ou’ve got an idea for your marketing campaign. You know exactly what you want to do, you know exactly where you want to start, and you really just want to jump in, get creative, and hit publish, right?
Wrong.
While jumping feet-first into your next marketing campaign might feel extremely productive, it’s akin to building a house without foundations. Much like a house built on sand will look good initially, with no foundations, it’s not going to be fit for purpose, and at some point, it will be destroyed. This is exactly what will happen to your marketing campaign if you start churning out blog posts, email newsletters, and visual or written content without properly preparing for a successful strategic market campaign.Â
Know Your Goals
One of a marketing campaign’s most fundamental yet often overlooked aspects is setting clear, specific goals. Many campaigns fail because they lack this crucial element. It’s not enough to have a vague idea of what you want to achieve. You need to clearly define your objectives.
You need to identify what it is you’re trying to do.
Do you want to
- Generate leads
- Increase sales
- Build brand awareness
- Get more downloads
- Launch a new service or product
Whatever your goals are, you need to write them down, make them specific and measurable (SMART), and be specific. Growing your audience isn’t a goal; however, getting 100 new sign-ups before the end of July is an achievable goal.
Not convinced? According to CoSchedule, marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to report success than those who don’t. That is four times more likely to see success thanks to simply setting goals before action and any marketing content.
Define Your Audience
Understanding your audience is key to a successful marketing campaign. It’s not enough to categorise them as ‘small business owners’ or ‘millennials.’ You need to know who they are on a more personal level, what keeps them up at night, what platforms they use, how they research before buying, and what objections they might have. This understanding will allow you to create a more personalised campaign that resonates with your audience.
Ask yourself questions like
- What keeps your audience up at night
- What platforms do they use, and where can you find them
- How do they research before buying
- What objections might they have
Take a moment, just sit down, and create a mini-profile of sorts or buying persona, if you prefer, for your audience. Including pain points, priorities, tone of voice, and any other details relevant to your buyer shows you how to create more specific content that will actually resonate with them and hit the mark. A good tip at this point is to actually talk to some existing or past customers and get some real insights and feedback from them to help you build your buyer persona.
Know What’s Working
Understanding what’s not working is just as important as knowing what is. This means critically reviewing your existing content and strategies. Are there areas that could be improved or repurposed? By identifying these, you can make your marketing efforts more effective.
Can you include testimonials in emails, update a well-performing blog post, turn a short-form video into written content, or create a how-to guide from a short-form video?
You’re not trying to reinvent the wheel; you need it to turn more easily, travel further, and reach more places. By repurposing existing content that is already beneficial to your business, you can do just that.
Revisit your Marketing Mix
Your marketing mix is the classic framework of the four Ps, which have now been extended to the seven Ps. Will this help you cover all of your bases before anything goes public?
For a quick refresher, here are your 7Ps
- Product – What exactly are you promoting? Is it ready for the market?
- Price –Â Is your pricing competitive, and does the message reflect the volume?
- Place –Â Where will your audience find this on a website, in-store or online?
- Promotion –Â What channels will you use?
- People – Who will represent your brand? This could be sales, customer service, or support staff.Â
- Process –Â Is the buying or sign-up experience smooth and easy?
- Physical evidence – What proof are you offering?
Budget
You need to set a budget before you even think about creating any marketing material. Because if you don’t set a budget, the costs will spiral and get out of control before you have even done anything.Â
When it comes to setting your budget, you need an overall budget, which, according to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey, will average around 9.1% of total company revenue in 2023, with digital marketing accounting for the most significant share of marketing budgets.
Once you have your overall budget, you need to break it down into different sections, for example
- Paid media
- Creative tools
- Promotional partners or influencer fees
- Email Marketing or CRM platforms
Have a Timeline
Your marketing campaign absolutely needs a timeline because creating content without a timeline will just lead to things dragging out and not being completed, and any impact you might gain from the initial flurry will simply be lost.
So, before you create anything, you need to map out when you will do actions such asÂ
- Writing and designing assets
- Internal approval deadlines
- Launch dates
- Promotion phases
- Review points
Integrating tools into your operations and marketing campaigns can help make all of this even easier. For example, a visual calendar can keep everyone on the same page and start things from the same point, while tools like Trello, Asana, and Notion can help keep your marketing campaign on track.Â
Align the Team
Even if it’s just you, everybody involved in your marketing campaign should know what the campaign is for, who it’s targeting, the key messages and CTAs, and the launch plan and timeline as a minimum. You need to make sure that your marketing campaign is blocked off in your calendar and your customer support and sales teams are prepped and ready to respond in advance so that they can be ready when they need to be.Â
Metrics
Lastly, you need to understand how you are going to track what is and isn’t working. You need to set up tracking tools early to show that you can understand what is going on. Things like Google Analytics goals, UTM parameters for links, CRM tags for new leads, and social media tracking pixels can all be used to help you track activity relating to your marketing campaign.
You also need to define your primary KPIs: click-through rate, conversion rate, CPA, engagement, or dwell time. Having trackable KPIs in place can help you understand the success or even failure of your marketing campaign, so you can make changes as and when needed to get the desired result.Â
