Your Marketing Campaign Starter Kit using Northbeam

A rundown of what makes a quality marketing campaign and how to track your campaigns in the Northbeam dashboard

A lot goes into conceptualizing a marketing campaign that will drive profitable growth. While every brand is different, in this article we’ll cover 5 steps every brand should take and how to track those components inside your Northbeam dashboard. 

Step 1: Test the promotional offer

Sustainable success comes down to crafting effective and enticing offers that convince new and/or existing customers to convert and purchase. Your goal is to identify a product bundle or promotion that works well specifically for the business and audiences. If the offer at the core of the campaign isn’t resonating then you would still be wasting marketing dollars. Here are some ideas that have worked well for our other clients: 

• Hero Product: Many of our clients started with one Hero Product that helped them grow in popularity before branching out into other product lines. Many of their most effective campaigns are built around some sort of offer with this Hero Product because that’s what most customers associate with their brand. Note this can be combined with several other offers below to make an even more compelling offer. 
• Bundles: For our clients who have multiple variants of certain products find that bundling offers perform very well. In exchange for a small discount, customers can choose to buy 2+ of whatever product to increase Average Order Value. If the product has a relatively fast consumption timeline (such as CPG), bundles can be a great introduction to subscriptions for fans of the product. 
• $ or % Off: Simply putting the product on sale is one of the most tried and true offers and a proven way to increase revenue. However, pricing actions are a relatively blunt instrument and start to train the customers to wait to buy because they think the product may go on sale at some point in the near future. We recommend balancing out sales with a combination of other offers. 
• Buy One Get One (BOGO): Similar to sales, running too many BOGOs can be detrimental but they can be more powerful than simple sales if done correctly. If the product can be stocked up on, then running a BOGO can help quickly sell seasonal inventory or perishables quickly. However if the product doesn’t fit the BOGO format then offering a 50% sale offer may perform better. We recommend testing both to see what works best for the specific situation. 
• Free Gift with Purchase: Sampling is one of the best ways to get new customers to try the product, especially if the brand is new to the market and have low awareness. It can also be an invaluable way to gather feedback from existing customers on new product launches before launching it officially. 

How to track offers in Northbeam? 

1. Log into your Northbeam dashboard and click on the Overview Tab.
2. Look at the Cash Snapshot on the Overview Page for the most convenient way to monitor your AOV, CAC, as well as Conversion Rate–which shows how effective your ads are at converting sales. 
3. Use the dropdown menus in each box to look at Cost per New Customer and Daily Conversion Rate. 

Step 2: Optimize the creative assets

In order to be compelling, your creative content needs to be clear, timely, and engaging. Creative is one of the most important levers that a growth team has control over, and should be continuously iterated on for improvement. If creative strategy and optimization is your priority, consider checking out Northbeam's integration with Motion.

How to track creative analytics in Northbeam? 

1. Log into your Northbeam dashboard and click on the Overview Tab.
2. Start by looking at CTR of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads, you can gauge the closest proxy we have for pure creative performance. We recommend identifying creative formats, themes, or pillars that tend to perform well for your brand, and then doubling down on those formats horizontally.
3. Once you’ve identified a piece of winning creative, create a feedback loops within your own internal teams. Gather as a team regularly to discuss and identify: 

• • What element(s) caused this creative to perform well? 
  • What insight(s) drove this creative? 
  • What was the Call-to-Action? 
  • What audience was it intended for? 
  • What audience did it perform well with? 
  • What lessons can we take away when creating our next campaign? 
  • What types of creatives are performing? Text-heavy, on-model, and/or user-generated content.

We cannot emphasize enough just how important it is to keep testing and optimizing creative content. To get granular creative insights, it’s important to set up custom labels to ad level so you can see how different campaign types perform. 

Step 3: Identify and target the right audience

A key aspect of media buying is getting the message in front of the right audiences at the right time and place to convince them to make a purchase decision. Targeting is hampered and difficult in a post iOS14 world, but we recommend brands stay in a recruitment mindset. 

• Consumers are increasingly difficult to retain so at a high level we see our best clients are running about 70-80% prospecting campaigns to find new promising audiences to test creative against. The remaining 20-30% is dedicated to retargeting and remarketing campaigns further down the funnel. The optimal mix for the business may vary, but the takeaway is to prioritize finding new audiences.
• In your Northbeam dashboard, the key metrics to watch are:
  • ROAS for a general gauge of performance
  • CPMs to understand efficiency
  • First-Time vs. Repeat Transactions to ensure the exclusions are working on the promotion. Even if the exclusions are applied correctly, you might find a portion of transactions and revenue coming from existing customers increasing. If you're acquisition-oriented, take this into account when determining which tactics to scale.
• As you check Northbeam daily to monitor active campaigns, what audiences stick out that are either under or over-performing benchmarks? Your goal should be to find which audiences are the most affordable or expensive to target, and then use historical data to gut check whether the ROAS will justify investing in those audiences. 

Step 4: Optimize the website and landing pages for conversion

Once you’ve done the hard work of serving great creative to the right audiences, make sure the website is able to nurture a potential customer along their journey by anticipating their needs and providing support to finally guide them to conversion. We’ve found the best websites: 

• Set up custom labels in you Northbeam dashboard and include landing pages in the ad level naming conventions to easily pinpoint the best place to drop traffic on the website.
• Educate and build trust with cold traffic. Can the average user with limited to no knowledge of the brand and products learn everything they need to know from the initial ad touchpoint through the website and landing pages? Are there best practices such as social proof (reviews, testimonials) to provide education beyond product features?
• Does the landing page align with ad campaigns? Check to see if the same style, tone and other cues from the ad that initially brought the customer to the website? Do all of the touchpoints tell a cohesive and compelling story about the brand and products?
• Watch the conversion rates (ECR in the Northbeam platform) across landing pages and URLs? If not, then test out some new landing pages that can drive those conversion rates up. Does the website provide a seamless and easy check-out experience? Have the anticipated potential points of friction and addressed them at this last critical part of the purchase journey? 

Step 5: Understand targets

You can’t scale profitably if you don’t know the relevant targets and benchmarks to hit. Our best clients do a great job of aligning internally on which metrics are most important to their business, and what benchmarks they should be beating in order to grow. Some examples include: 

• A ROAS scale: For example, if ROAS is below 0.15x then turn off all campaigns. If ROAS is closer to 0.25x, then keep spending but keep a close eye on performance. If ROAS is 1.5x, then scale spend by 10% to capitalize. 
• Customer LTV: Look at LTV for customers acquired during past promos to determine if they are willing to tolerate the same efficiency during promos even if the customers might be far less profitable.
• Platform Benchmarks: The target ROAS, CAC, and other metrics should differ by platform because your strategies and content likely differ by channel as well. Internally, your team should have a good sense of what to expect from Facebook vs. Google, or Snap vs. TikTok ads for example. 
• Conversion Lag: Look at what the conversion lag has been during prior promotions to ensure that the forecast is accurate and/or reasonable.