Every business desires growth. And marketing techniques forge the most assured path to such growth. Marketing helps capture the attention of potential customers by telling them why your products or services are a good choice. This may seem like a pretty straightforward job for all businesses and marketers. The true story, however, is that most businesses fail at marketing. Why? Because marketing isn’t as easy as it seems. Especially in the modern information age. It isn’t just about putting up advertisements and trying to force sell. It is an extensive series of actions taken by a business/brand to promote itself which is why an effective marketing campaign is difficult. And the only way to achieve that in the competitive landscape is by listening to your customers.
7 Steps to Build an Effective Marketing Campaign
Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you stay away from failed marketing campaigns.
1. Plan your campaign
For a campaign to succeed, it is important to plan it well. Planning your campaign should be the first step towards success. Get a clear picture of your organizational goals. Chalk out how you want to go about setting up and implementing the target. Also, analyze if it is the right time to launch the campaign and whether your business is ready to take the leap. Market research and consumer insights mapping are a must to pick the ideal timing and to understand public sentiment.
2. Set Campaign Goals
In the previous step, we asked you to map out your organizational goals. The importance of that step will become clear in this step. Say your brand’s goal is to be among the top fabric suppliers in the market, your short-term goal should be to have a good market share. Align your campaign goals to this goal.
It is impossible to set up a marketing campaign without a fixed set of goals. So, before you create a campaign, make sure you have your business goals ready. Ideally, business goals should follow S.M.A.R.T. criteria. S.M.A.R.T. goals stand for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Goals in line with the S.M.A.R.T. criteria are easily quantifiable and attainable, ensuring better success rates.
3. Fix your Budget
Once you have your marketing goals ready, you should consider the budget that you want to allocate for the campaign. Most businesses have a fixed budget for their marketing and this should cover all marketing costs. You cannot spend your entire budget on one campaign alone. That is why you must fix a budget for each activity. Once you have set up a budget, your marketing team can plan the campaign with the resources available.
4. Decide Campaign Details
With your goals and budget set, it is time to chalk out the campaign details. For this, you can use simple resources like Excel sheets, Google Docs, Google Calendar to map details like the date of a campaign or the content.
But don’t limit yourself to these. For a robust campaign, bring in automation tools, channel management tools, which will help you read your audience. When you know your audience you are in a better position to create successful campaigns. Research your audience well and find out about their sentiment, interests, etc. Big brands like Pepsi and Dove have faced public backlash for putting forth content that was perceived as insensitive. All these will save time and effort and give you better control of your campaign.
5. Plan Campaign Distribution
For the best results, you must decide the media you want to target with your campaign. It makes sense to cover media that are important for your business. For example, if you are a beauty and personal care brand with very few potential customers on Pinterest, you can simply avoid targeting the medium. You can, instead, focus on Instagram where the majority of your audience is. This will ensure better success results for your marketing campaign.
Again, track and monitor your brand keywords across all platforms to determine the platform that works the best for you. Social intelligence tools like Auris can help you dive deeper into the data and track the impact your brand is making on each platform individually.
6. Take Care of the Execution
The next step would be the execution of the campaign. However, before you launch your campaign, there are a few things to take care of. These would include keyword research, content creation, CTA choices, email list building, etc. These actions are important for all marketing campaigns and should be taken care of by expert marketers.
Automation tools can help you track trending keywords and gather potential leads from social media. Making use of smart tools can make each campaign efficient in terms of success measures and time-consumption.
7. Monitor the Campaign
Executing a campaign isn’t the end of it. For the success of a campaign, it must be monitored at every step. This will give you an idea of how the campaign is faring. If the results aren’t as good as expected, you can modify the campaign to achieve the goals that you have set. Campaign monitoring is possible with metrics like bounce rate, scroll depth, conversion rate, CPC, CTA, CTR, etc.
Use Social Listening for your Marketing Campaign
Every business owner needs a marketing solution that provides the best ROI. The best ROI can be derived if most of your leads convert. And running a marketing campaign without any concern for your leads isn’t going to help. Your leads should be able to relate to what is being promoted. This is why it is so crucial that you study your target audience well.
Social listening tools track real-time consumer data which is then analyzed for you. Industry and brand-specific reports help you understand the exact pain points and expectations of your customers. When you deliver on these you can build a strong relationship.
Social listening allows you to monitor more than social media metrics like comments, shares and follows. It’s a one-stop solution for your PR campaigns, online reputation management, lead generation, and a lot more. And this 360-degree effectiveness in building effective marketing campaigns is what makes it a tool worth investing in.