The 3 Stages of Successful Campaigns

Marketing campaigns take a ton of effort to think up, plan, organize, execute, measure, optimize, and report—and if you're not careful, you can spend all that time and effort and exhaust your budget with very little to show for it.

But once you understand the three stages of successful marketing campaigns, you can instantly and effortlessly get better results from yoru campaigns without the overwhelm.

Transcript

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This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Let's talk about the three stages of successful marketing campaigns. As a marketing director, your job is to create and launch successful marketing campaigns. And let's be clear, campaigns take a ton of effort to think up, to plan, to organize, to execute, to measure, to optimize, and to report. A ton of effort, a ton of time. It's no easy task to launch a successful marketing campaign. And if you're not careful, you can spend all of that time and effort and exhaust your budget and have very little, or in some cases, nothing, to show for it. So today I want to share with you the three stages of successful marketing campaigns. This is exactly what I teach inside of my coaching group, the advisory board, a coaching group, marketing directors. And anytime anybody in the group is launching a campaign, we always fall back on these three stages. Because once you understand these three stages, you can immediately and easily diagnose your campaign. And it will help you to show progress easier and with more confidence, to know exactly what's not working in the campaign, and pinpoint where to fix it so you know what to focus on. And it will help you to get more results and get results faster and easier from your marketing campaigns. So here are the three stages, and then I'll break them down for you. But first, the stages are flow, form, and friction. In the flow stage, we get people to pay attention. In the form stage, we get people to take action. And in the friction stage, we get higher quality leads and the right people who are ready to act. So flow, form, and friction. Let's break it down. The first stage is flow. Your campaign starts here. Everything begins with flow. Before you launch the campaign, you have no flow. No one is seeing your ads, no one is opening your emails, no one is visiting your pages. And so your first goal, your only goal when you launch a campaign is first to create flow. Until you create flow, nothing else matters. Your KPIs don't matter. The budget you've spent doesn't matter. Nothing matters until you start to get flow. Because this is the prerequisite to getting people into your world, getting people to take action. So if you're launching an ad campaign on a social channel, like LinkedIn ads or meta ads, let's say, your first goal in the flow stage is to get people to see your ads. If your ads are not being delivered, if you're not getting enough impressions on the ads, if they're showing up to the wrong job titles or the wrong companies, then you are not achieving flow. So in this flow stage, your only goal is to make sure the right people are seeing your stuff. If you are launching a cold email campaign and doing outbound, in the flow stage, your only goal is are we sending enough emails every day? And are they being received? Are they going to people's inboxes? At that stage, we don't care if people reply, we don't care if people take action. The only goal in the flow stage is to achieve flow, is to get the water flowing, is to get the people coming through our system, seeing our pages, seeing our ads, getting our emails, whatever tactics or channels you're using. The only goal of the flow stage is to start to achieve flow. I want you to pause and just reflect on this for a second. This changes the dynamic of how you launch a campaign. When you first launch a campaign, you probably feel overwhelmed and you want to speed through it so you can get to the results, right? And there's a lot to think about. There's a lot of levers you can pull and things to consider. But if you first focus on just achieving flow, the beginning part of launching a campaign gets a lot easier. And it helps you to really focus on what matters, which is if you can get flow, then it's a lot easier to move to stage two, which is form, getting people to take action. Once you have enough flow and the right flow of people seeing your stuff, visiting your pages, opening your email, seeing your ads, now we can take some of those people and get them to take action. And now we're in the form stage of the three stages. And in the form stage, our goal is to get people to take action, to fill out a form. Because in B2B, almost everything ends in a form. If you're downloading an asset, that's a form. If you're registering for a webinar, that's a form. If you're booking a demo or a trial or a call, that's a form. And so in the form stage, we want the user to fill out a form. We want to capture a lead. Because once they fill out a form, we can put them into our CRM, we can nurture them, we can show them retargeting ads, we can do lots of cool stuff. But first, we need them to take action. We need them to fill out a form. So in the form stage, that's your only goal. You already have enough impressions