What is a marketing campaign?
A marketing campaign is a focused and coordinated series of marketing activities and efforts that are designed to achieve specific goals and objectives within a defined timeframe. These campaigns are typically centered around a particular product, service, or brand and are strategically planned to target a specific audience or market segment. Marketing campaigns can encompass a wide range of activities and channels, including advertising, content marketing, social media, email marketing, public relations, events, and more.
Marketing campaigns should be relevant (target audience), authentic (be true to your product and the value it provides), engaging (capture the target audience attention), and measurable (have a goal for the campaign and measure the KPIs relevant to that goal to track the path to success ).
9 steps to a successful marketing campaign
- Identify the objectives for your marketing campaign
- Ascertain the budget for the campaign
- Identify the target audience
- Identify how you will measure success
- Identify the timeline for your marketing campaign
- Identify the channels for your marketing campaign
- Execute your campaign
- Monitor and analyze your marketing campaign
- Post campaign analysis
In this blog I will cover each step in more detail.
Identify the objectives for your marketing campaign
What business goal do you want the marketing campaign to achieve? That should be the first question you want to answer when ideating a marketing campaign. Objectives for a marketing campaign can be:
- Lead Generation
- Creating awareness for a new product or key updates to a product
- Capturing customer feedback and testimonials
- Generate revenue
- Improve customer retention
- Increase brand awareness
For example, a business goal for a campaign could be to generate 500 Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) in 1 month or gather 20 customer testimonials in 2 months.
Ascertain the budget for the campaign
A marketing campaign comes with a cost in terms of people, time and money. Identify what resources you have in terms of all three before you start planning a marketing campaign.
The costs could be hiring freelancers to create content, cost of search and social media ads and cost to create landing pages to name a few. Large companies will have the resources in house for these tasks but for smaller companies outsourcing is one way to get these tasks done. Research the costs for the key items you will need. The budget will decide what activities you can afford in your marketing campaign. It will also allow you to set realistic business goals for your marketing campaign. Being realistic will help you run a successful marketing campaign.
Identify the target audience
A marketing campaign needs to be targeted at a specific audience. This should be the people who are most likely to buy your product or service. To find your target audience you need to do some research and brainstorming.
Your campaign goal will also decide which part of the customer journey it is targeting.
It could be targeting the awareness stage, consideration stage or the purchase stage of the marketing funnel. For example, if the goal is lead generation, then you will be targeting the awareness stage.
Identify your target audience based on the demographic and psychographics data collected by running surveys, interviews and social media research. Create an ideal customer persona. Create your messaging and content and identify the marketing channels which will have the most impact on your target audience. Keep the messaging, branding, and quality of your content consistent throughout your campaign to build trust and recognition.
Some of the questions to consider when selecting a target audience are:
- What are the interests of the target audience?
- What are their pain points that your product can solve?
- What channels do they use to get information?
- What messaging will resonate with this audience?
The answers will give you a good picture of your ideal customer profile which is a reflection of your target audience. You don’t want to go overboard when creating an Ideal Customer Profile. You need the key information that will help you create content that is appealing to the target audience and make them act on your CTA’s.
Look at previous campaigns you have run if any and see if you targeted similar audiences and how they responded to those campaigns. These learning can help you guide your current campaign by learning from the successes and mistakes made previously.
Identify how you will measure success
Measuring how your campaign is performing on a regular cadence is critical to understanding if it is working to achieve the business goal you set for the campaign. Measuring campaign metrics allows you to make changes to the campaign if needed and to visualize what is working and what is not.
If the goal for example is to get 500 MQLs (marketing qualified leads), then the KPI to use could be the number of unique people who filled out the form that you had in your CTA on your landing page. To get the people to the landing page and to your CTA you can use email campaigns, social media campaigns, webinars and search ads. The channels you use for the marketing campaign will determine other KPI’s as well which can be measured to determine if your messaging and content is driving potential customers to take action on your CTA.
Use a CRM system to manage and nurture leads. This will help you maintain and build relationships with potential and existing customers. Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho and Monday.com are some examples of CRM software.
