Analyzing the effect of promotional campaign

The swimwear company Bikini Luxe created by Candice Galek. to increase brand awareness, it was decided to change employees to brand ambassadors, through what workers get commissions of 15% from their sales, post everyday photos to their pages and get different rewards. After these changes company got visible different in sales, which are increased and company got more followers on Instagram and Facebook. At the moment there are about 250000 likes and followers (Dinesh 2018).

Another good example of successful promotional campaign was launched by organization founded by Polish expert marketers and sports fans, called OSHEE. The range of company is more than 50 sports drink products are currently available in 27 international markets. The organization has launched the campaign in terms of 4-week video ad campaign, which scored a major boost in brand awareness, creating a strong foundation for future direct response campaigns and brought 17% of viewers watched entire videos and 11-point lift in ad recall (Facebook 2018).

2.8.4 Analyzing the effect of promotional campaign

In order to talk about effectiveness, it is important to understand which effectiveness of social media advertisement is explained in this chapter. In this part the effectiveness means that any activity is the ratio of the effect achieved as a result of the activity to the amount of resources expended to achieve this effect, where the efficiency - the relative value and for the same process can be different, depending on what the purpose of the activity is (Cossa 2018).

Moreover, planning marketing activities determines the course of business development. When developing strategies, market indicators are taken into account, on the basis of which it is possible to build a forecast of the dynamics of consumer preferences (indicators). The Data for evaluation can be obtained through social networks, where advertising of the brand or product helps to see changes in the characteristics of the target audience (Sales Generator 2018), steps presented in the chapter help to measure the effectiveness of promotional campaign.

At the present time, the effectiveness of online advertising with direct response could be analyzed without any difficulties by click/through rates and amount of leads generated.

However, when we considering service or goods to be purchased through the internet where the direct response is absent, there is no officially accepted way of advertisement effectiveness

(Sissors & Baron 2010) and no ‘best practices’ for measuring a successful promotional campaign (Suryakumar 2011). Other authors of researches, journals and books cannot disagree with this aspect as social media advertising require human communications and interactions which cannot be calculated and measured accurately. (Vaynerchuk 2011). In addition, Owyang J. in his publication created in 2010 has also underlined that the profound measures and results have to be created through the composition of financial and non-financial outcomes of the campaign.

Nevertheless, theories tell that the measurement is complex and is not accurate, but there are some possibilities which identify effectiveness of promotional campaign by eight steps provided by Blanchard in 2011. According to the author, the measurement steps are necessary to use because they help to determine which campaigns were the most effective and which advertisements did not show any effect to the company’s success (Blanchard 2011, 222).

The first step is to establish a baseline, which primarily concentrates on creating the data that should be measured such as sales volume, net transactions, number of brand mentions (Blanchard 2011). In other words, the basic information about the company has to be collected in order to establish primary image of the organization.

The second step is to create activity timelines, which means that companies have to plan all actions from firm’s departments and social media platforms that have an effect on the nonfinancial outcomes and the best way is to create one shared document in joint network in order to integrate campaign, which prevent the biggest part of misassumptions when analyzing the results (Blanchard 2011).

The third step is to monitor the volume of mentions, author underline that at this level companies have to measure brand mentions, research different social media sites, blogs and networks. Secondly, to measure “the mix of sentiment” of the brand mentions presented in the previous step (Blanchard 2011). Thus, there are positive and negative sentiments which could be served as an indicator of shift of customers’ preferences, for instance, increase in positive sentiments shows that the positive mentions were increased by word of mouth.

The next step is to measure transactional precursors, on this step company has to analyze all non-financial results obtained by the company such as number of “fans, followers, shares,

recommendations, RSS subscriptions, content downloads”. In other world, company has to research all things connected with consumers, their number and involvement to the company’s activities before and after promotional campaign.

The fifth stage is to look at transactional data or research financial changes. Organizations have to compare the changes in net transacting customers and the number of net transactions.

This step shows companies which changes they have got after the promotional campaign. For instance, “if the percentage change in net transaction is bigger than the percentage changes in sales volume, this means that new customers have begun to buy small things. And vice versa, if the percentage change in sales volume is bigger than the percentage changes in net number of transactions, it means that the current customers are spending more money than before”

(Blanchard 2011, 231).

The next step is to overlay all data (steps 1-5) onto a single timeline. On this stage companies have to establish the whole baseline, including relevant data such as ‘competitors’ press release and important events that might affect firm’s activities’.

