Campaigns – What They Are & Why You Need Them

One of the functions Vivid Vision builds into the Joomla sites we construct the ability to track campaigns. When we mention this little tidbit to our clients, it’s usually met with an enthusiastic nod, however, experience has shown very few clients understand what a campaign is or how to use one.

When one hears the word campaign, thoughts of politics and elections often come to mind, but a campaign in business marketing is something quite different.

Let’s illustrate a campaign with an analogy so to make its functions easier to understand.

Let’s say you own a business and you want to increase sales. A brilliant thought occurs to you and you say, “Let’s advertise.”

For the sake of this discussion, let’s say you have $300 to spend on advertising and you decide to buy some ads on three social media networks, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You spend $100 on each of those three sites and then you sit back and wait for your new customers to arrive.

By the time your ads have expired, let’s say you grossed $700 in new sales. Pretty good, huh? After accounting for your $300 investment, you netted a $400 profit and you pat yourself on your back for your business prowess.

Now, since that worked so well, you decide to do it again, but hold on there bucko, because you’re missing one very important element, you don’t know your ROI.

“My what?” You ask.

Your ROI or Return on Investment. You see, you threw $300 at three platforms for advertising but you don’t know how many customers came from which platform. For example, let’s say that your advertising brought you one customer from Facebook, zero customers from Twitter, and six customers from LinkedIn totaling seven new customers/sales.

Now where is the best place to put your advertising dollars? In Twitter? Nope—you got zero, zip, zilch from Twitter. How about Facebook? Nope. On Facebook, your $100 only got you one new customer. But look at LinkedIn. LinkedIn netted you six new customers.

So, if $100 buys you six new customers on LinkedIn, smart money would take your next $300 and buy eighteen new customers from LinkedIn and forget about Twitter and Facebook.

A campaign is an ad with a tracker that reports back to your website’s campaign software, which generates a report or metrics. The tracker shows you exactly how many new customers you got from each advertising platform. This is how you can be smart with your advertising dollars.

Is this technique new? Not at all. It’s been used for years and is used everywhere. Consider the television ads for My Pillow. You know, the My Pillow guy who promises you a good night’s sleep? In each ad, there’s a little code on the screen that you can use for discount. Watch and you’ll see that every time you see one of those commercials, the code number changes. Yup…that’s campaign tracking.

So the software Vivid installs with each site we build includes campaign tracking so you can run ad campaigns, email campaigns, and social media campaigns with the knowledge of knowing exactly where you’re seeing your best return on your investment.