Today’s marketers are faced with a number of different analytics to test the success of a marketing or advertising campaign.
- How many link clicks did your PPC campaign earn? 🤔
- How many people made a purchase as a result of your social media campaign? 🤔
- What percentage of people who received your email actually opened it? 🤔
While these high-level analytics offer value to brands or clients of marketing and advertising agencies, it can be disheartening when they don't reflect an increase in business or revenue.
This makes people question the worth and ROI of their marketing efforts.
The problem is link clicks, impressions, form fills, email opens, and sales are not the only depictions of how to define successful marketing or advertising campaigns.
That is because there is one metric that tends to fall flat: brand impact.
To combat this challenge, marketing and ad agencies are using market research such as campaign evaluation surveys to showcase the true validity and value their campaigns have for their clients.
What is a campaign evaluation survey?
A campaign evaluation survey is a research methodology used to assess the effectiveness and impact of a specific campaign or initiative.
The goal is to measure the success of the campaign, understand its strengths and weaknesses, and identify areas for improvement.
A campaign evaluation survey reveals whether a marketing campaign:
- Effected the target audience’s likelihood to purchase from a brand.
- Effected the target audience’s likelihood to consider buying from a brand.
- Created a positive, neutral, or negative audience perception of a company.
- Impacted top-of-mind awareness and aided awareness for the target audience.
Why conduct campaign evaluation surveys
Whether you are creating a new website, running a Facebook campaign, or administering an email campaign, a campaign survey will uncover underlying metrics you cannot obtain through traditional advertising analytics on digital platforms.
Sure the $100,000 marketing campaign you ran for your client might have fallen 20% short on sales. But, wouldn’t it be great to know...
- Awareness of the brand increased by 8%
- Positive perceptions increased by 12%
- Likelihood of considering purchasing increased by 23%
What campaign evaluation surveys, uncovering these hard-to-measure metrics are possible. They work to showcase a 360-degree view of what impact advertising has on your brand.
How to conduct a campaign assessment survey
A campaign evaluation survey is a two-part market research methodology and project.
The two phases of a marketing campaign evaluation survey include:
- A pre-campaign evaluation survey
- A post-campaign evaluation survey
Let's dive into each stage to understand the step-by-step processes.
Step1: A pre-campaign evaluation survey
Before running a marketing campaign, our advertising market research company will create a pre-campaign evaluation survey with a random sample of respondents who match your target demographics.
Demographics such as ethnicity, marital status, and gender will help you gauge your target audience’s voice. Collecting this information can highlight targeted sample purchasing or cross-tabulations of data.
The pre-campaign evaluation survey acts as a baseline to measure key brand metrics such as:
- Aided and unaided awareness
- Brand perception
- Likelihood to purchase
- Likelihood to recommend
- Sources of awareness
To have a true representation of your entire target demographic, the pre-campaign evaluation survey sample must be as random as possible.
For example, say the target audience of your marketing campaign is women who live in New York. The survey should collect feedback from women across the entire state, not mainly New York City or mainly Upstate New York.
In short, the market area for the survey should match the market area intended as the focus for the upcoming advertising campaign.
After fieldwork for the pre-campaign evaluation survey is finalized, the marketing campaign is ready to begin as it normally would.
If you don't have experience conducting an online survey, read our blog post "How Does Online Survey Project Work?"
Step 2: A post-campaign evaluation survey
At the end of the campaign, the marketing team responsible for the campaign will obtain traditional advertising analytics such as sales growth, link clicks, followers, calls, store visits, cost per lead, conversion rates, etc.
This, of course, is all dependent on the type of marketing campaign you are conducting and its objectives.
These analytics, while valuable, do not show visibility of how the marketing campaign has largely impacted the brand, especially if the campaign did not produce bottom-line revenue.
This is where campaign evaluation surveys into play. ✅✅
An advertising effectiveness company will administer a post-campaign evaluation survey with a new and fresh random sample from the same market area in step 1.
