Effectively planning your marketing campaigns is key to delivering results, however, the process can be quite complex. Being consistent with your marketing message across all channels, to reach your target audience isn’t easy, and without sound planning, it can become chaotic.
That’s why we wanted to share seven simple steps to planning marketing campaigns, helping you to stay on track and reach your marketing goals.
1. Decide what you want to promote
First things first, you need to decide what it is you’re going to promote and of course, who you’re going to promote it to. This might be the easiest part of campaign planning, but it’s also the most important. You can plan a killer marketing campaign, but if what you’re promoting doesn’t interest your target audience, then your campaign isn’t going to deliver results, so have a good think about this one. Often, companies will run marketing campaigns that promote:
- New products, features and services
- Incentives, deals and discounts
- Resources (e.g., a blog posts, videos, webinars)
2. Decide on a theme or concept for your campaign
So, now you know what you want to promote, and who you want to promote it to, have a think about an overall theme to tie the elements of your campaign together. It doesn’t need to be any revolutionary, but it’ll help you to build a more consistent experience for your customers.
Think about:
- Your target audience’s interests and pain points, what challenges they face and what might grab their attention (your buyer’s personas will help you with this).
- The overlap between your target audience’s interests and your brand.
3. Set campaign goals
Setting goals and KPIs will allow you to measure the overall success of your campaign. Not only that, but it will give you valuable insight into what is working and what isn’t and will help you to improve the performance of future campaigns.
- Set one, overarching goal for your campaign (this might be to drive brand awareness, generate new leads, increase revenue).
- Choose metrics to monitor for each marketing channel. That means having specific KPIs for email, social media, blog posts, etc. For example, increasing the number of retweets on Twitter is a platform-specific goal.
4. Decide what marketing channels you are going to use
The marketing channels you choose will depend on your campaign goals and target audience.
For example, if your campaign goal is to increase brand awareness, visual platforms, such as Instagram are a good option. However, if your goal is to generate leads, think about using email marketing, social media, and paid advertising to help drive traffic to a landing page.
Think about:
- What do you want customers to do? This can be placing an order, signing up for an account, or following you on social media.
- How can you get your customers to take the desired action? How will you take them from point A (discovering your product or service) to point B (taking the desired step).
- What channels have worked well in the past?
- How best to reach your target audience? What are their preferred channels?
- Are there channels where you want to develop a bigger audience? Planning a campaign around a weaker channel with good potential can help to create better resources for your brand
- Are there any limits on time and resources?
- What channels make the most sense for this campaign?
5. Plan what content you want to create for each channel
Go through each of your chosen media channels and establish the number of posts, ads, or pieces of content that will be needed to execute the campaign. This will help you to plan your time more effectively.
Your audience, timescales, and what you’re promoting all tie together here. If your main goal is to drive people back to the website, and your campaign is going to be over the period of a month, you might need more content spaced over that period.
6. Plan the execution of your campaign
To execute your campaign successfully, you’ll need to keep track of where everything is up to.
Think about:
- Who is going to be responsible for delivering the different elements of the campaign, e.g., copywriting, creating social media posts, design, etc and assign tasks to the relevant members of the team.
- Setting deadlines for each part of the campaign
- Research, content writing, and approving can have their own deadlines. Set these deadlines with enough time for them to be completed before your project’s end date.
- When will you send out your campaign?
7. Measure the success your campaign
Referring back to step three, you will easily be able to measure the success of your campaign based on the goals you set in the first instance. The use of CRM software, such as Intilery, can help you to drill down into the performance of your campaign. Analysing the results will enable you to understand what elements worked, and where improvements need to be made, this information can then be used to form a plan for the next campaign you run.
So, there you have it, seven simple steps to help you effectively plan a marketing campaign that will deliver results.
