Piloting a Successful Marketing Campaign

A marketing campaign is a coordinated series of tactics used to promote a product or service. It’s a path that you pave for your target customer to follow so they can find you. To produce a highly successful marketing campaign, you need a focused strategy and deliberate execution. This seems like common sense, but without clear direction, the daunting, general urgency to achieve can cloud judgment—and that anxiety can be quite counterproductive to your goals. It’s important to take a beat and assess the situation.

No matter how big or small your company is, and whether you sell million-dollar machines or five-dollar screwdrivers, you must follow a process in order to create successful marketing campaigns. Otherwise, your campaign will be as effective as if you payed people to buy from you.

When our agency meets with any new client for the first time, we ask all sorts of questions to learn as much about their business as we can. The most valuable answers usually come from questions that begin with this word: “Why?” You’d be amazed at how quickly you can get an “aha” moment by simply asking this question. Often, our clients haven’t thought to ask why they want something or why they’ve been doing things a certain way. It’s not because our clients aren’t insightful or sophisticated. It’s because they are so focused on the minutia of the current situation that the whys get lost in the sauce. Remembering to take a step back to ask that simple question will give you a competitive edge in each phase of your marketing campaign.

Starting Strong

Why Are We Doing This?

Start your brainstorming sessions with this question: Why create a marketing campaign, anyway? Think beyond a specific marketing tactic or creative piece (e.g. brochure, email, direct mail, trade show booth) and define what you are trying to accomplish in the grand scheme of things. Your motivation might be to raise general awareness of your brand, or it might be to make money from the sales of your cool new product. Look at the campaign’s greater organizational purpose. You need to spend some time strolling through the forest before you start chopping down trees. 

What Are We Trying to Achieve?

Now that you know the big picture, let’s get into some details. What action do you want people to take? For your campaign, your goal could be to measure Facebook likes, form submissions on your website, phone consultations, sales, and so on. Choose leading and lagging key performance indicators that are specific, measurable, and attainable according to what you want. For example, when we send out our email campaigns to our contacts, our goal is to get at least 20% of them to click (a lagging indicator). Setting clear goals with measurable results has the dual impact of planning your campaign and evaluating it.

Who Do We Target?

Once you know your purpose and your key performance indicators (KPIs), you need to identify your targeted audience. This can include prospects, current customers, or a combination of both; likely, the prospects you want to get are similar to the customers you already have. Using a customer relationship management database (we use HubSpot), you can hone in on the specific group that you want to reach with this campaign.

When you’re selecting your target audience, and when you’re creating the campaign’s content, it is vital to know the target in depth so that you can make informed choices about what kind of content—relevant to your field—they would engage with. You should strongly consider composing buyer personas, which are detailed but generalized representations of the types of customers you serve, and creating materials targeted to each of them. Once you’ve determined who your target is (their preferences, concerns, hobbies, and any other important detail you can find), you’ll have a better idea of how to reach them.

How Will We Get to Them?

Your goal, audience, offer, and industry will help you to determine what vehicles you use to deliver your message. The campaign should have multiple touchpoints to ensure that your target doesn’t miss your message. For example, if you are sending an email out to your prospects, how will you follow up? Maybe you incorporate a direct mail piece just to those in your target group who didn’t open your initial email. And online retargeting ads can have a better chance at converting those people who clicked through the email but didn’t answer your call to action.

One company I worked with launched a new product by purchasing all of the ad space at a single train station. The station was strategically located where most of the target audience would jump on, jump off, transfer to bus or drive through on their daily commute. Along with grabbing the attention of their target audience, their campaign garnered publicity for the brand beyond belief when reporters broadcasted the clever idea on national television. So don’t be afraid to innovate.

Building the Campaign

What Do They Want?

Time for the big kahuna. If you have done adequate research and know your customers, it shouldn’t be difficult to come up with a call-to-action that attracts them and compels them to complete the desired action. Identify a need of theirs and come up with a solution they would find helpful.

For example, our clients, who are mostly small industrial brands, tend to reach out to us for help with website design. To supplement our services, we offer a free ebook on exactly that topic to educate them on website design and also to promote our services. Or if you work in sales, you might offer a spreadsheet template for organizing your client’s contacts. And lawyers often offer 30-minute consultations to prospects to hear their concerns and give them essential information. Always look at a situation from your customer’s perspective. If you can throw them a bone, especially something helpful, free, and very relevant, they’re more likely to appreciate you and pursue your business.

The Creative

This is the meat of your campaign. Your in-house creative team or your agency has to make sure that all parts of your campaign grab the attention of your audience and ultimately drive them to your desired action.

The first step in the creative process is to develop the overall concept of the piece or pieces that will make up your campaign. Your concept should support your goal, remain on brand, and elicit the desired response. Great design will catch your target’s eye, guide them through the piece, and reinforce the message.

Once your company agrees on the concept, you’ll need your copy (the headlines, sub-heads, body text—all the components of the writing). A coworker in my past life once told me, “Every single word on the page should have a purpose. If you can do without it, it shouldn’t be there.” No matter what, copy has to do more than fit in with the overall campaign. Copy has to support it and enhance it—never work against it. Remember, your call-to-action is the most important component to your campaign, and the copy conveys the details of the offer itself.

Making It Happen 

We’re All in This Together

You’ve got a beautiful landing page, trade show booth, mailer, brochure… you should be proud of your work. But that’s just the beginning of the campaign. Now you have to deliver on what you promised. Is your team ready? Do they even know about the campaign and its goal?

Everyone, and I mean everyone—not just the key decision-makers—should know about the campaign in order to support it and seal the deal with your target. In some situations, you can simply inform your team with an email including a few images and descriptions for the campaign’s essentials. In other situations, you would be wise to invest in a presentation that details the campaign in depth. It’s up to you, but I highly advise you to be thorough. 

Failing to inform your team will cause it to miss opportunities. Fast food companies spend millions on television, print, radio ads, and in-store signage “this month only” campaigns. Yet I can think of many instances when the point-of-sale store clerks didn’t even know about the campaign when I walked in. The staff thought I was pulling one over on them when I mentioned it. Well, the next week the store was decorated from head to tail with signage, and there was a recorded message in the drive through promoting the campaign. Informing the whole team eliminates communication gaps between your company and your customer. Additionally, it brings everyone together under the common goal.

Where it is appropriate, inform your team of the KPIs of your campaign and get their help to track the campaign’s performance. If you do that, not only will your team members have the campaign at the forefront of their minds, but they’ll also all be able to contribute valuable analysis and suggestions directly from each of your campaign’s touchpoints. You should measure your performance throughout the campaign to check that you are on target to meet your goals.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line for all marketing campaigns is to earn more business. Whether it’s YouTube views, leads for your sales team, or money in the till, a successful campaign can sustain and grow your company. Empower your campaign by understanding its purpose and then plotting out the details. You’ll spend less time rearranging the Titanic’s deck chairs and more time not crashing into icebergs. Kate Winslet (and your boss) will thank you.