on your ads, you already have enough people getting your emails, maybe you already have enough people coming to your page. Now we need them to fill out the form. And so in this stage, you're going to focus on getting your first few form fills, your first few form submissions. And that means that in this stage, until you can consistently get form submissions every day or every week, you need to focus your efforts on optimizing the page, the messaging, the form, reduce the form fields, make the offer more clear and compelling, add urgency and scarcity. The list goes on and on. There's lots of things you can do to drive form submissions, to increase your success in the form stage. And in my coaching group, the advisory board, we work with marketing directors all the time. And this is the biggest challenge for most of them the form stage. We can get your ads and campaigns going and get flow, but for many of them, the form stage is the hardest. There's lots to say here about how to increase forms, but the goal is to focus on improving the form, making it more clear, making it more urgent for people, and showing the value. This is the biggest mistake the marketing directors make is I give you a form because I want you to fill it out. But what's in it for me? Why should I fill out the form? What am I going to get? What's going to happen? This is about reducing the risk and increasing the perceived value. So in the form stage, once you get enough people filling up the form, you start by getting one form submission and then two and then three. And then once you're getting a couple of form submissions every week, then you can start to think about moving into the third stage, which is friction. Remember, in the flow stage, we get people to pay attention. In the form stage, we get people to take action. In the friction stage, we get the right people. And we do this by intentionally adding friction. Once you have flow and form submissions, now we can be more picky, more choosy about who we want to fill out the form, who we want the ads to go to. And so you have lots of options to do this. I'll tell you three real quick. The first is in your targeting, whether it's ads or emails or however you're reaching people, you can be more specific. You can tighten the reins a little bit on who you're targeting, on who is seeing your stuff. That allows you to add a level of friction so you get the right people. You can often do this by changing the messaging as well of your ads or emails to be more specific, to say this is for people who have more than 10 locations. These are for people in this specific industry. These are people whose company is going through this transition or initiative. So we can be more specific in our messaging. You can also improve your form. This is now where you can start to add back in more form fields to your form to ask more questions, to provide more qualification criteria. You can have things like a checkbox that says, I'm ready to take action, or you can ask for their revenue or their headcount or things like that. It'll give you the right data points that you need to know if they are a qualify lead and not just a tire kicker. So in the friction stage, it's all about taking the flow you've created and the form fills you've gotten and adding friction to make sure that when you get someone who fills out a form, that they're the most highly qualified person ever. This is the peak, the end of the campaign. And most of your time, once you've achieved flow and form submissions, will be spent on the friction stage of this delicate balance of adding friction to get more qualified people and not adding too much friction that we don't get anybody. There's a balance here that depends on whether you want volume or you want quality. And often you can't have both. And so you need to choose. And the friction stage, you'll go back and forth on this balancing act of figuring out how much volume do we want and how much quality do we want. And those are not mutually exclusive. They're linked together. And so you have to be careful and mindful about how you approach that. So think about these three stages of successful marketing campaigns. Flow, where we get attention, form where we get people to take action, and friction, where we get the right people. What stage are you in right now? If you're about to launch a campaign or you have a campaign going, what stage is that campaign in right now? And what number do you need to hit to check off that stage and move to the next one? So if you're in the flow stage and you're running ads, how many impressions do you need every day? Or what click-through rate do you need to see that people are paying attention? If you're in the form stage, how many form submissions are you getting every week? And how many do you need to have confidence that you're getting enough people to submit a form? And if you're in the friction stage, this is where you'll spend most of your time is optimizing to balance out volume versus quality. Launching campaigns is never easy. But it becomes a lot easier when you have a framework to view it in, to think about it. And these three stages will help you to do that flow, form, and friction. Use flow to get attention, form to get people to take action, and friction to balance volume and quality.