Our Top 10 Tips for a Successful Marketing Campaign

Let’s look at each element of a successful marketing campaign in a cohesive order. You can use this as the basis of all your campaigns to make sure that you are giving each element the attention that it needs and at the right time.

1. Set Goals

From the outset you need to establish what your campaign is to achieve. Is it X number of clients, X number of product sales, brand awareness, lead generation or something else?

To do this most effectively you will want to understand your products and services in more detail. The margins you make from each, your bestsellers, the low hanging fruit, which types of customers generally buy each.

Which brings us to...

2. Identify your target audience

If you’ve completed step one you will already have a clearer understanding of who to target with each campaign. Now you need to solidify your audience.

Again, detail is key. You need to know the key facts about your buyer persona (target audience) and where they are.

About:

• Age
• Gender
• Fears, frustrations, hopes, dreams
• Job title, industry, income, net worth
• Style, personality, lifestyle, beliefs etc.

Where:

• How they spend their time and where – online and offline

Note: even in a B2B world, you need to know the answers to these about the individual(s) within the businesses that you’re selling to. People still buy on emotion as well as rationality for their business.

The purpose of identifying your target market in detail is so that you know how to communicate your offering to them and the right marketing channels to focus on.

3. Market Research

Continue your due diligence by researching your competitors and the competing offers that they’re promoting. If you find that a direct competitor is running a similar campaign to the one you’re planning, how could you entice them towards your offers instead? How do you add more value through your product/service?

4. Create your key messaging

Focus each campaign on one key thing – an offer, a message, a service. Don’t complicate your messaging and dilute your campaign’s impact by focusing on too many things.

Make sure your marketing campaign is consistent with your brand and message in general. Should you be in a place where you have created a lot of brand equity this will only strengthen the impact of your message.

Always remember too that people have short attention spans when it comes to engaging with your marketing, you need to grab their attention right away with the most powerful part of your message.

If your campaign involves email marketing, intrigue readers with your subject line. If it’s a landing page, then your title and copy to persuade people to click through to your page need to achieve the same level of curiosity or emotion to move your potential customer along the buying journey.

Keep the core message clear and have a separate call to action. What do you want the customer to do next? Buy? Sign up? Register for your site or download your app? Tell them what to do and how to do it. Don’t miss this step.

Finally, your messaging needs to be personal. Speak directly to your individual audience members not to them as a collective. Make the messaging specific to your niche in the same way, address their specific problems and how you solve them. All this adds to the impact, and the results.

5. Pay attention to the customer journey

Another aspect that you need to remove complication from. Ask yourself how you can remove friction to make it easier for your customer to buy from you. Consider your buyer personas that you created earlier, how would they prefer to communicate with you? Give them the option to do what’s best for them, not what’s best for you.

6. Get every aspect ready to go ahead of time

Consider what you need. Ad creative, an email marketing platform, data, a landing page, or even a new e-commerce mechanism or booking platform? Get everything in place ahead of time, it will help everything run smoothly and get you ready to handle all those important enquiries when you do send your email campaign or hit publish on your ads.

7. Get your data

All great marketing strategies blend inbound and outbound communications to reach the maximum possible audience within the target market. Whilst marketing channels like Google and Facebook ads can generate valuable enquiries, don’t neglect email marketing or direct mail that can get you in front of the right audience in a different, more direct way.

Not all potential customers use every platform so you can’t expect the reach of your digital ads to attract the number of enquiries you need on their own, sometimes you need to proactively get in front of your audience via tried and tested methods, such as email marketing and direct mail.

At I-4business we can provide you with all the data you need to give you access to the people you need to reach. The first step that kickstarts all successful email marketing and direct mail campaigns is securing compliant, legal, and effective data, which we offer. You can try us out for free, sign up for a free trial now, or you can find out more about our data service here.

8. Test to find out what works - and what doesn't

It’s not always possible to track the performance of everything that you do in marketing. Such as quantifying how many people see your signage and subsequently call you.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

John Wanamaker

This quote isn’t as true today as it was in Wanamaker’s day with all the digital marketing tools we now have, but you still can’t see every touchpoint. The other thing to bear in mind with marketing is that performance data shows you the past, it’s not always a representation of the future so don’t avoid using your intuition and your knowledge of human behaviour – particularly those that match your buyer persona – to try different approaches.

Try things, A/B test, change the creative across multiple aspects of your campaign rather than hoping one piece of content works before trying something different. Spread your bets and pay attention to the results.

Use the data that you can see. Then, once you know what works, go all in on that. A mistake a lot of marketers make is trying to improve the performance of low performing channels and then neglecting the best performing ones because they are already doing well. That’s the wrong way to do it. Yes, try and improve under performing channels but pay more attention to what’s working.

9. Refine, adjust, focus

Use everything you track to review, refine, and adjust your campaigns, and your offering. Keep your efforts focused on the key message and the channels that are driving results. Keep going through this refine, adjust, focus process as you go.

10. Follow up in a timely way

As you can see, you can spend a lot of thought, time, and money on creating an effective marketing campaign so make sure that you treat all enquiries as professionally and expertly as you can, in a timely manner. The quicker you can follow up, the warmer the lead.

Don’t just follow up once either, be persistent when required to secure those sales that you want. Sometimes you may need to follow up with a prospect 8-10 times before they commit to a purchase depending on your product/service and sales cycle. Don’t quit on any lead too soon, make sure you get what you deserve from the effort you put into your marketing.