4 Steps for Success Before (and After!) Your Campaign Launches | Simple Machines Marketing

You’ve built workflows, edited and re-edited landing pages and carefully crafted emails – your campaign is almost ready to launch!

While it’s tempting to want to rush through launching to get your campaign live, there are a few crucial steps you need to take to make sure everything goes smoothly. And once your campaign has kicked off, it’s a big mistake to just set it and forget it.

Successful, effective campaigns are the ones that have pre-and post-launch plans ready to be put into action. These plans consist of several essential steps to ensure your campaign reaches its maximum potential. Let’s break them down:

Double-Check Functionality

Even if you’ve already checked your campaign’s functionality, re-check it again before launching. This is a quick step that can save you a lot of headaches.

Then once your campaign is live, double-check that everything is running smoothly so potential clients and users don’t experience any issues.

We suggest testing that:

Keep Your Goals Top-of-Mind

One of the foundational steps for any campaign is defining success with a set of goals. But in the anticipation of finally launching, it can be easy to forget about those benchmarks.

This is a disservice to any campaign. The last thing you want is to reach the end and realize that you have no goals to compare your metrics to.

Don’t let setting goals for your campaign slip your mind. Put together a few achievable milestones pre-launch to assess your campaign. Some common metrics to track could include:

These established benchmarks are meant to be used throughout the life of your campaign as you track its performance. Once you’ve gone live, create a consistent schedule to compare your analytics to your goals. Based on that data, you can reassess your goals as needed.

(If you need help creating goals for your website or ad campaign, our free CRO testing calendar can help!)

Schedule Your Content

Our team knows how much time and care goes into crafting quality pieces. And there’s nothing worse than putting all that work into creating excellent content only for it not to be published on time (or, God forbid, at all).

The best way to avoid this frustration is to create a content calendar. Mapping this out helps your team track when certain assets should be published or sent out.

Once you establish that calendar, your team can take advantage of content scheduling tools. Here are a few that we recommend:

(Admittedly, as HubSpot Certified Agency Partners, we might be a little biased!)

Those three foundational steps will help streamline your launch and start you off strong in the hustle and bustle of going live. But just because your campaign has started doesn’t mean the job’s over.

Whether or not your campaign is successful shouldn’t be defined by the execution of your launch. The steps you take post-launch can have a major impact on the performance of your campaign – whether that’s positively or negatively.

Plan to take the following two steps once your campaign has begun:

Track Your Analytics

When assessing your campaign’s execution, performance metrics are your best friends. Armed with your previously established benchmarks, here’s where you can check if you’re on track for success.

Of course, every campaign is different, so the metrics you use will vary depending on your goals. But there are a few popular ones you might be keeping your eye on:

We understand that these metrics can be a little confusing if you’re new to campaign analytics. For an in-depth breakdown, check out our piece, “What Your Website Analytics Might Be Telling You.”

Optimize as You Go

There’s no reason to feel beholden to your original campaign strategy if it’s not working. By tracking as you go, you can take a beat and optimize your plan or content.

Consider the following optimizing tactics:

Running The Post-Launch Marathon

Campaigns aren’t a sprint – they’re a marathon. They require consistent tracking and tweaking throughout their life to be as successful as possible. Using the steps above to build a pre-and post-launch strategy, you can level up your campaign performance and hit your business goals.

Short on the time required to keep up with a campaign? Our team of marketing experts can help. Contact us today to launch (and sustain!) your next campaign.