Marketing is more than just rustling up quirky banner ads and funny commercials. The process takes a lot of forethought, research and planning – especially if you’re after tangible results. Ideally, a successful campaign should be designed to reach the following three objectives:
- A well-targeted message that reaches a defined target audience.
- A message that is understood by the said audience.
- A message that prompts recipients into performing one or more actions.
Reaching these objectives can take some time and the best marketing campaigns aren’t created overnight. You’ll need patience, insight, and access to customer-centric data. Luckily, we now have technology on our side, which can make the process so much easier!
Why Are Marketing Campaigns Important?
A well-designed and thoughtfully created marketing plan has the ability to position your brand in the sight of your customers, establishing it as a certain “something” in their minds. Many successful brands may even dare to say that marketing is the most important part of their business – because everything else within the business depends on it.
Management and business maestro, Peter Drucker said –
“Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation.”
If you’ve recently recognised the importance of marketing your business (big or small) or perhaps you’ve finally decided to put thought into action, then this guide will be invaluable to your organisation. It’s time to challenge your creativity!
Your Guide to Creating a Successful Marketing Campaign
In the steps that follow, we’ll help you to learn how to create your very own strategic marketing campaigns. Whether you have worked on a campaign before or if this is your first attempt at formalising how you “put your business out there”, you’ll find what we’re about to share to your utmost advantage.
Let’s start:
1. Determine Your Business Goals
Before you put pen to paper and start jotting down your plan of action, take some time to think about what you want your campaign to achieve – that is, what is your campaign objective?
Establish SMART objectives for optimal results.
SMART goals are:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Timely
For example, your goal may be to gain at least 20 new customers a month or to sell 20 products per week or to increase your turnover by 30% in a year. Your marketing intentions can be based on anything from sales and customer satisfaction to profits.
2. Secure a Budget – and Then Stick to It
Budget plays a huge role in marketing. Why? Because many of the steps, such as research and implementation, can cost money. Determining how much money you have to spend on your campaign will help you to create realistic objectives and strategies.
Without putting thought and effort into this step, each stage to follow may become null and void.
3. Perform Market Research
This step focuses on getting to know your business and its market better. It entails defining your product or service and making detailed notes of features and benefits. You can also ascertain what makes your brand unique and a cut above the rest.
Collect and organise all the points that “make” your business, such as price, service, and distribution.
Some suggested areas to consider can include:
- Market patterns and dynamics (is your product/service seasonable)?
- Product comparisons (does your competition sell a similar product/service – if so, what is their strategy)?
- Benchmarks in your line of business.
- The suppliers, partners, and employees who you’ll need to rely on.
*When focusing on your unique selling point, it’s important to establish what makes you different from your competitors.
To reiterate, you should formalise:
Who your ideal market is.
What it is you are selling.
Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – why what you offer is different and better.
By considering these elements of your business, you’ll have a clearer idea of who your target market is. Which brings us to the next step.
4. Find Your Target Personas and Study Them
Finding and defining your target personas starts with the market research process but because of its complexities, it’s important enough to get its own step.
Referencing Yusuf Bhana, TranslateMedia’s digital marketing manager, you need to ask yourself the following questions when studying your target market:
“Who are your target customers?
What are their motivations?
How do they like being communicated to?
Which newspapers or magazines do they read and which sites do they visit regularly?
Which channels are they using?
If they use social media, what are they talking about?”
These questions need to be answered before you create a successful marketing campaign.
Here’s what you should do when building your market personas:
Start by describing your ideal target customer – stipulate their age, gender, family dynamics, income, likes and dislikes, lifestyle, buying patterns, what their hopes and expectations are, and so on…
Next, use focus groups, online customer surveys, quizzes, and established customer patterns to collect your data and formulise your buyer personas.
The type of details that you gather can be as intricate as you need them to be and over the above, they can also include:
- Job titles
- Roles within the workplace
- Education history
- Pain points
- What types of content they prefer
- What their fears are
5. Determine Your Campaign Objectives
Once you’re happy with the information you’ve gathered and solidified during steps 1-4, then you’re ready to outline your specific campaign goals. Here you will establish the idea that you want to convey and what actions you want your target audiences to make when they receive your content.
For example, do you simply want to create brand awareness, or do you want your marketing campaigns to include Calls to Action that result in sales conversions?
