If you want to know how to create a successful marketing campaign, keep reading!
here’s nothing worse than unmet expectations. When you put all of your energy into developing a product or perfecting a craft, you want to see your efforts succeed. Unfortunately for entrepreneurs, it’s never that easy. There is no direct, linear path to success. However, there are plenty of things we can do to help us out along the way.
One of those things is making sure we consistently market ourselves. We live in a fast paced world, where information is coming at us constantly 24 hrs a day. If we don’t take marketing seriously, it’s going to be hard to stand out, grow and ultimately meet our goals.
I have personally seen businesses transform when they begin to tune in to their marketing plan and strategy. You may cringe at the idea of marketing because feels icky and “salesy”, but how else will people know you are here if you don’t tell them? Talk to any successful business owner, and they will likely agree, marketing is baked into the infrastructure of their success.
RELATED: How To Create a Killer Marketing Plan
We’ve talked about the importance of a marketing plan and strategy, and I strongly suggest that you work those out before you begin developing a marketing campaign. But when you’re ready, a marketing campaign is a must to drive interest and generate more revenue.
What Is A Marketing Campaign?
You may think a marketing campaign sounds scary or that it’s reserved for “more established” brands, but honestly, it doesn’t have to be. A marketing campaign is nothing more than an individual, focused approach to advertising. Maybe you have a flagship product you want to draw more attention to, or a new service you just started providing. A marketing campaign allows you to focus the attention to a specific part of your business.
So in other worse, it’s the “action” part of your marketing strategy and plan. A boiled down version of your overall marketing objectives. You’ll be looking to achieve a specific goal in mind when you are developing a marketing campaign.
Why Do You Need a Marketing Campaign?
You will be hard pressed to find a successful company or brand that hasn’t produced a marketing campaign. It’s truly the best way to direct attention to a specific part of your business. What’s more, a targeted marketing campaign can give you insight into what is working and what isn’t.
How To Create A Successful Marketing Campaign
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Identify Your Goals
As I mentioned before, a marketing campaign directs focus to a specific part of your business. Because it’s so specific, you’ll need to be clear on what your goals are. Do you want to generate more sales of a particular product? Are you trying to get more clients for a particular service? You need to know exactly what your end game is so you can make the blueprint to match.
RELATED: A Step-By-Step Guide To a Killer Marketing Strategy
Identify Your Target Audience
If you’ve been here for awhile, you may be thinking I already did this when I developed my marketing strategy. And you wouldn’t be wrong.
However, when you are working on a marketing campaign everything is worked to a finer detail. The general target audience that you identified when you made your marketing strategy, may not apply in this case. For example, you may make hair care products for African American Women ages 29-40. But if you have a specific product that’s for low porosity hair that you are developing a marketing campaign for, that general information may not cut it. It’s always smart to design a campaign that speaks to a specific audience. So now you’re looking for African American Women ages 29-40 with low porosity hair (can you tell I’ve been watching alot of youtube videos?) but maybe you want to niche that even more. Are we looking for career oriented women on the go? Are we looking for moms? Women who workout alot? Each of those concepts will produce a very different marketing campaign.
Decide What Platforms Are Best For Your Message
To piggy back off of your target audience, you’ll need to decide what platform is best to share the message you want to convey. Where would your target audience be? There’s a good chance they will be on social media, so you’ll want to make sure a branch of your marketing campaign is there. Some messages are going to be more powerful in video, or photos, or text, but in truth a good marketing campaign will likely use all of these.
I would be remiss not to mention the power of video. It’s a tool I would strongly suggest you consider. It’s more involved yes, but it’s absolutely worth it. I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve seen overlook video, and as a result, the marketing campaign wasn’t as strong as it could have been. There are many benefits to video marketing, one being that it substantially increases engagement.
What’s more, every year video marketing is seeing upward mobility with no signs of letting up. Just take a look at these statistics:
- By 2021, 82% of all consumer Internet traffic will be coming from videos. (Cisco)
- 54% of consumers say that they want to see videos from brands they support. (Hubspot)
- Youtube has over one billion users, which is almost one-third of the internet (Youtube)
- One-third of online activity is spent watching video. (wordstream)
I honestly wouldn’t put together a marketing campaign without video. But if that isn’t within the current budget, you’ll want to make sure to have strong photos at a minimum. Truth is, the visual aspects of your marketing campaign can make your break it’s success.
Decide What Visuals Will Best Communicate The Message
This is the fun part! Now you can start thinking about the colors , design and copy of your campaign. Depending on your goals, you may want to keep the color palette the same as your brand. However, if your goals are slightly different, then you may want to modify it. You can always brand out your images by including the logo or tagline. It’s all up to you!
This is the stage where you’ll likely want to enlist the help of professionals. A marketing consultant will do the trick, and they will likely have connections to other professionals like graphic designers, photographers and videographers to really bring the idea to life!
Develop A Buyer’s Journey/Sales Funnel
If you really want your marketing campaign to succeed, you’ll need to think about the buyer’s journey. What will it look like as your potential customer/client moves through your system? What experience do you want them to have? Will they start on a landing page? A specific blog post? Through an email campaign? Knowing each step that your customer will go through is a vital component to your marketing campaign.
TIP: Be sure to include a clear call to action! Tell the customer what you’d like them to do! You may think this is self explanatory but it’s not!
Ultimately you want to direct attention to your specific goal, but the lifeblood of that is the customer’s experience.
Continue To Monitor
As with any marketing effort, its crucial to monitor your results. You will not know what is working and what isn’t if you aren’t constantly tuned into the feedback you are receiving. However, try not to get bogged down with the early numbers. Sometimes we launch with the idea in mind that we will see stellar numbers right out of the gate, that isn’t always the case. As with anything that is worth while, it may take some time to really see what the overall trend is. But be sure to monitor your results all along the way, it’s essential.
Marketing Campaigns, Made Easy
I hope you found value in this post as you work on your marketing efforts. Now, I want to turn it over to you.
Have you launched a successful marketing campaign? What advice would you give? Sound Off in the comments below!
Ready to take your marketing to the next level? I’m a creative professional with expertise video, photography and writing. I’d be happy to talk with you! Please reach out to me!
