Hello and thanks.
To put up a good marketing campaign for you business, here are few steps that I recieved when I asked same question.
1) Know how your marketing campaign fits into your
marketing plan.
Ideally, before you plan a marketing campaign, you have a
marketing plan for your business. (If you don't, Writing the Marketing Plan will lead you through the process. ) The marketing plan is your master plan for marketing your small business. It provides the full picture of your marketing
objectives and strategies for interesting your target market in
your products and/or services. The marketing campaign, on the
other hand, is one small piece of your marketing plan, a
marketing action designed to achieve a particular marketing
objective. When you know how your marketing campaign fits into your
overall marketing plan, you know who your target market is and how you might best communicate with them.
2) Set your marketing campaign objective and parameters.
What do you want your marketing campaign to achieve? That's
the marketing campaign objective. You want to be a specific as
possible. Not just, "I want more sales", but how many and of
what product or service? You can think of parameters as the details of the objective.
Time is the most common parameter that needs to be included
as marketing campaigns lose their effectiveness over time.
(Even Tony the Tiger had to be retired eventually.) So a common marketing campaign objective formula is: what will
be achieved + how long will the marketing campaign run? For example: Sales of face beauty marks will increase 50% in
three months.
3) Determine how you will measure success.
What metrics are you going to use? How will you tell if your
marketing campaign has succeeded or not? Obviously, if I have
a marketing campaign objective such as "Sales of face beauty
marks will increase 50% in three months" the metric I'm going
to use to measure the success of my marketing campaign is the
number of sales made over the three month period. But the number of sales may not be an appropriate metric at all if my
marketing objective is to increase the awareness of my brand
or to improve my website's search engine page ranking. For tracking online marketing efforts, you can use Google Analytics. Methods of Tracking Offline Marketing Efforts by Laura Lake, About.com Marketing, explains some common ways to measure
the success of your offline marketing campaign. Don't forget to establish or note a baseline for whatever metric
you've chosen; you'll need it to measure your progress.
4) Set your marketing campaign budget.
How much money you have to spend on your marketing
campaign will greatly affect the marketing strategies you
choose so you need to set the marketing budget first.
Obviously, a Superbowl TV ad is much more costly than an ad
on local television or in a magazine. I advise you not to depend on free advertising and promotion
strategies for your small business. In my opinion, this is one of
the biggest mistakes small business owners make. This is not to
say that all free marketing strategies are bad. But there is
always a cost to marketing, even if the cost is only time, and
your time may be much better spent. Always think first; is this the best/ most effective/ most convincing way to reach my
customer? These ways usually cost money so resign yourself to
spending money on your marketing campaign. You don't
necessarily have to spend a lot, but you do need to spend
some.
5) Choose your marketing strategies to communicate with
the customers.
What communication channels are you going to use? Email? Direct mail? Pay-per-click online advertising? Note that some communications channels are going to be
better suited to your target market than others. For instance,
placing radio ads may be a complete waste of money if your
target market doesn't regularly listen to the radio. Think about
your target market's haunts and habits when you're choosing
channels to reach them. Where do they spend their time? Where are they most likely to see or hear and pay attention
to information about your products and/or services? In a
magazine? On a bus bench? On their iPhone or Blackberry?
So far I've explained how your marketing plan and your
marketing campaign relate, how to set your marketing campaign
objective, how you'll tell if your marketing campaign is a
success, the importance of setting your marketing campaign
budget, and selecting marketing channels and strategies
suitable to your target market (see page one of this article). It's time for the "Just
Do It" part of the marketing campaign.
6) Create a time line/action plan.
Write down what exactly you’re going to do and when in your
marketing campaign. It doesn't have to be elaborate, but writing it down will
greatly increase the chances that you follow through and give
you records to use when you go to evaluate the success of your
marketing campaign. For instance, suppose you are selling bicycle seats designed to
be more comfortable than most. You might come up with a
marketing campaign such as: Now that's about as simple a marketing campaign as you can
have. My point is, they can be simple. Simple is fine if it gets
results. This is also a great example of a marketing campaign that it
would be easy to jazz up. Suppose, for example, that there was a local person who was
going to be in the bike race that was willing to wear a jersey
with my business name and logo on it for the cost of a free
bike seat. Suppose as well that she was willing to be the face of an online
marketing campaign, whether free or for a price, and I could
then set up a Facebook page and Twitter account about her
training for the race (and, of course, promoting my bike
seats). On race day, I could tweet about her progress. See how
easy? And all for less than $2000. You could also get more promotion benefit out of your race
sponsorship by advertising in more places, such as buying
banner ads on bike-related websites, and/or ads in appropriate
ezines and magazines.
7) Do it. Write your ad copy.
Firm up your dates. Place your ads. Search
for and approach someone to be the face of your online
marketing campaign. Whatever actions your marketing campaign
involves, execute; do; activate. Go back to your action plan timeline and check items off,
writing in the date that you complete them. It will keep you
organized and you'll love the feeling.
8) Measure your results.
When the marketing campaign is over, it's time to see how
successful it was. Go back to your marketing objective, measure
what you've chosen to measure to determine the marketing
campaign's success and see how it's done. Suppose that my marketing objective for my bike seats
marketing campaign was to increase my sales of bike seats 25%
over four months. It would be a simple matter after the fact
to compare my May, June, July, August and September sales
figures and do the math.
9) Tweak and repeat as necessary.
Once you've measured the results of your marketing campaign,
you'll be able to make decisions about the marketing strategies
you've used and future marketing campaigns. Suppose that my
bike seat marketing campaign increased bike seat sales 41%. I
would call it wildly successful and decide to repeat it again
next year. Assuming I had the tracking in place to know which marketing
strategy produced which results, I could tweak my marketing
campaign accordingly. If I had the data that showed that only
2% of my increased sales came from my Twitter and Facebook
strategies, I may decide not to bother with that aspect of this
marketing campaign next year. Or I might decide to repeat the whole marketing campaign as designed and see if the
results for these two marketing strategies improve. Of course, my sales results for the months involved may show
no improvement or even a decline, making this marketing
campaign a bust. That happens sometimes, too. I might have to
go back and do some serious revamping or even scrap the whole
bike race sponsorship campaign. But if I've set up my marketing campaign properly and kept
records of what I’ve been doing, at least I have data to make
these kinds of marketing decisions.
The Best Marketing Campaign In a way, any marketing campaign is better than none, because
it means you're directing your small business marketing efforts
rather than just casting blindly here and there. But the best
marketing campaign is the marketing campaign that gets the
results that you want and that takes some planning and a
coordinated effort.
It helped me, try that very helpful.
Cheers
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12/12/2013 12:32 am