Doing the Unthinkable: Building a Plane while Flying it (AND loving it)

Campaign Management - do they teach you this in school nowadays? I know, I know... it's been a few years since I got my marketing degree. And, to be fair to my alma mater, a Google search is hardly helpful on this topic, either (but, thank you for the 19,700,000 results of campaign management software providers!).

In my previous post, I briefly talked about decision-making in the blind and its unexpected positive impact on learning. Today, I get to share some of those learning, practical points... Perhaps you will recognize your own experience here?

Now would also be a great time to mention that, yes, indeed... there are wonderful software programs out there that will do this for you. But, for those of us who do not have the budget to tap into that world, the more rudimentary (and rather practical) approach outlined below is what we get to play with :).

Now, onto the good stuff.

Unsurprisingly, rather quickly, I learned that business doesn't wait for you to get your strategy in place. Instead, adopting a "define, refine" approach is the best (and, possibly, only) option. In other words, I quickly learned that we need to build this plane while flying it.

So, how do you not jeopardize current business while also learning what to do right in order to grow it? I started with the easy tasks that didn't result in any changes to campaign execution... Lists.

Such as...

1. A list of available campaign tactics (also known as the let's-list-all-possible-marketing-channels-we-can-use-for-a-given-message exercise). For us, this list includes 52 entries with granularity extending to differentiating between a Facebook Post and a Facebook Post Boost (for an excellent list of available social media tactics, by the way, check out this post by Hootsuite).

2. A list of things we market - in our case, a list of any offering that would require an effort from the marketing team (e.g. classes, conferences, events, open houses, festivals, etc.). In this list, I also categorize where this offering belongs in our school hierarchy.

3. A list of things I want to know - including... amount spent on each tactic, tactic effectiveness on engaging audiences, effectiveness comparison among tactics, effectiveness comparison per tactic per things we market, enrollment status, profitability update, and so on.

Next...

With those lists in hand, I felt we were ready to start collecting data, fully understanding that this will require tapping into 12+ different data sources to collect everything needed (e.g. reports from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, MailChimp, EventBrite, Registration System (for enrollments) and much more). In the end, this is what our spreadsheet data headers look like:

View fullsize

Entries for Class Name, Tactic, Campaign Name and Program are limited to the pre-defined lists from above to ensure data entry is standardized (to learn how to do this, check out this how-to article from Tech Republic).

And then, the fun part: the collection of data, data, data! A month into this rudimentary (but awesome) system of 16-column data entry, we can already make conclusions on tactic effectiveness. And, since we are building and flying this plane at the same time, we are also applying all lessons learned to all new content we create.

For which, by the way, we have been using Google's (beta) Data Studio. Its magic turned the above not-so-sightly spreadsheet into dashboard reports that visualize our learnings onto a single page:

(actual report, simulated data)

And, last but not least, this is where the LOVE part comes in. If you are a numbers geek (which I happen to be...), building out reports that slice the data in a variety of manners will become addictive. And, analyzing changes in your results over time will give you even more dopamine releases. Because, good or bad, every lesson will be well documented with actionable support for your future decisions...

Now that is one fun plane to fly!