What’s the one thing common to all great brands? That’s right, great marketing. You may have a great product with irresistible features but to get customers to consider buying your brand, you would also need an effective marketing campaign. Without it, everything else is academic.
Unlike several other facets of business, marketing might seem easy when seen from the outside. Some may even attribute its success to timing or luck. But the truth is that for any marketing outreach to be successful, you need to follow a series of marketing campaign planning steps.
No matter what category you are in, whether you’re launching a product or a new business, these steps will show you how to plan a marketing campaign that resonates with consumers.
7 steps to writing an effective marketing campaign plan
- Know your goals
Marketing campaign planning starts with goal setting. What do you expect your marketing to achieve? Is it to raise brand awareness or increase customer retention? Do you want to generate more leads or establish your authority in your domain?
It helps to be specific about your goals. For e.g., your goal could be to increase the number of your website visitors by 40 percent. This makes it easier to track later.
- Identify your target audience
Who’re you trying to reach with your marketing campaign? Here again, you should be specific. Generic descriptions will make it vague and reduce the effectiveness of your campaign. If you try to target everyone, you’ll end up reaching no one.
For e.g., ’housewives’ is too broad a category. What’s their educational qualification? Where do they live? Have they bought from you before? What are their likes and dislikes? These will help you create relevant content.
- Generate ideas
The next step in marketing campaign planning is to come up with ideas. These have to be interesting, engaging, and importantly, add value to your user. Heycollab makes collaboration easy by organizing discussions and showing everything in one place.
You can extend ideas from any successful campaigns you may have rolled out in the past or you can look at your competitors for inspiration. You need not be restrained by category codes. Some of the most memorable and effective ideas are unlike anything in their industries.
- Select your channels
Now that you have generated ideas, it’s time to choose the channels. This is how your audience will discover your marketing campaign. You may choose a mix of several channels, including, email marketing, conventional ads, banner ads, social media marketing, influencer marketing, etc.
Remember that the channels you choose should be the ones your target audience will be more active on. If you’re unsure about which channels to select, you can look at the platforms your competitors use.
- Develop a timeline
For marketing task management, it’s crucial to set a timeline for your campaign. You should have a clear idea about when you plan to launch it and how frequently you’ll promote it. Once you have your launch date, you can work backward and create a calendar for your team.
Scheduling a campaign, especially in a remote and hybrid world can be challenging. That’s why Heycollab allows you to easily assign owners, organize with labels, set due dates, and track your team’s time. By giving visibility, the platform empowers managers to track projects.
- Create a call to action
From content management to audience analysis, all aspects of a marketing campaign should be driven toward a particular call to action. This is the primary reason why you’re creating the campaign. The more clarity you have on your ‘desired action,’ the more effective your marketing campaign will be.
Do you want your customers to sign up for your email marketing? Do you want existing clients to refer someone else? No matter what it is, the action should be easy for the consumer to take and for you to track.
- Track the right metrics
Based on your campaign objectives and call to action, you can select the key metrics that you would want to track. This is important to understand the performance of your marketing efforts. It will also make it easy to make the necessary changes like adding or removing a channel or changing the budget.
Check out our article detailing the marketing metrics to track here!
In short
In a highly competitive world, your marketing campaign will decide the future of your business. If done well, it can lead to more customers, higher prices for your product, greater retention, and business growth.