The seventh step is to look at patterns, the author has presented three possible impacts of social media campaign. The fist example tells that there is an developing tendency even before the campaign was uploaded, because the impact of social media activities is complicated to determine from the pattern due to the lack of visible changes on the firm’s performance. The second example shows the lack of influences from the social media program. Probably, it was caused by the outside activities of the firm. In this case company has to concentrate on these factors which can cause this pattern. For instance, the promotional campaign was success, but due to the selling directly through the shop, there were no stock available, this process can also interrupt the process. The third pattern shows the desired outcome of the promotional campaign, where the social media performance increased is observed immediately after campaign was launched. Therefore, advertisement campaign would bring to the company any of three presented outcomes to the companies and to get to the third one, firm has considered all steps to the effective promotional campaign creation.

The last stage of the measurement of promotional campaign effectiveness is to prove of disapprove relationships. So, to prove the effective using of the promotional campaign company has to work “their way backward from the outcome to trace the correlation between

the change in firm’s performance and its social media marketing” (Blanchard 2011). In order to conduct it, company has to connect own metrics with the complete timeline (which was considered in the step six). For instance, company can check if there is a correlation between campaign of launching new product or service with increase of site visitors, reviews, likes and so on. In this way, the process can help organizations to analyze if campaign in social media help companies to achieve success.

According to the publication made by American Express (2018), which has proposed own way to measure the results, some of the campaigns have easy measurement criteria by using several simple questions such as how many visitors have company has or how many customers bought the product or service after launching the campaign. However, to measure the effectiveness deeper American Express has provided readers with the step questions, which can bring more useful information about campaign effectiveness, the questions are following:

1. Did we meet the objective we set?

2. Are there measurable items like coupons, or vouchers that are directly linked to the campaign?

3. Can I compare sales figures for the same period, year on year?

4. Have I noticed a difference in sales activity on products featured in the campaign?

5. Have I noticed a change in the type of customers I am now getting?

6. Can I see if spend per customer has changed over the period of the promotion?

7. Were there more footfall/traffic/phone calls/bookings/online visits during the period of the campaign?

8. Did customers give any feedback on specific elements of the campaign?

9. Have we created a sustained change in business or was it a short-term success?

10. Did your campaign cost less than the value of the new business it generated? (American Express 2018).

In addition, company American Express underlines in their paper that everyone who helped in campaign creation has to take a part in researching and measuring it to get profound results and understand what worked and what did not work at all.

According to the Sales Generator (2018), users of social networks are partly attracted by metrics that allow companies to analyze how many subscribers have their community or channel, how many comments, likes and reposts have company’s content. Business owners

should also pay attention to these indicators in order to measure them and evaluate the effectiveness of advertising for the company.

The first indicator is audience, company has to identify how many followers has the company’s group or page and the dynamics of organization’s performance. The next indicator is coverage which reflects how many users from the total audience of the social network watched content, including paid advertising. This indicator is applicable to a separate post and to the entire page as a whole. This indicator can help to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising impact on the target audience. The last indicator is involvement, which helps to evaluate the reaction of the audience by using following aspects:

1. Likes - shows the number of users who have viewed and rated your content

2. Comments -demonstrate the effectiveness of the content, which stimulated users to enter into a dialogue

3. Reposts - reflect the increased interest of the audience, counted the content relevant for posting on pages of organization as well as for further distribution

4. Mentions - show how many times during the communication of users the name of the brand is cited

The more active the audience demonstrates, the higher the effectiveness of advertising in social networks. The engagement indicator helps to assess the degree of interest of users in relation to your content. Thanks to this, the audience's loyalty grows, which in future can lead to sales growth (Sales Generator, 2018).

Finally, in order to conduct proper analysis of social media campaign effectiveness, company has to measure it inside the organization first, because managers outside the firm might not understand exact goal of the research. Nevertheless, company has to use other services outside the organization to involve different department that can bring the neutrality of the research outcomes to the report (Blanchard 2011).

3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The main purpose of the research is to study how to create a successful promotional campaign in social media, launch it, evaluate and compare with previous campaign launched in 2017 year.

This chapter is based on practical problem solving and systematizing that experience to research of the whole research and tries to answer fundamental question. The research method of the

thesis is an Action Research as the main idea is to create promotional campaign, launch it to Facebook, wait for a result, analyze and compare with previous campaign launched in October 2017 to answer the basic question of the research is how to create a successful promotional campaign and which key elements have to be considered during the process.

The Chapter presents research methods which are used in the study. This section is divided into several topics such as research approaches, methods, data gathering and analysis. These topics discuss research design and which approaches and methods were used in order to implement the research, considers methods to collect necessary data, explain how the analysis is implemented and, finally, show if the research I valid and reliable.