Effective marketing campaigns need to be well planned or they simply won’t work.

Do you have a structured campaign or do you just do it an ad-hoc kind of way, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best?

This is your chance to learn:

  • How to set marketing campaign goals
  • How to choose tactics that will work
  • How to track your success

An effective marketing campaign requires planning, execution and measurement in order to succeed and be meaningful. It’s not enough to just have an idea and give it a go – you need to have clear and smart goals based on what you want the campaign to achieve that guide it from start to finish, and you need to be able to measure the results to see whether it was effective and, if not, work out what to change.

Setting Effective Marketing Goals

To set effective marketing goals, a good question to ask yourself is ‘What is the driving force of this campaign and what do I hope to achieve with it?’

Often, business owners will simply say that they want as many customers as possible as soon as they can get them. That goal is so generic that it makes it impossible to measure. Instead, you need to make sure that you determine clear, realistic goals. Examples of this might be to raise awareness of a tourism brand in a particular overseas market, generate more bookings from existing customers, or generate more customers from a particular market.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Some of you may have already heard of the SMART framework for setting goals. What it stands for is this:

S – Specific

Your goal should focus on one specific area of improvement – for example ‘increase bookings from California,’ rather than just ‘increase bookings.’ Another common goal that people think of for marketing campaigns is to ‘increase awareness.’ That is a valid goal, but just bear in mind that goals based purely on awareness in a certain market can be difficult to measure.

M – Measurable

Your goal should have a specified quantity by which you want your objective to be measured. This provides a benchmark against where you started and a measure of success – for example ‘increase bookings from California by 20% over the same period last year.’ This way you have a baseline, as well as a way to determine whether you succeeded or not. If you increased bookings by 10%, you did not succeed, and if you increased them by 30%, you did.

A – Assignable

Assignable means that you need to specify who will carry out the action of this campaign or goal. If you’re a sole trader, then of course that will be you. If you have some employees, then you should appoint one of them to oversee the implementation and measurement of the campaign. This makes sure the campaign is coherently run, as the one person sees it through from start to finish.

R – Realistic

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Don’t set a goal that is beyond your abilities to achieve given your time frame and available resources. For example, if you are a small start-up based in suburban Sydney, don’t set yourself the goal of going global within a month – that’s probably not going to happen, no matter how hard you work. You know your own resources and capabilities, so be ambitious, but don’t be silly.

T – Time-Related

You should set yourself a timeline for your results. This will guide how intense your efforts are as well as giving you a convenient way to measure your success – for example if you set yourself the goal in January of ‘increasing bookings from California by 20% by the end of July’ and you achieve that percentage increase by mid-May, set yourself a higher percentage increase target next time.

If it seems like components of the framework are doubling up on each other, don’t worry. Effective marketing goals don’t need to be broken down as much as we have here, they just need to include all of these elements. To use our example here, your goal statement would be: ‘I want Steve to oversee a campaign that increases bookings from California by 20% over this time last year by the end of July.’ It only needs to be the one sentence, but it needs to include all five elements.

Choosing Effective Marketing Tactics

Effective marketing needs execution as well as planning. Once you have a SMART goal, you need to choose the tactics you will use to implement your campaign. Each tactic also needs to include a SMART statement.

For example, if you want to raise awareness in an overseas market, your tactic might be to list your business with local directories, or even attend trade shows to find partners.

For example, if your goal is to increase awareness and your chosen tactic is to attend a trade show, your SMART statement would be as follows:

S: I want to generate sales from a trade show
M: I want 10 listings gained as a result of networking
A: I want Jane and Steve to be the employees who attend the show and talk to the partners
R: We expect that we can generate 20 sales per month per partner listing
T: We want 10 partner listings within 3 months, generating 200 bookings per month

Measuring Success

Effective marketing requires follow-up as well as planning and execution. With your goals and tactics sorted, it’s imperative that you make sure you have a clear way to measure the results of your campaign. Otherwise you have no way to know how worthwhile your investment in your marketing efforts has been.

Rezdy has two ways you can use to measure success. The first of these is to create promo codes. These are specific promotions and discounts you can set up through Rezdy that you can then distribute. This is a potential tactic you could use in your marketing efforts and they are very easy to track in your sales reports.




effective marketing promotional campaigns




The other tracking method works through your sales reports as well, even if you are not using promo codes. In your sales reports, you can filter the orders you have received by source, so you can see whether they came from agents, direct bookings online, or any other source. You can also specify the date range you want to search, so you can look at orders received only after you kicked off your marketing campaign.
If you have any more questions, please feel free to send us an email at support@rezdy.com and we’ll be happy to give you a call and help you through it!




weekly reports effective marketing measurement