5 Steps for Planning any Marketing Campaign

In a previous post, I talked about How To Create Your 2008 Business and Marketing Plan. In this post, I want to break that down a bit further and discuss marketing campaigns.

What is a Marketing Campaign?

A marketing campaign is a series of steps designed to achieve a specific result. Think of it as the big picture that includes detailed, step-by-step guidelines for one particular goal you want to achieve. Marketing campaigns are broken into two parts:

1. Strategy - This is planning step where you determine target audience, your message, what marketing tactics you’ll use, and how you’ll measure results.
2. Execution - This is the action step where you follow through on your plan.

Planning Your Marketing Campaign Strategy

Planning a marketing campaign is a lot like planning a vacation. You can’t move forward with the details of booking your flight and hotel or creating a basic itinerary until you know if you’ll be in Orlando or Paris. The same is true for your marketing campaign. You can’t determine what you should say, how you should design your ads, and which publications to advertise in until you commit to working with a particular target audience and define specific campaign goals around that target audience. Here are the 5 essential steps to any marketing campaign:

1. Determine Your Target Audience - I’ve talked in great detail in previous posts about the importance of choosing a target audience and how to narrow your focus.
   
   
2. Set Campaign Goals - What should your marketing campaign accomplish? These should be S.M.A.R.T. goals rather than simply “getting more clients” or “making more money”.
   
   
3. Determine Your Marketing Message - Your marketing message must address the needs, concerns, and motivations of your target audience while describing how you are different from others (your unique selling proposition).
   
   
4. Determine Your Action Steps - How will you reach your target audience? I suggest you focus on one thing here until you figure out what works and what doesn’t. For instance, if you decide to run an advertising campaign, stick with it until you know what headlines, offers, design, and publications get the best results.
   
   
5. Determine How You’ll Measure Results - Build in ways to keep track of which inquiries come from which promotional methods. For instance, RingCentral.com makes it easy to set up unique 800 numbers. If you are running two ads, give them unique 800 numbers so you know which inquiries come from which ads. You might also tell prospects to ask for a particular person (ask for Jane in one ad or ask for Steve in another) when they call. Or if you offer a free report, change the title in each of the ads so when prospects ask you for it, you know how they found you.

Executing Your Marketing Campaign Strategy

It’s easy to get so caught up in the planning stages of your marketing campaign that you never commit to action. You’ve probably heard the phrase “paralysis by analysis” which refers to getting so caught up with all the factors involved in creating the master plan that you never feel confident moving forward.

The truth is that no matter how long you brainstorm about every conceivable possibility that might happen, something won’t go according to plan when you finally do execute. Marketing is a learning process not a one time deal and the only way to know for sure whether something will work or not is to test different marketing messages, different publications, different titles, and so forth.

It’s actually pretty scientific. Just as scientists design models and frameworks for understanding the world and then create real world tests to see if their models hold up, you do the same thing with your marketing campaigns. You identify all the different variables in the equations (your target audience, your marketing message, your design, your title, your offer, etc) then start testing to see which variations work the best.

On a side note, I just reviewed Mike Moran’s Do It Wrong Quickly, which addresses these principles extremely well - and will get you up to speed on internet marketing in the Web 2.0 world

PS - Happy New Year!