How To Run A Marketing Campaign

Businesses of any size can reap huge benefits from running an effective marketing campaign.

This article will take you through the whole process, so you can reap those benefits too.

It explains just what a marketing campaign is and goes through the key elements of what makes a marketing campaign, with tips on how to make yours as effective as possible.

What is a Marketing Campaign?

A marketing campaign uses a variety of different media such as social media, emails, advertising campaigns, and digital and print media to promote and sell a product or service. This goal however is quite general. We will look at why it’s a good idea to get specific about your marketing campaign goals and what that looks like in the next section.

Key Elements of a Marketing Campaign

• Discover your audience
• Decide on Distribution routes.
• Set SMART goals.
• Analytics to measure success.

We’ll go through each of these below.

Discover Your Audience

Understanding who your target audience is and what stage of the buyer journey they are at is key to planning your marketing strategy.

By understanding your audience we mean not just their demographics like age, gender, geographical location, industry/job, and income bracket. But also, psychographics such as passions, pain points, hobbies, thoughts, beliefs and values.

There are 3 stages of the buyer journey; awareness, consideration and decision. First, your buyer realises they have a problem. Then your buyer thinks about ways to solve their problem. Finally, they decide which solution they are going to use/buy.

Decide on Your Distribution Routes

Distribution routes and channels include:

• Email.
• Social media.
• Paid advertising including digital and PPC such as Google ads or display advertising.
• Your owned media; your website, blog, newsletter.
• Referrals and word of mouth.
• Sponsorships.
• Forums.
• PR

Your chosen distribution route will depend upon your target audience and the stage of the buyer journey they are at.
For example, an email marketing campaign would be a good option for existing customers whose email data you already have, but not for potential customers whose email addresses you don’t yet have.

To gather email data from potential customers a lead magnet marketing campaign based on your potential buyers’ psychographics and distributed on a social media site that is commonly used by your buyer demographic would be a good option. Learn more about which demographic use which social sites here.

Set SMART Goals

SMART goals are :
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Timely

To help you settle on an aim of your marketing campaign you can think about the following;

• Do you want to build familiarity with your brand and values?
• Do you want to promote something in particular?
• Do you want to gather data (such as email addresses) or feedback?
• Do you want to generate leads?
• Do you want to boost sales?

Once you’ve found which of those most resonates you can create your SPECIFIC goal.

Now you have your goal, you can decide how to MEASURE it: social media likes, numbers email addresses collected, sales, or leads for example. Attach a specific number you’d like to achieve such as 1000 new website visitors.

Ensure it’s ATTAINABLE because you have chosen the right distribution route/s.

To make sure that your goal is RELEVANT it needs to align with your larger business goals and values. For example, a restaurant that caters specifically for families would not necessarily choose an edgy social media campaign. Instead, a more wholesome approach would be more relevant.

Finally, give your marketing campaign a realistic deadline to make it TIMELY.

Analytics to Measure Success

To help you measure the success of your marketing campaign you could consider an analytics tool.

• For social media marketing campaigns, all of the major social media networks have their own analytics tools to provide insight into your campaign. There are also tools such as SocialPilot that allow you to post on and track the activity on all major social networks in one place. If you either don’t have the time or the social media savvy to run a social media campaign yourself then we can do that for you, click here to find out more.
• Email marketing tools such as Mailchimp and Benchmark Email also usually come with their own analytics. But if you are looking for a hassle-free ‘done for you’ service then look no further than Approved Business Email Marketing.
• For website analytics, our own Web Traffic Revealer provides unique detail about visitors to your website including company names and details and who at the company are the major players and decision-makers.

Finally

We want to wish you every success in your marketing campaign journey. If there’s any aspect of it that we at Approved Business can help you with, don’t hesitate to get in touch.