Marketing Campaigns: The Essentials

WHY YOU SHOULD START WITH A PLAN?

You are starting to build your marketing campaign and you think you know all the obvious steps.
You choose your goal, then you decide the platform, creation of copy & visuals of course, you set everything up on the platform and off you go LIVE.
Now you sit and wait for the countless leads and new customers. 
Why wouldn’t you?
You already spent a lot of time and money, it has to work.

But what happens next? 
You’ve probably been there before…
DISAPPOINTMENT and FRUSTRATION, that’s what's next. 

After some time you realize that among the few leads you got, you didn’t get anybody that will engage or buy/use your service/product and you start thinking of the time and money you’ve invested in your marketing campaign JUST TO SEE IT HOW IT GOES DOWN.
But, the most frustrating part when you actually launch a marketing campaign and it fails is the fact you can not detect what and where it went wrong without spending too much time, so you can improve it.

How can you save yourself from all this trouble?
It's not as complicated as you may think.
To shoot and to score from the first time is very possible. 

Basically, you need a simple planning process that will be your “secret formula” leading you to the creation of successful campaigns over and over again. 

WHEN DETERMINING EFFECTIVE PLANNING PROCESSES FOR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS LESS IS MORE!

For starters, you need to determine the essential steps and stick to them, this can predetermine whether you’ll get to the phase where you get to segment the countless leads & customers in your funnel. 

FIRST THINGS FIRST, DO YOUR RESEARCH!

Before you start doing anything, do the research!
Believe me when I say that research will literally save you min. 40% of your efforts & resources when launching a marketing campaign. 
You can research everything when it comes down to building a campaign and that can be overwhelming, messy and confusing, especially if you are a newbie.
That is why for starters, you can use a few angles of advertising market research to help you better understand your prospects and the market in general, and when you master those you can only add more overtime until you become a master researcher. 

GO VISIT YOUR COMPETITION, BUT DON’T SAY HI

Yup, when doing research, competition is one of your best friends, and we all should check up on our friends from time to time, no? 
There are so many user-friendly online tools & SaaS software like SEMrush, SimilarWeb, etc. that will provide thorough data which will help you utilize your competition's online presence and behavior, as well as, show you how they’re using their tools for optimum results.
If you are not in a place where you can allow yourself to invest in such tools, then you can just make a list of your actual competition and the large A-list companies you strive to become. 
Once you have the list you can manually check what they are doing: what keywords are they using, how they market to your target audience, what strategies they use, what are their lead magnets and use this data to your advantage. 
This will help you optimize your marketing campaigns far beyond all your competitors.  

ARE YOU SURE YOU ARE TALKING TO THE RIGHT PERSON? 

We are assuming you already have your perfect buyer persona & your ideal target audience for writing, but do you track it, are those people even here?. 
The biggest mistake many marketers and entrepreneurs make is THEY ASSUME, THEY WISH and then they act upon their assumptions & wishes. 
So, do you have proof of what your actual audience is, or you just assume that it is rich people with the same taste as you in desperate need of your product or service?
If not, you have to start researching the people that are already here & see whether they should be here and you have to start “speaking their language” or you’ve invited the wrong crowd. 

This way you can find many reasons why your marketing campaigns have failed: it can be the content, it can be the targeting, the key messages, the whole strategy, but whatever it is if it's not in correlation with your ideal target audience it's the very reason why you’ve wasted your last month advertising budget for nothing!  
These are the main market research angles you must pay special attention to if you want your advertising investment to pay off. 

YOU MUST HAVE A DETAILED GAME PLAN 

Good, now that we know where we are, who we are talking to, we go to show and tell everybody about our amazing service/product. Now, let's wait for the conversions. 
Just like Lewis Carroll said — If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there. 
MAKE A STRATEGY DECK!
‍I would personally recommend creating a universal template that you will use for every campaign. It may take a while to do it, but in the long run, this is what saves you a lot of time. 
Think of the plan as choosing & paving the way before you start walking it.
Do not overcomplicate it. The plan should fit YOUR needs.
This is the base of what an effective campaign plan should have:

 Campaign goals

This is where you decide what you want to achieve with the campaign you are launching. You can choose from awareness, conversions, lead generation, etc. 

Social Media Platforms

Decide where your desired target audience is, or which platform is most budget-friendly if your pocket is tight. Is it Facebook, LinkedIn…maybe e-mail?

Detailed Target Audiences

Now that you chose the perfect platform for your campaign, you can really get into detail with the targeting based on the options the platform offers & get your most suitable audience.

KPIs 

How will you know when you have achieved your goal? Once you have the objective & the platform you need to determine what will indicate progress and success, so you can successfully track & measure it. 

Messages & Visuals 

Your campaign advertising copies & visuals should contain strategic messaging that has a defined purpose and is designed to attract your target audience and prompt them to action that you chose as your objective.

Budget 

If you plan your budget carefully & if you have a bit of experience, even the tightest budget can make a great impact. 
There are plenty of free budget planning templates available online that can help you organize & effectively manage your budget across your campaign.

BE READY FOR THE ROLLERCOASTER: OPTIMIZE, ADJUST, REVIEW

Once the campaign goes live, after some time you can witness the fruits of your labor & this is honestly the most challenging & exciting part. 
But don’t be fooled, this is not yet the part where you count your profit from the campaign.

THIS IS WHERE YOU DO WHAT IS CALLED MARKETING CAMPAIGN ANALYSIS!

And why do we love it, when it's called analysis?
BECAUSE THIS WILL HELP YOU MAKE MORE PROFIT, TEACH YOU HOW TO DODGE THE MISTAKES NEXT TIME, OR SIMPLY IMPROVE YOUR FUTURE OR CURRENT CAMPAIGNS, either way, keep in mind that this is how you scale! 

Remember the KPIs we set?
Well, now they come into play. 

You can easily evaluate & measure the marketing campaign performance & fix what needs to be fixed. This is how you discover whether your visuals are good enough, whether you really have the right audience, maybe you’ll find out that you need to change the demographics, who knows.
What I want to say is that you can see everything just in time, so you don’t have to waste a ton of money just to see your mistakes. 
You have great marketing campaign analysis templates & tools on HubSpot that can help you if you are a beginner.
Once you analyze everything you go and improve, change & fix, then BAAAM there you have your new winning campaign!
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As you can tell by now the secret to creating successful marketing campaigns over & over is building a marketing campaign planning process mainly relying on the deduction principle in each of the steps.
Just keep in mind this conclusion when you put all of this into practice, I promise that it will come in handy. 

So, when it’s your next planned campaign?

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