Keep your intentions tied to measurable key performance indicators (KPIs that will help you to make smart, informed, and realistic goals).
Since you’ve already established your marketing budget, remember that your objectives are going to be tied to a monetary value. And – of course, return on investment is also important.
For example, if you just want to create a bit of brand awareness, you can spend $1,000 on a Facebook ad and get X number of views. *Our final step will help you to determine whether you’ve achieved your goal and made an ROI.
IMPORTANT!
A large portion of this step needs to be focused on communication. You need to formalise what you want to say and what actions you want to prompt. Use the data you have collected on your buyer personas to determine the best way forward in this regard. Questions you can ask yourself include:
Does your target audience like to read? Or do they prefer videos? Do they respond well to ads with lots of imagery, or do they prefer messages to be direct?
TIP: For optimal results (and to expand your efforts), create content that can be leveraged in many formats. For instance, a blog post can be turned into a podcast or a video script – or it can be broken down into an infographic, quotes, and memes for social media posts.
The better you communicate with your recipients, the more success you’ll have with reaching your goals.
6. Define the Elements or Channels You’ll Use to Execute Your Campaign
Once you’ve established what it is you want to communicate (and if it’s going to be engaging enough), then you need to choose the channel/s that will ultimately carry and compliment your campaign. With technology at the forefront, these “portals” have become seemingly endless.
Currently, the most popular marketing channels include:
- An email marketing campaign (such as a newsletter)
- Phone and Text (SMS) marketing
- Social Media Platforms
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Pay Per Click Advertising
- Website and eCommerce pages
- Content (blog posts and podcasts)
- Events
- Press Releases/PR
- Traditional marketing such as magazines, print ads, and brochures
- Promotions (such as coupons)
- Demos/evaluations
Take a moment to revise your previous steps and ensure that every element of your marketing campaign is still in line with your goals – and suits your buyer personas.
7. Create Your Content
Many marketers refer to this as the fun part – where you get to turn your research into a visible and actionable product. How you action this step, however, is up to you (and possibly up to your budget too).
You can outsource your content creation (such as text and graphic design) to freelancers or agencies so that you can have more time to focus on strategy – or, if you’re a creative, you can take the work on yourself. Whatever you decide, remember to ensure that you keep your buyer personas in mind during the content creation planning phase.
8. Execute and Promote
When your content has been finalised and signed-off, then it’s time for the juicy bit that we like to call “promotion and execution”!
Use the channels that are going to best reach your target audience so that they openly receive the information that you’re communicating. If you’re looking for engagement, make sure that you’ve included methods of response – such as turning on Twitter commenting, for example.
According to Digital Marketing Institute, “everyone who enters your sales funnel via any channel can prove to be valuable – even the ones who don’t purchase your product(s) or service(s) right away”.
9. Make Sure Your Team Is On Board
We’ve added this as step 9 but ideally, it should be implemented in conjunction with step 8.
So, you have created out-of-this-world content, but does the rest of your team or company know how to apply it? Do they even know it exists?
Take some time to make sure that internal communications are afloat and that everyone from the interns to upper management and HR knows what your company goals are – and what you’re doing to make them happen.
Train your team members so that they can adequately respond to communications that result from your campaign and ask them to play an active role in supporting your efforts.
10. Analyse
Last, but certainly not least, you’ve got to learn to “analyse”. To guarantee that you are making a return on investment and that your marketing efforts aren’t in vain, you need to find ways to track and measure your campaign’s performance.
Here are some examples of popular methods used to conduct analyses and gather reports:
- Google Analytics (which gives insight into the number of organic visits to your digital content).
- Marketing automation software (this type of software can track email campaign open rates and click-throughs, for example).
- Google Paid Ads (which shares click-through and referral data).
- Social media platform engagement (such as “likes” and “shares” – or you can use free / paid social analytics tools).
Whichever method/s you use to track your campaign, make sure you have enough information to confirm that your actions have been plausible. If you’ve discovered that your marketing campaign wasn’t as successful as you expected it to be, then use your newfound experience to reinvent the wheel.
When it comes to planning any type of business strategy, the outcome will always lie in the details. As complex as marketing campaigns can be, their impact is noteworthy enough to take them seriously.