The market research will measure the exact metrics tested in the pre-campaign evaluation survey (awareness, perception, likelihood to purchase, etc.).
Now, the marketing and advertising team has a full breadth of campaign analytics to provide to clients, investors, leadership teams, and more.
Campaign evaluation survey data often appears as such:
- Your brand perception increased positively by 10%
- 15% of target customers are more likely to choose your company for their next purchase
- 2 out of 5 people are more aware of your brand as a result of the marketing campaign
- Sources of brand awareness increased by 25%
- Word association with your brand is 15% more positive
This completes a full picture of the impact of an advertising campaign combining both measurable statistics (clicks, sales, etc.) and previously unmeasurable metrics which have now been collected through an online survey.
What are the benefits of a campaign evaluation survey?
1. Show other areas of success
As a marketing professional, you spend copious amounts of time, resources, and money on marketing campaigns for your brand or clients of various industries.
With no 100% guarantee, your marketing efforts will result in an influx of new business for your clients, it is important to show other areas of success and movement of the needle as a result of your campaign.
2. Boost your marketing RFPs
By conducting campaign evaluation studies to verify the credibility of marketing efforts, you can provide your clients with access to key metrics that often go unmeasured.
With this addition to your campaign services, your proposal stands out as a marketing agency that specializes in a 360-degree evaluation approach.
No stone is left unturned.
3. Unbiased third-party research
When conducting campaign evaluation studies, we recommend using a third-party market research firm to verify the credibility of the data.
Potential clients are also pleased to learn that campaign evaluation research is performed by a third-party market research company as this exudes full transparency.
Partnering with a third-party market research company allows your clients to feel fully confident in your campaign assessment.
Your clients are assured no fluffing of the numbers to make the campaign look as if it performed better than it actually did.
The benefit of using a third-party source like Drive Research also include:
- Strengthen your proposals with market research services
- Reduce failure risks and ensure your campaign survey is top-notch
- Optimized messaging capabilities
- Consumer behavior exploration
Gaining feedback from real-life buyers is another hallmark of using a third-party agency. High-quality feedback equals crystal-clear ROI.
4. Measure hard-to-find KPIs in traditional advertising
Although measuring advertising effectiveness with market research is beneficial for all types of marketing campaigns, they are even more influential if your campaign includes traditional advertising efforts such as TV and radio commercials.
It is a major challenge for marketers to truly understand the effectiveness and ROI of traditional marketing campaigns because there is no direct link between someone hearing or seeing an advertisement, and then going online or to the store to make a purchase.
With campaign evaluation surveys, you are still able to measure areas of awareness, perception, and likelihood to purchase with offline marketing campaigns. This is done by surveying those who are most likely to be served in the TV or radio commercial.
For example, if a radio advertisement for a manufacturing organization is being played to those who live in the 7-county Syracuse DMA, a market research company will survey those who live in Syracuse, Oswego, Cortland, Tompkins, Seneca, Cayuga, and Madison counties.
The campaign evaluation survey would easily detect key brand metrics and KPIs for the radio ad.
Recommended Reading: How Market Research Can Help Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Contact Our Campaign Evaluation Survey Company
Campaign evaluation surveys provide brands and agencies with a 360-degree view of how marketing campaigns affect brand impact. Start measuring changes in brand awareness, perception, likelihood to purchase, and much more with our team.
Drive Research is a full-service market research company located in New York. Our team executes campaign evaluation surveys for a variety of marketing teams across the country.
By partnering with a market research company specializing in campaign evaluation surveys, marketing, and ad agencies can strengthen their proposals by adding a full campaign assessment, unlike anything prospects have seen before.
Let's work together! Reach out through any of the four ways below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Emily Rodgers
A SUNY Cortland graduate, Emily has taken her passion for social and content marketing to Drive Research as the Marketing Manager. She has earned certificates for both Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
Learn more about Emily, here.
