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How Pilot Marketing Campaigns Drive Success
Testing the waters before a full-scale launch can help marketers optimize their messaging — and their media spend
It's estimated that consumers see more than 5,000 ads per day, as they face a constant stream of marketing content across numerous platforms. Therefore, it is imperative for brands to continually assess channel, messaging, and other marketing strategies to ensure they cut through the chaos. In addition, marketers are facing another significant challenge: reduced budgets. In May 2024, a Gartner study of 300 CMOs found marketing budgets dropped 15 percent when compared to 2023.
Given these obstacles, innovative solutions are needed for maximizing outreach and conversions while still preserving budgets. Like test-driving a vehicle before purchasing, pilot campaigns allow marketers to start small while gathering information to make informed decisions. By leaning into insights, marketers can implement data-driven pilot programs that provide key insights to efficiently and effectively grow their business.
What Is a Pilot Marketing Campaign and Why Is It Helpful?
A pilot program is a small-scale campaign designed to check the viability of a specific marketing strategy, whether it's marketing channel efficacy, offer and promotional testing, or audience selection. By selecting a narrow marketing focus, pilots strategically offer a controlled environment and budget to properly vet marketing concepts and tactics. This allows marketers to quickly fine tune their efforts as insights funnel in.
How to Implement a Pilot Marketing Campaign
There are three main steps that marketers need to take to ensure a successful pilot campaign: decide on the purpose, craft a plan that can successfully implement and measure the purpose, and run the campaign in such a way that it produces measurable and actionable results.
- Understand the objective. Identify the problem to solve as well as the desired outcome. Is the pilot set up to prove or disprove a theory? It's imperative to know what is being tested and why its success or failure is critical for the outcome of any pilot initiative.
- Build a strategy. Identify levers that can be used to test and learn. What offer, call-to-action, channel, dataset, and/or creative assets should be used to reach the target audience? Marketers should keep in mind that the more tests put into a pilot, the more sample is required. The pilot should only test one to two hypotheses so that the program has actionable results.
- Run the pilot program! Marketers need to spend time thinking about measurement prior to execution. This will ensure the campaign is built to produce the right metrics.
As marketers run their pilot programs and examine the outcomes, developing a measurement schedule and KPIs for benchmarking purposes will be crucially important. But marketing teams must remember that not all the data needed to make intelligent decisions will aggregate at once. In the beginning, insights will be more directional than absolute. This allows for minor adjustments. Once the campaign is fully cured, rigorously measuring the results will allow the team to make bigger refinements to take advantage of new insights. Which metrics they focus on at this stage will be key.
What Metrics Matter?
To achieve an effective pilot campaign, marketers will need to measure relevant data points:
- ROI. How much money did the campaign cost, and how much revenue did it generate? Other important metrics can be return on ad spend, customer acquisition cost, or cost per incremental order.
- Performance efficiency. How can the campaign be fine-tuned for a larger-scale launch? Leverage consumer and business population data to find behavioral or geographical traits to distinguish responders from non-responders.
- Response rate. How did the response rate compare to prior campaigns? What was the percentage lift or decrease and how does that compare to the marketing budget?
- Conversion rate. It is important to understand the difference between engagement and conversion. Can insights be used to help narrow the gap between the two?
- Channel strategy effectiveness. How well did the selected marketing channel perform? Was direct mail, digital, social, connected TV, or email the clear winner (especially when the channel cost is factored in)?
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It's important for marketers to recognize that these metrics shouldn't be studied in a vacuum but in comparison to each other. For instance, a high response rate but a low conversion rate means something needs further investigation — why are people falling out of the funnel after they engage? Or an improvement in digital response rates with a decrease in ROI might indicate that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and the spend in digital didn't affect the bottom line. By diving into these metrics more holistically, marketers can make intelligent marketing and budget decisions.
Implement Best Practices to Accomplish Objectives
Identifying and implementing proven best practices can help marketers save time and money for critical campaigns.
Marketers should focus solely on the marketing channel with the best performance while others can be added post-pilot. Testing multiple channels simultaneously can blur results and distract from achieving the objective.
In addition, marketers need to allow enough time for their campaign to perform. Marketers need to take a wait-and-see approach, allowing the audience to respond and build enough sample for statistical validity. Generally, data collection takes up to 60 days after the campaign ends, but reporting can be shared throughout the campaign.
It's also important for marketers to keep measurability at the forefront of any campaign. Consumers' responses will help identify what worked and what didn't. However, using other data, such as the home type, income, or geography, can help enhance performance.
The Bottom Line
With the amount of messages to compete against daily and the challenge of reduced marketing budgets, pilot programs are an essential strategy in a marketer's toolkit. Though thoughtful strategy and planning are initially required, the results can be incredibly valuable for lead generation, customer acquisition, and overall business impact.
In sum, pilot marketing programs provide critical insights to avoid costly pitfalls and are an essential tool for effective campaigns.
SIDEBAR
Mattress Retailer Pilot Program Generates 45 Percent Increase in Orders
When slow campaign efforts led to an online mattress retailer missing out on engaging consumers who had recently moved, it developed a pilot program testing new mover data against multi-sourced, "first to the market" pre-mover data. This allowed the company to reach movers earlier in their shopping journey.
The campaign targeted 50,000 households of people who had recently moved, were about to move and were under contract, had their homes listed for sale, and a control group. Over a four-week period, recipients received weekly coupons featuring a code for 15 percent off any purchase. Pre-movers generated a 45 percent lift in orders generated compared to those who had recently moved, leading to more units sold, increased sales revenue, and improved return on ad spend.
— K.L.
Deluxe is a partner in the ANA Thought Leadership Program.
