7 Steps to Launch a Successful Marketing Campaign

Modern day markets have different choices when it comes to promoting or advertising products or services. Besides the conventional marketing methods like print adverts and direct marketing, web-based marketing like the use of emails, social media and mobile gadgets have become increasingly popular.

Overtime, businesses have realized that what works in conventional marketing methods does not necessarily work with web-based methods. Though there is no single way of creating a marketing campaign that is highly effective, there are specific steps that can help businesses increase their chances of succeeding in their marketing efforts. Ideally, a marketing campaign should be designed to achieve a certain goal over a specified period of time.

The campaign could have various pieces depending on what a business hopes to achieve. Here are important steps that businesses can use to launch a successful product or service promotion campaign:

Determine your marketing goal

When crafting a marketing campaign, the first thing you need to do is to set a clear, concise goal. You can make the goal as simple as possible but ensure that it is specific so you know when you achieve it. A simple and concise marketing campaign could be something like increase revenue sales for the month of February by 10%. Making the goal specific also increases your chances of achieving it and helps you focus your strategies so you save time.

Understand your target audience

Identify and define your target audience by demographics like age and gender and psychographics like interests, attitudes and behavior. Some important questions to ask at this stage include what motivates your audience and what their preferred channels of communication are. You may also want to know what magazines or newspapers they read and what they read or talk about. Getting responses to these questions will increase your understanding of the audience you want target. It will also help you identify the most effective mode of communication and inform your key messaging.

Develop a consistent look

This has to do with ensuring that you have a consistent visual identity, whether you are using print or online media channels. Though most people view their business logo as the only visual identity they need, it goes beyond that to include the overall design, style, colors, fonts and graphics. Basically, all your marketing campaign materials should be coherent and easy for people to visually link them to your business.

Sync your marketing efforts or teams

If you are running a business with a huge working capital to support various aspects of a marketing campaign, you might end up with multiple teams working on separate projects that feed into the campaign. This makes it necessary to coordinate team efforts through team meetings so that all players read from the same page. This is critical in ensuring that your campaign generates a consistent message while maintaining high brand standards throughout the different campaign aspects. In the event that you work with different agencies to run different campaign aspects, it is helpful to have an in-house person coordinate the work so you are sure that your business brand remains consistent.

Develop marketing content

Think about the message you want to pass to your target audience and develop content that is both consistent and easy to adapt or re-purpose for different media channels. This is important because ordinarily it may take over five impressions before a person can recognize a particular marketing message or brand. You may want to follow the three C in marketing which means clear communication that is free of confusing phrases or words, a compelling message that is interesting to the receiver and a consistency in the media used to share the message. All aspects of your promotion should focus on increasing traffic to your target. If you are running a web-based campaign, you need to generate links that lead your customers to the product or service that you are offering. 

Identify a channel of communication

Besides finding out what communication channels your customers flock, you also need to get an idea of what works well with those channels and what doesn’t. Think broadly on how those channels would enable you to reach your business goals and be ruthless when picking or rejecting a communication channel. When identifying channels to use in passing your message to your audience, it helps to focus on those that are highly effective rather than trying to use all channels available at the same time.  

Track the marketing campaign

Once your campaign starts rolling, you need to find a way to track progress against your set goals. By establishing a mechanism of gathering useful information helps you understand how the campaign is reaching your intended audience and measure how results are being achieved.