Following are five steps you can take — before employing any strategy or starting any campaign — to ensure that you have data to justify every one of your decisions:
- Review all the data sources to which you have access.
You should effectively review all your owned, earned, and paid media data sources in order to pinpoint all the data to which you have access.
- Segment your data in order to focus entirely on Millennials.
After you access all your data, filter out anything that isn’t relevant to Millennials. Begin with age ranges and then expand to include those that possess the Millennial mindset.
- Establish your objectives.
Of course, establishing objectives is a standard practice with every campaign you run. But in this case, you justify your objectives with actual data.
- Refine your objectives through the use of your data.
You can now analyze the information that you have filtered in order to elaborate or change some of the more universal objectives that you have outlined for a given campaign.
- Set your benchmarks and key performance indicators.
What is most important about this step is the fact that any one of your benchmarks and all your indicators should be measurable. That measurability will result from your ongoing data analysis.
It’s crucial that before executing a campaign, every one of your objectives has measurement criteria. After all, how can you know whether your campaign is a success if you haven’t defined how it will be measured?
Data is agnostic. That means that for every campaign you run, you’ll be able to implement these five simple steps. You’ll be able to support every one of your actions with numbers and justify every decision with the statistics needed to back it up. Implement this process each time you plan on launching something new, and the entire process will be simpler and more successful.