The regular cadence you set up for measurement and reporting will allow you to measure the progress of your campaign. This can help keep the team accountable and can also help to motivate the team.
Identify the timeline for your campaign
Create a campaign timeline with key milestones. Use a project management tool to keep track of the different tasks, stakeholders, deliverables and key dates. These tools allow you to visualize, share and remind people of the different tasks, their status and milestones achieved allowing you to manage the campaign efficiently.
Some examples of project management tools that can be used to organize marketing campaigns are Asana, Monday.com and Airtable.
Creating a timeline allows you to:
- Map content deliverables and key dates and assign them to the right people.
- Map content based on the channels being used.
- Setup key milestones such as 30% of budget reached or landing page completed.
- Monitor the progress of tasks and adjust as needed.
Identify the channels for your campaign
The channels you choose should be determined by the target audience for your marketing campaign and the budget and resources allocated to the campaign.
The channels take time and effort in terms of planning, content creation, identifying KPI’s and setup. If your organization is small then you may only have the resources to choose just one social media channel. You can always outsource some of these tasks to freelancers or agencies depending on your budget.
Large organization on the other hand have a lot of resources and budget and specific teams for marketing so their marketing campaigns tend to be more broader utilizing more channels.
Use marketing automation tools to schedule the posting of content on the various channels. Automation is key to successfully scaling a marketing campaign and getting the maximum ROE and ROI. (LIST TOOLS HERE)
You can use the PESO (Paid , Earned, Shared and Owned) model to select your marketing channels.
Execute your campaign
The above steps help you plan and organize your marketing campaign. The execution phase is where the rubber meets the road. You will be posting content on the social media channels you choose, posting blogs on your webpage, conduct email marketing and measuring the analytics along the campaign journey. Based on the business goal set for the campaign you can measure the progress of your marketing campaign towards that goal using the metrics collected. If the goal is lead generation and the KPI is collecting 500 emails in a month using your CTA you can measure weekly the progress towards this goal.
The marketing tools you use will allow you to schedule the posting of the content on a regular basis and the email automation tool will allow you to send personalized emails to the potential customers that have signed up using your CTA.
The marketing campaign can last a week, a few weeks or few months depending on what your business goal is. The time it takes for your marketing campaign planning stage also will depend on this as if the campaign is of short duration, then the planning stage will also be short and vice versa.
Monitor and analyze the campaign
Monitor the analytics from the tools you have setup regularly and generate reports to present to the team. This helps to hold the team accountable as well as motivate the team based on how the campaign is performing. Regular analysis helps to make changes if needed to the campaign. For example A/B testing helps to identify which content is resonating more with the target audience. This helps to achieve the business goals in a timely manner.
You can also check how the campaign budget is being spend and measure the ROI.
Post campaign analysis
Once the campaign is over you should analyze based on the data collected if the business goal was met within the budget and time allocated. You can also analyze what went right and what went wrong and document the learnings to be used for future campaigns.
The learnings can be used to teach new team members how to run a successful campaign and the pitfalls to watch out for. It can also be used when creating your future marketing campaigns.
Tips on scaling a marketing campaign
Scaling a marketing campaign allows you to do the most with the least number of resources. Most small companies are resource constrained so scaling marketing campaigns is critical to the success of their marketing plans. Large companies also need to scale marketing campaigns to realize the maximum ROI on their marketing dollars. Today there are numerous martech tools to help with scaling your marketing campaign.
- Use a marketing automation platform. A marketing automation platform can help you automate many of the tasks involved in running a marketing campaign, such as email marketing, social media marketing, and lead nurturing. This can free up your time so that you can focus on other aspects of your business.
- Invest in content marketing. Content marketing is a long-term strategy that involves creating and distributing valuable content to attract and retain customers. Content marketing can be very scalable, as you can reuse and repurpose your content across different channels.
- Use paid advertising. Paid advertising can be a great way to reach a large audience quickly. However, it’s important to set a budget and track your results carefully to ensure that you’re getting a good return on your investment.
- Build relationships with influencers. Influencers are people who have a large following on social media or other online platforms. By building relationships with influencers, you can get them to promote your products or services to their followers.