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Marketing Campaigns are essential to any business big or small. They build awareness, increase engagement with your business, and can increase sales. Marketing Campaigns have taken many different forms over the years from newspaper ads to billboards, and now to Social Media. No matter the platform there are some essential basics to developing an effective marketing campaign, that works in favor of the goals you have and the results that you want to see. In this blog, we’ll give you a guide on how to create a successful marketing campaign.
“Content marketing is more than a buzzword. It is the hottest trend in marketing because it is the biggest gap between what buyers want and brands produce.”- Michael Brenner
1. Define and Set Your Goals
The first step to creating any successful Marketing Campaign is to define what your goals are. The best goals to set are those that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely or S.M.A.R.T. The goals that you set need to be measurable otherwise you have no real way of determining if your campaign was a success or not. Goals could include a specific number of sales on a product per week, 10 lead generating forms filled out by the end of the campaign, or a certain number of clients captured by the end of the campaign. Whatever goals you decide to set they need to be defined at the beginning as they will inform the rest of your Campaign efforts.
2. Create A Budget
Now that you have defined your goals it is time to create a budget. Creating a budget is important for several reasons one of the most important being that it will dictate how far you can go in your campaigning efforts. Your budget should be affordable for you, and if you are just starting you should be especially wary of throwing the entirety of your marketing budget into one effort.
Your budget should bring a certain level of value per each person viewed, define what that value is for you, and set your budget accordingly.
3. Define Your Audience
It’s time to define your audience. Defining your audience is one if not the most important element of your campaign because it determines many things from messaging to the platform, and even content. Getting to know your audience on a deeper level now will save you time later in terms of having to reorient the look or messaging of your campaign. Important things to know about your audience include
Name
Age
Occupation
Location
Interests
Gender
Likes and Dislikes
Issues and Fears
Pain Points
While these are only some of the things that you need to know about your audience, they will aid in helping you determine the best route for your campaign. Knowing things such as their likes, dislikes, and pain points will help you create more focused effective messaging that helps you reach your goals.
“Successful companies in social media function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners than as traditional advertisers.”- Erik Qualman
4. Conduct Market Research
Defining your audience is only the first step to creating a successful and targeted campaign. Now it’s time to conduct market research, with your audience in mind it is now your job to figure out what it is you are offering specifically and how that will interact with the current market.
For instance, if your audience is professionals looking to advance in their career, and the market currently has little to no products to address this your marketing campaign could focus on the pain of not moving up in a career and then offer the solution such as a course or coaching.
Knowing what the market is looking for, what products are already out there, and how you differ or are better than the products that already exist is the key to conducting informative marketing research and creating a successful marketing campaign.
5. Study Successful Campaigns
If you have never run a campaign before and are unsure about how you would even begin creating content or marketing to your audience, studying successful marketing campaigns is a great way to gain more confidence.
Successful marketing campaigns are ripe with information on effective audience identification and targeting, messaging that is appealing and hits pain points, utilization of different platforms, and much more.
Some of the best businesses to study for successful campaigns include Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple who have all defined and targeted their audiences in new and innovative ways.
Nikes LDNR Campaign saw 235,025 conversions and displayed impactful messaging keyed to the interests of the audience which in this case was athletic Londoners. Studying campaigns like this is key to developing your strategy.
6. Choose Your Platforms
Any effective marketing campaign is implemented across multiple platforms to reach the widest swath of your audience. The platforms you should choose should be following those most used by your audience, for example, if your audience is a career professional businesswoman who is looking to move up in her business, targeting platforms such as Linkedin and Facebook, coupled with newspaper and blog ads might be an effective strategy for you.
At the end of the day, it comes down to reaching where the audience is not where you wish they were. Say your audience is on Facebook but you are more comfortable with billboard advertising. It is up to you to adapt to the needs of your audience if you want to create an effective marketing campaign that will bring you the results that you want to see.
7. Design Your Campaign Content and Messaging
Designing your campaign content and messaging is probably one of the most difficult parts of creating a campaign. However, it will be made much easier by the fact that you have defined and established your audience. Your messaging and content must include a USP or Unique Selling Proposition which defines how you stand out from the competition.
Your messaging needs to hit the pain points of your audience and convey to them why the product or service that you have can make their lives better. People are motivated by self-interest so explaining why your product or service is beneficial to them specifically is much better than general messaging.
While you may be concerned that in creating messaging that focuses on a specific audience might close you off from other options, the fact remains that messaging that is untargeted and unfocused will leave you with a much lower rate of success because the audience will not understand who it is for.
Be purposeful with your content and messaging and strive to stand out from the competitors, your audience is being sold to every day and you need to figure out how to stand out from the crowd.
8. Launch Your Campaign
Now it is time to launch your campaign, your campaign should be launched in multiple modes of distribution: Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned. Listed below are examples of distribution channels that fall into each one. An effective marketing campaign will make a point to use more than one of these options.
Your use of each of these channels needs to be purposeful and should be informed by the audience definition and marketing research that was conducted earlier. The modes of distribution are dependent on where your audience is so picking which platforms your audience is most active on and making those your mode of distribution.
The platforms that you choose may also require you to adjust the content that you have put together for your campaign. More visual modes such as Billboards and Instagram quill require stronger visuals that convey your message with little to no wording, while blogs and email campaigns will require strong wording with less emphasis on visuals.
Source: Ceralytics
9. Evaluate The Results
Evaluate the results, this is where the goals that you set will come in and if you set S.M.A.R.T goals noting whether the campaign was effective or not should be easy. If your goal was to gain ten new clients over five weeks, and you get seven you can say that the campaign was successful.
However, if you only got two, you will want to reevaluate where your campaign failed to connect with your audience. You might also want to look at whether the goals that you set were achievable for the scope of your business.
Taking a comprehensive look at the results of your campaign can reveal a wealth of knowledge that will help you improve in the future.
Note areas that weren’t effective, messages that didn’t connect, money that could have been saved, etc because these will help you to create more effective campaigns in the future which will save you time and money while yielding better results.
Effective Campaigns are the result of various trial and error sessions, so the more that you work on refining and creating campaigns the more successful they will be.
“This is a learning process and sometimes you have to fall in order to learn things.”- Christine Korda
Conclusion
Creating a successful marketing campaign can be hard but it doesn’t have to be. With careful planning, research, and evaluation your marketing campaigns can become a big asset to your business. While the task may seem daunting it gets easier as you gain more experience, so don’t be afraid to get started.
If you would like to help with your Social Media or Social Media marketing efforts contact us today using this link. We can help you create effective social media marketing efforts tailored to your goals and audience.
We hope this article was helpful. Now that you have the information get out there and start building your marketing campaign!