What’s the difference between a successful marketing campaign and one that fails? If done correctly, even a campaign with no results is still a success because something can be learned from the data. The key is to know which pieces to review and to have a controlled process that looks different almost every time it’s conducted.

This isn’t just a lesson for mid-sized companies either. Larger companies might be quick to judge the creative for failing to produce and forgetting to evaluate a competitor’s campaign that is happening at the same time. There’s no shame in having a rundown of the basic steps handy as the campaign planning begins to take shape.

Your Focus

Pick a focus. Trying to accomplish too many goals with one campaign will suck the life out of what you’re trying to achieve. This also means picking a target audience and knowing as much about them as possible. Piling on to a campaign can look a lot like earmarking – don’t tack on unrelated information or news just to get it out.

Top tier household brand names can launch new logos and identities with a corresponding launch of a new product or new product label. Take Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer product, for example. Their marketing launch into foreign markets coincided with the roll out of their new packaging and new pricing. The “cheap and fratty” beer,as Business Insider calls it, now sits on store shelves in China as “Blue Ribbon 1844” among top shelf beverages.

Laser-like focus on the goal of the marketing campaign and the target audience (as well as what part of their life through which you’re reaching them) will not only clear the air to get results, it will also make measuring those results easier.

Your Resources

Even if your campaign has a lot of money, it doesn’t always have a lot of time. Learn how to make the most of your resources by having a backup plan. If creative takes longer than expected, and won’t run on one platform for as long as you had intended, you can use an alternate to support it. It doesn’t have to be your dream scenario, but it’s better than having no extra support in lieu of lost airtime.

Budgeting for a campaign takes knowing the focus first. Plans that get qualified leads cost about $272 each in 2013, according to Ad Age.There’s also the rising cost of SEO being factored into online campaigns. Verizon has conducted research-based campaigns, knowing that the front-end cost of the research might be greater than the advertising expenses. Verizon spends around $212 million annually on marketing.

Your Measurements

Other than using messaging that doesn’t resonate with an audience, failing to measure indicators before and after a campaign is a common mistake. If tracking digitally is difficult for some reason, have a plan for at least eliminating unqualified leads anecdotally. Hearing from “first responders” on the sales side, the social media coordinators, or even the receptionists, can lend a great deal of insight into a campaign.

Measuring the right data sounds simple, but can be misunderstood. For example, if the goal of a campaign is brand awareness, then tracking branded search terms and hashtags by count sounds like the right fit. But, if the goal is to rebrand, then more context is needed. And if the hashtag gets hijacked, it will affect the tonality of the campaign and must be supported by other metrics.

Remembering these key factors from Scott Keever SEO company when planning a marketing campaign is extremely helpful. If the campaigns get executed extremely fast – or extremely slow – it’s easy to forget them or hard to remember to change them from the last campaign you worked on. It might not even hurt to share these key pieces with all of the parties involved in working on the campaign.