Every business needs a marketing action plan and campaign. Every business will have a different strategy but the steps to launching a successful campaign are the same across the board. The type of campaign is the only difference.
1. Begin with the end in mind
You can’t get where you’re going unless you know where you want to end up. By identifying these goals you can structure your marketing campaign to help you achieve those goals.
Do you want to generate more leads? Do you want to make more sales? Do you want everyone to know who you are and what you do by seeing your logo? Are you trying to increase customer satisfaction?
Whatever you define as your goals that’s how you can structure your marketing campaign. If you want more leads, that’s where your focus should be. More sales? You need to focus there. Focus in on exactly what you want to accomplish, and that’s where you will see success. Don’t try to work on two big things at once.
This is also a good opportunity to do a SWOT analysis for your business. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Identify what those are and find out if there’s a way for your new marketing campaign to help you overcome those. Do you have a strength you really want to promote? Is there a weakness that you as a business can help to work past? Is there a threat to your business you need to focus on and what opportunities do you have to generate success?
2. Set a time frame
By setting a time frame, a drop-dead date, you’re able to hold yourself to that time frame. There’s also a potential for failure here- you never want to rush yourself to the point of creating mediocre results, mediocre creative, a bad website, ad copy etc. Keep in mind that you want to have a little wiggle room so that when you are developing your strategy, if you need to delay for whatever reason you have the opportunity to do so.
Don’t rush through this. By identifying a time frame, you hold yourself to it, but give yourself some wiggle room so you can adapt to things that come up that you don’t have control over. By doing this you’re able to ensure you’re going to create a great campaign.
3. Identify Your Milestones
You want to set your milestones and even micro milestones so you can identify success as you achieve it. What kind of goals do you have? Milestones you can set include:
- Making your first sale
- Launching your business
- The first time that the campaign pays for itself with money left over
- The first time you become profitable
- etc.
These are all ways to identify if you’re on the right track. Just launching a marketing campaign doesn’t mean you will for sure be successful, so by setting these milestones you will be sure to encourage yourself and your team (if you have one) to see where your growth is coming from and focus in on that.
4. Identify Your Budget
You always want to make sure you’re in control of your financials. So by identifying how much money you want to spend on individual campaigns, or the campaign as a whole, that allows you to focus your energy where it needs to be; if your funds are earmarked for certain campaign and you find that other campaigns are doing better, you can always readjust.
But identifying the amount of investment that you’re placing in these marketing campaigns really will help you sleep better at night. You need to ensure that any money that you are spending needs to be spent wisely. Small business owners really need to keep track of where their money is going. So it’s not something that you can just put out there and waste and spend willy nilly. But by identifying the amount that you want to spend and how much that spend should result in a ROI, will hep you understand where you’re gettin the best results and be able to focus that budget on what makes the most sense.
5. Choose the marketing channels you want to use
You have to choose the channels you’re going to run your marketing campaign on. And there are hundreds out there. Focus on what your actual goals are.
Are you going to be selling products, or maybe you want to be on Google Shopping, or have a shopping feed connected to a Facebook campaign.
Are you focused on lead generation? You can focus on intent based search or inbound search. In that case, maybe you want a campaign running on Google Adwords.
Are you producing DIY information? Something that you need to have a lot of images/videos? Pinterest or Instagram may be a great opportunity for you.
There’s a lot of different ways that you can run a campaign so you have to identify the channels that your consumers are using. Even more so, identify where in the sales funnel they are when they’re using those campaigns. Often times you can use these different channels to identify the right kind of customer at the right kind of time. And because you’ve already decided what the budget is, you know where you can move funds to achieve the best results. By understanding where you want to go you can create the path to get there.
By focusing on the correct marketing channels, you’re able to reduce any extraneous spend that you want to avoid. So keep your budget in mind, choose your channels wisely, then optimize.
6. Launch
Now it’s time to execute. You know where you’re going by this point and your budget. Now it’s time to turn it on. This can be the scariest part of launching a campaign. Up until this point, everything has been on paper. You’ve been deciding what to do and trying to understand where you want to go, and educating yourself on different strategies.
Now it’s time to turn it all on and see what happens. If you’ve budgeted and executed effectively, you’ll start to see the data come in. You’ll see clicks, conversions, interactions with your ads, shares, likes, comments, things like that. Take a look at all these and follow up on them; engage with your content and utilize this to execute your campaigns effectively.
7. Optimize
The data has come in. You’ve got all the analytics you can possibly want. Now is the time where you can go through and refine your campaign. The keywords you’re focused on, refine your budget, refine your channels, change out ads, reduce or remove budget for certain campaigns and increase or move it over to other campaigns that are doing well, etc.
This is your opportunity, you’re time. Take everything that you’ve learned and what you’re seeing; this real world data, and apply it. Everything you’ve done on paper has led you up to this point. You’ve focused really hard to ensure that the campaign you designed is good as it can be. Now is the time to use the real world information to really optimize.
Don’t be afraid to pull down ads or to create new ones or test new things. Don’t be afraid to completely abandon channels that aren’t producing good results. Make any changes that you need and continue to make them as you move forward. Find out what works, focus on that, remove what doesn’t.
Repeat this process for any new product or service you’re introducing to your customers.
