Every business owner knows the first step before opening their business is to create a business plan. A business plan gives an overview as to how the business will operate and create revenue. What our web design firm has realized over the years is that most business owners get stumped when creating a marketing campaign. Many small business owners can create a marketing plan, which is the bigger picture as to what their marketing objectives and strategies are, but they don’t know how to make the smaller pieces fit. Essentially, a marketing campaign is the small pieces that will guide your business in achieving these objectives. Our marketing professionals have come into contact with many business owners and after figuring out the root of the problem, they have some tips for you.
Knowing Where Your Campaign Fits
When we say fits, we are talking about where this campaign fits into your marketing plan. If your business does not have a marketing plan before attempting your first marketing campaign, then there is your first problem. A marketing plan is the master plan that all your campaigns will run off to achieve the goals and objectives you have set forth for your business. Having this plan set forth will help you establish a target market and how to best communicate your campaigns with said market. One of the major goals your campaigns and marketing plan should focus on is getting people to your website, so they can see your products/services.
Set Your Campaign Objectives
Whether it be for our web design firm or a client, our marketing team determines what we are looking to achieve with each campaign. This is a great starting point because it will help you determine how you will go about achieving that objective and help set the parameters of that campaign. These parameters and objectives must be specific and realistic. One major parameter of any campaign is time. Every campaign loses their effectiveness eventually and that is why determining a set time for a campaign is vital.
Determine How to Measure Success
What are you going to use to determine if a campaign was successful? This is why setting up objectives has to come before this step. If your objective is to increase sales in a certain area over a certain period of time, then you wouldn’t look at an increase in traffic to your business’s website as a key metric. You would want to look directly at the sales of that product/service to determine if the campaign was a success.
Choosing A Budget and Channels
The final steps you will want to focus on for your marketing campaigns is how much money you are willing to put out to run that campaign and how you are going to communicate it with your target market. These two go hand-in-hand since once you determine how you plan on advertising this campaign to your market will determine how much money you will need to spend on that marketing.
