What recommendations do you generally provide at the end of a campaign?

For ad-hoc campaigns, we typically would either repeat and iterate if it’s performing well or kill it if it’s not. Even if it’s not performing well, we would take that learning to inform future campaign strategy or other workstreams. Typically, we monitor performance throughout the campaign flight to make optimization. For example, we recently launched a lead gen campaign driving customers to book a call with a rep upon qualifying. Because users may not be familiar with our products, we launched a standalone page to provide overview and a separate form page so we can integrate the scheduling tool using another platform. One week post launch, the data shows that there was a huge drop-off from the first landing page to the form page itself. We had to make an immediate decision to reduce the steps in the user journey and drive users to the form page directly. After updating the backend user logic and content on the form page, we made the change and saw a significant uplift in form submission conversion. However, there isn’t too much increase in the number of calls scheduled. For this campaign, our recommendation would be to kill it but we plan to repurpose the integration we have done and benchmarks collected to inform an upcoming market expansion GTM approach.

Here are three things I would recommend at the end of a campaign:

1. Compare performance to goals
2. Update your campaign strategy slides/doc with results, highlights and lessons learned
3. Bring the team together for a campaign retrospective meeting. Discuss what worked well and what can be done better

First and foremost, should we do this again? Of course that requires you to setup the campaign correctly, ensuring you have outlined clear goals. Sometimes it's easy to see, i.e., did we get pipeline/bookings - while other times it's not quite as straight-forward. For example, if it was a campaign intended to drive awareness you have to go back and look at how you set up your original goals. Whatever you do, share the results with sales and also get their insights, as there is always a 'story within the story.'

At the end of a campaign, I generally focus on three areas: impact and outcomes, what worked and what didn’t work, and next steps.

• Impact and outcomes: At the end of the campaign, you should be able to define the results and associated recommendations. This should be framed around how they impact the company’s goals. Did the campaign impact revenue? Did the campaign impact retention? How? 
• What worked / what didn’t work: You should be empowered to not only express what worked, but also what did not work, what you learned from it, and the recommendation going forward. How will you adjust for the next campaign based on this data?
• Next steps: This should address the, now what? Based on the items I covered above, the next steps and your recommendations should naturally come together. Be sure to include any relevant details such as dependencies and budget requests along with the expected outcomes from said budget.