Marketing campaigns are a hugely effective way of executing your marketing strategy. They bring structure and purpose to your marketing efforts, as opposed to randomised messages that may or may not yield a return.
Marketing campaigns keep us focused on the macro goal, and they make that goal more attainable, by breaking it down into micro tasks. It serves as your plan of action – that series of defined micro tasks all contribute to the achievement of a larger objective.
It also gives you the opportunity to track and measure success, which is very important if you want to know what went well and can be optimised for better success next time vs what was less optimal and should probably be avoided in the future.
As mentioned above, the pillar of a marketing campaign is structure and there are some key elements that a marketing campaign should include in order to be effective.
Let’s break down the steps needed to create a strong marketing campaign that is set up for success:
Start at the end:
What does success look like for this campaign? What is the overarching goal and objective … and why? (Always come back to the why!)
You need to have a clear goal in place so that you have direction and know exactly what you are trying to achieve.
Identify your target audience:
Understanding the needs, preferences, and behaviours of your target audience is essential for creating an effective marketing campaign.
You will have gone through the process of determining your target audience when you created your marketing strategy, but it is important to revisit this and decide if this particular campaign is suitable or relevant to all of your audience, or a particular persona that you have mapped out.
This will come down to the primary objective of the campaign
Decide on the message of the campaign.
What do you want to say to your audience? What do you want them to feel when they read your message? How is your message going to resonate with them?
A good campaign becomes a great campaign when the messaging is well thought out. Too often, businesses focus on what they want their audience to hear, rather than what their audience wants to know.
They can be the same thing, it’s all in the delivery. You have to deliver the message in a way that your audience will most connect with, not in a way that is easiest or best for you!
A well crafted message is very reliant on you knowing your target audience as well as, if not better, than they know themselves. (See step one!)
Have a Call-to-Action (CTA):
What do you want your audience to do? What action do you want them to take? And think about how that desired action might be different at each stage of the funnel.
Don’t over complicate this part. And don’t give them lots of different options. You need to keep things simple and easy. If you give them too many choices, you run the risk of overwhelming them and they will either freeze and take no action at all, or they’ll be confused about which direction to go in and find themselves in analysis paralysis.
Give them one option at any given stage. Complete this action, or don’t.
Set a budget:
How much are you willing to spend for the results that you want?
Is that in line with what you’re able to spend? Because often, the two amounts can be wildly different. And that means that one of two things usually needs to be adapted – your expectations, or your budget.
It’s important to manage your expectations here. If you want 20 conversions on a high ticket item worth over $5000 say, for a CPA of $10, you will either need to have a super primed, ready-to-go audience, an absolutely cracking offer, or a way to explain why that goal wasn’t achieved.
Remember – it’s a SMART goal and the A in SMART stands for achievable. (And the A in COACH stands for accountability – don’t come at me for giving you a hard truth here, I’m just doing my job!)
Create a timeline:
Creating an outline of what will happen and when with the campaign will do a couple of things – it will keep you organised and it will keep you accountable.
Personally, I prefer a Gantt Chart, because it is a great visual representation of how long each stage of the campaign is scheduled for, who is responsible for what part and it also breaks down all the elements of the campaign in to digestible chunks, rather than being overwhelmed by the mammoth task of the campaign in its entirety.
When you break down each element of the campaign into each section, it means you can be more focused and you’re less likely to miss details along the way … and there’s nothing worse than that last minute scramble to get something done that was overlooked in the preparation process.
Choose your marketing channels:
You need to be clear on which channels of marketing are going to be a part of this campaign and why. If you choose to use Email Marketing as part of this campaign, why have you chosen that channel and what purpose is it going to play in achieving the results you desire?
You need to be aware of how the channel in question is going to add value to what you’re trying to achieve. And ask yourself what stage of the funnel it is that that particular channel starts to be utilised. Not every channel should be used in the same way or for the same purpose. It’s about creating a campaign that exploits the strengths of each of those channels in the context of what you’re trying to achieve.
Metrics:
This is such an important one! You’ve created what you believe to be an amazing campaign – but how are you going to prove that? If you don’t measure the success of your campaign, you won’t have clarity on what workers, what didn’t work etc, and therefore, you won’t know what to improve or optimise for the next campaign.
Everything we do in marketing is so reliant on data. It’s the data that we generate that that allows us to make informed decisions on how to generate, or emulate, success.
The metrics that you choose to measure the success of your campaign by will need to align with your goals of the campaign. For example, you wouldn’t measure a sales focused campaign based on the number of Instagram likes that you get, you would track revenue generated. On the other hand, if the objective of your campaign is more engagement based, then it would make sense to track likes as interaction.
These 8 ingredients are the recipe for a well thought out and structured campaign, one that is focused, efficient and aligned with your business objectives. Structuring a campaign in this way is going to make your life a lot easier. And who doesn’t like that?
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