Establishing Campaign Timelines to Drive Success

One of the many benefits of digital marketing is that everything moves faster online. It’s easier than ever to outline, design, schedule, and publish digital marketing content. In some instances, you can access campaign data almost as soon as ads go live.

It can be tempting to begin adjusting keywords, bids, and other variables once those results start funneling in. After all, a good digital strategy relies on being able to interpret data and refine your tactics accordingly. But for long-term campaigns, making immediate changes can actually be a disservice. Keep reading to understand why campaigns need at least a month to show reliable results.

Patience Is Key to Campaign Planning

There are many components to a full-scale digital marketing campaign, including both paid and organic tactics. The components must align both thematically and strategically to achieve success. But that doesn’t mean they all generate reliable, usable data on identical timelines.

For example, paid and organic strategies are both necessary in digital campaigns, yet they behave differently. Paid strategy, such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC), can generate impressions quickly and show immediate results, while Search Engine Optimization (SEO), an organic strategy, is notoriously considered a long game. You need both, but SEO will never be able to keep pace with PPC because that’s simply not the nature of the tactic.

Each part of a digital marketing campaign deserves time to prove its worth. Allowing time for concrete results to develop will be more helpful when planning future campaigns. Move on from any part of the campaign too quickly, and you may never truly know how effective your efforts could have been.

Generate Better Data with a Longer Campaign Calendar

Extending a campaign’s timeline doesn’t mean you’ll lose ground on the competition. In fact, you could end up a step ahead: a longer campaign calendar can better illustrate how successful each component of the campaign is, and for how long.

Consider the paid vs. strategic dynamic again. The PPC and paid social media parts of your campaign will generate almost immediate results. While this can be exciting to see, it’s not the most helpful set of data because it can’t really tell you anything about the long-term viability of the campaign.

Your campaign needs time to acquire impressions and clicks while discovering which users are engaging with your campaign. Similarly, any changes you make during the campaign requires Google Ads to relearn the information associated with the campaign.

Google also needs more than one or two weeks to judge the ad’s performance by gauging the activity level surrounding the ad. The performance evaluation combined with the eventual refinements you’ll make will help to evolve the quality score, thus impacting how it ultimately performs in the ad auction.

Additionally, a longer campaign timeframe helps you to properly allocate resources. More data can help you decide which components require more of the marketing budget and which areas can be reined in.

So instead of altering keywords and adjusting bids right away, use the first month to gather data and potentially improve your future campaigns.

How to Set Up Your Campaign Calendar

Knowing how long to run a campaign is a balance between optimizing as quickly as possible and allowing time for truly useful information to be collected. Here’s a basic template for getting started:

• PPC: 90 days. You can make key adjustments at the end of each month.

• Social ads: Three to six months. This applies to long-term plans, not daily posts used for maintaining brand presence.

• SEO: Six months to a year. Organic tactics tend to take longer but can yield a wealth of useful insights. 

Some campaigns will be shorter due to seasonality or limited-time offers (sales events, holiday offers, or special promos) but you can apply these general guidelines to long-term campaigns. Your campaign can also benefit from the following techniques:

• Create buyer personas based on actual data, not assumptions. Data-backed buyer personas ensure you’re targeting the right audience from the start.

• Make sure you’re measuring the right metrics. Otherwise, you may not even be evaluating the right parts of your campaign. Your team should know how to use your preferred analytics tools to ensure accurate metrics.

• Align content with the correct stage of the buyer journey. This will be easier to do with the right buyer personas.

• Know your budget. The number of digital channels you utilize will each require a portion of your budget; plan accordingly and be ready to adjust as needed.

Each campaign may vary slightly depending on its goals, digital channels, product offerings, or other variables. Monitor each campaign and exercise patience when needed to make every digital marketing campaign a success.