Learn how to prepare for an effective post mortem marketing analysis meeting to help your team create better campaigns in the future
Once a marketing campaign has wrapped up, the next step is to report results and conduct a Campaign Post-Morten to reflect and identify takeaways: what did your team learn from this campaign that can be used to hone and improve future ones? Remember the purpose of this evaluation is to identify both successes and failures because they both present meaningful opportunities for improved performance. In this article, we’ll cover how to use Northbeam to report campaign results and conduct campaign post-mortems. If your team uses a BI tool or another analytics solution, we’ll also show you how to export Northbeam data into those tools.
Data Reporting Best Practices
Every brand does reporting a little differently, but in our experience there are some universal truths that we tend to see frequently across our clients. Let’s go over some best practices when reporting data to various stakeholders in your organization.
- Focus on What Matters: We often see teams get bogged down by trying to analyze and report every single metric that could drive results across all their marketing campaigns. While Northbeam empowers you to look at whatever “Soft” KPI you find valuable, we recommend primarily sticking with the basics when doing the bulk of your reporting and decision-making. Again, although every brand is different, we recommend looking at your overall ROAS or Media Efficiency Ratio (MER) as the main northstar KPI. This requires having a good understanding of your brand’s cost structure but your goal is to find the MER threshold that makes your business profitable given your COGS and other expenses. Once you have that benchmark clearly established, it’s just a matter of checking Northbeam’s Overview Tab daily to keep an eye on MER to make sure it’s within a range you’re happy with. If not, this is a major indicator that you need to make changes to your channel mix or creative concepts.
- Grow Profitably: Assuming that your MER looks good, let’s take a look at Cost per New Customer (or whatever you call customer acquisition costs internally) next: is every new customer you’re acquiring helping or hurting your bottom line? Remember that growth is counterproductive if you’re losing money on every transaction because your CAC is too high in order to incentivize purchases. Just like with MER, based on your cost structure, what level of CAC can you afford before it becomes to expensive to acquire a customer?
- Understand Channel Mix: So far we’ve only looked at blended numbers because those metrics are the best way to gauge performance at a quick glance. The next step is to look at ROAS and CAC by your primary channels: which ones are ultimately driving the most impact for your brand? Remember that the key to a healthy channel mix is effectively and efficiently driving new, incremental purchases. After you look at the core KPIs by channel, don’t forget to also evaluate the “Soft” KPIs to see if there are any clues that explain the performance of that channel. For example, let’s say you notice ROAS is lower for TikTok than expected benchmarks: is the culprit low click-through rates? Low conversion rate? Expensive CPMs? Your goal is to validate any hunches from your core KPIs with these “Softer” ones.
- Personalize Your Data: The last three steps can apply to any brand, but our best clients personalize the Northbeam platform to make it work for their needs. This includes using our Breakdown Label Editor and Custom Labeling features to apply metadata tags to group data in ways useful to that brand. For example, one leading men’s accessories brand has all their campaigns broken down by funnel stage so they can quickly look at performance for prospecting vs remarketing campaigns. For more information on how to use these tools, read this article on how to Personalize Your Northbeam.
- Monitor Leading Indicators: Although Northbeam can forecast conversion lag and track future expected revenue using LTV KPIs and longer attribution windows, we find that reporting on 1-Day Click can be incredibly helpful for some brands. Even if your conversion window is relatively long, a certain percentage of customers will purchase within a day anyways. Using our 1-Day Clicks Only model, what campaigns are driving those purchases for your brand? These campaigns warrant further investigation to figure out which audiences tend to convert faster. Similarly, we recommend keeping a close eye on Cost per Email Signup as well. We find certain audiences can take longer to convert, but cost relatively little to signup for email campaigns. After a few more touchpoints, they ultimately convert after receiving a marketing offer: if your brand has a higher AOV and generally requires more touchpoints, this is especially pertinent for you.
Post-Mortem Best Practices
A good post-mortem starts before the campaign ends by instilling a culture of transparency and collective responsibility to improving campaign performance. Here are some best practices we’ve collected on conducting effective post-mortems:
- Set Expectations: Make it clear to your team that post-mortems will be a regular part of your workflow moving forward, especially with larger campaigns or pushes around key selling moments (Black Friday/ Cyber Monday). Start creating routines such as pre-meeting agendas and post-meeting surveys to encourage feedback and reflection frmo your teams. Try and set an example of transparency by focusing on solutions and honest reflection as opposed to assigning blame.
- Conduct Mini Check-Ins: Instead of waiting for the end of a campaign, our best clients tend to set mini pulse-checks regularly (typically weekly, sometimes more frequently during important selling times) as the campaign is running. These regular updates give the team more opportunities to identify issues before they become critical, or to find winners sooner and start scaling them for faster results. Just as we recommend checking Northbeam frequently to keep an eye on benchmarks, you should be reflecting on those results with your team just as often.
- Include the Right People: Unless you have the right people in the room, post-mortems won’t uncover all of the insights needed for progressing forward. Instead of including senior leaders and top managers, try and get perspectives from all team members when conducting your post-mortem. We recommend keeping your leadership and key stakeholders involved by reviewing core KPIs and creative performance weekly to make adjustments as necessary. Some of our clients also find assigning a neutral moderator to facilitate these conversions incredibly useful so everyone gets a chance to contribute.
Reporting & Exporting Data in Northbeam
Northbeam offers you a few ways to quickly export data into a custom report via CSV or whatever BI tool you wish: