Highlight Your Company/Brand Goals
When you start planning a marketing campaign, you first need to establish a SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic & Timely) approach that helps you determine your goal and ultimately provides fruitful results.
The goal of a company can be anything, e.g., gaining 20 more clients or making x number of sales. The goal can focus and be centered around anything depending upon your ideas and mission but setting it up beforehand gives you a criterion of measuring your marketing progress accordingly.
Budget Planning
Budget planning is one of the most essential steps that should be taken initially as it determines your initial spending on the market campaign process and helps you in tracking your overall expenditure.
Research the Market
Starting to plan for your marketing campaign without research work is never a good idea. No matter how experienced a marketing team you hire, there is always more to learn due to the advancement. Research feeds your agenda in providing insight into things you might not have considered before, e.g., audience, strategies, resources, etc.
Your team needs to sit down, plan and research on following:
- Description of your Product/Services and emphasize your key products (pricing, services, distribution, etc.)
- Developing a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
- Emphasize, “Who you are?”, “Your mission, vision, and value”, and many more.
- Knowing your competitors
Once you collect all the information needed, make sure to organize it. While researching following are a few factors you must consider:
- Industry benchmark
- Market dynamics
- Potential vendors
Market Personas
Identifying your target personas
To create a good marketing strategy keeping in mind the interest of the audience is highly important. In this step, you make sure you know what your target audience is? What type of marketing strategy might work on them, to get attracted towards your product? What are the main marketing channels that they prefer to search about their interest? How do they want the information to be delivered to them? All of these questions and many more should be considered and you need to make sure you know how to effectively provide solutions to them.
Creating market personas
- Information related to “Target Audience”
age, gender, lifestyle, earning, likes/dislikes, etc. In many cases, you get disappointing marketing results due to the wrong analysis of your target audience. To avoid that, considering your budget, you can prepare online customer surveys, quizzes, or questionnaires for the audience and keep a track of the response through audience listing tools. This will eventually help you find your real audience.
To prepare your Target Personas, you can download templates online. These templates usually include the following information to be filled:
- Name
- Job title
- Gender
- Education
- Age
- Salary
- Company size
- Title/ details of the role
- Location
- Pain points – problems your customers are currently facing and how they need your product.
- Goals
- What types of content/promotion do they like/dislike?
- Fears/motivations
- Objections
Here’s a sample marketing persona template for you.
Accentuate Your Marketing Goals
Once you have determined your audience and completed the research, your next step should be to define your clear campaigning goals. To prepare a strategic marketing plan you need to have a goal, according to which you will be carrying out the campaign and keep track. Not every marketing campaign spreads awareness of a product, you might have a goal of increasing your sales or your focus might be on growth. Hence, having a set target is important! Based on your goals, you can prepare and keep a track of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Since you already have a budget in mind for your campaign, you can tie many of your goals to a monetary value. Finally, after the above step, you can work on choosing the content type according to your audience’s preference.
Creating content
Customers are not bound to a single channel, according to an integrated marketing effort. Today’s consumers are bombarded with brands and ads wherever they go, from the bus to their favorite websites to their email. To make your business stand out to customers, you must design campaigns that exist on the channels that they use. Simultaneously, the campaigns must have comparable characteristics to stand out in the eyes of buyers.
Customers will know your brand regardless of where they see it when your campaign is completely integrated. This will assist them to remember what you said, kicking off your relationship with them.
Campaign Promotions
You need to choose wisely when carrying out promotional activities for campaigns. There is no need of spending your time and cost on a platform that won’t favor your business. Hence, prepare a list of platforms that will only add value to your targets effectively.
Performance Analysis
There are a lot of ways you can analyze your campaign progress and performance. The best guidance is the “Google Analytics Goal Guide”. It helps you in measuring performance and tracking the KPIs.
Whatever method you choose, make sure it is providing you with extensive information needed for your company to decide whether to continue with the same plan or if there are any amendments required for betterment in the future
