Whether you have a grand opening, health challenge or anniversary around the corner, follow these three steps before launching your next company campaign.
As an event manager, I often coached real estate builders and developers on best practices when opening new communities and properties.
My first question sounded a lot like this: “What is the specific outcome this campaign is expected to produce?” followed by “What goals are being set for this campaign related to this outcome?”. These questions were typically met with a long period of silence.
Through my experience, I’ve learned that campaigns or initiatives have the best of intentions such as raising awareness and generating inquiries, but rarely have performance targets. This, my friend, is a problem. Why? Because you’re missing a golden opportunity to better understand your target audience and what motivates their purchasing decisions.
Here are a few steps you should consider BEFORE launching your next campaign:
Focus on a clear, defined target.
In order to be successful, every campaign must serve a well-defined purpose. Before you create any campaign, you must know what needle you are expected to move… and how far.
One particular developer in the Jacksonville, Florida division was experiencing exponential growth and decided to open a new community of single-family homes. The goal was to invite reputable brokers and real estate agents to the grand opening to experience the property and motivate them to set up appointments with their clients for showings.
Preset your performance targets.
If the desired outcome is related to customer acquisition or demand generation, your performance targets for a campaign may consist of a certain number of inquiries, appointments, or even quote requests. Whatever the performance target, it should be defined in advance so everyone understands what results the campaign is expected to produce.
For the community opening, the performance target was attendance. From previous events, we knew that if 300 real estate agents and brokers attended, it typically resulted in three homes being placed under contract. Using a targeted invitation list, nearly 350 leads attended.
Plan how to measure your results.
If there is one takeaway from this post, remember this: Measurement is key. Once you establish the target, you can anticipate what data you will need to measure the program’s performance, how you will plan to capture and manage that data, and what analytics you will apply to the data.
For the grand opening, brokers and realtors were entered into a drawing for a prize if they dropped their business cards into a bowl. In addition to a RSVP management system, we were able to gauge attendance and have a mechanism for follow-up.
Quantifying your campaign’s target, goal setting, and preparing in advance on how best to gather metrics is key to the success of your next campaign. What measurement tools do you apply to gather data from your events, campaigns and initiatives?
