There is a strong measure of truth in the following statement when it comes to marketing success and content campaign measurement:

“Success isn’t overnight. It’s when every day you get a little better than the day before. It all adds up.” – Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson

It’s very common to launch your output on the world only to be left feeling that it hasn’t created the waves you eagerly anticipated. Or you’re seeing great results in the metrics, but it isn’t translating to increased business.

Find your reason for success

When we talk about success, it’s best to get reductionist. Why are you doing the campaign or thought leadership in the first place? Is it to raise awareness and brand profile? Change perception of the brand? Gain new customers or repeat business?

Identify the end goal and reason before doing anything, and build backwards. If the goal is more customers, then it won’t be the marketing team measuring the success, it will likely be sales or customer service. If that’s the case, your campaign should be aligned across the team objectives. Then you can start to identify the metrics that feed into this end goal.

There are several issues at play, and you may find the answer to your problem in the questions below.

Five points to ask yourself

1. What does success look like for your campaign, project or business?
2. Do you really know what success looks like?
3. How relevant are your metrics and measurements to this end success?
4. What other ways could you measure the relationship between your objective and tasks?
5. Which other teams should be involved in tracking success?

Stop comparing your marketing success

Another pitfall that teams can get bogged down in is comparison to the success of others. What is a good metric for one brand is not necessarily a useful metric for another.

Unless you have the exact same customer base size, same buyer personas, same onboarding and service procedures and even the same product or service, it’s immensely difficult to replicate the exact same marketing success.

Take a podcast for example, where available metrics may indicate 500 downloads or 1000 plays is a good level of engagement. However, these metrics tend to be extrapolations from the most popular series: such as true crime and current affairs topics with broad audiences.

Niche business-led podcasts will have a smaller and more specialist audience, so the best measurement comes from weekly improvements on initial performance. This is also why it’s immensely more useful to create a consistent series of content to build that audience.

Hard insight

Going back to the wisdom of the Rock – he’s right, it’s all about getting a little better than the day before, and it’s rare to see overnight results.

Even if some campaign fortunes seem instantaneous, rest assured there’s been a steady and well-thought out build-up in the moments leading up to viral or jaw-dropping marketing.

If your metric results don’t over-awe on first glance, the most important thing is to not immediately abandon your approach. Thought leadership campaigns, for example, need steady release on a regular timetable to build up an audience. They need to find their rhythm and give a reason to keep coming back for useful insights.