So, your boss has just told you that the company needs a killer marketing campaign -- one that is going to make it rain customers so that everything will be gloriously profitable and profitably glorious.
No sweat: you can do this. Or rather, you WILL do this!
Here are the 5 elements that you need to focus on in order to plan, and ultimately launch, a marketing campaign that earns you plenty of praise...and perhaps a nice raise, too.
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Goals
Some people think that planning for a marketing campaign starts with a look at processes, phases, parameters, and so on. These people are wrong.
The right place to start your marketing campaign plan is by zooming to the end. What goals do you want to achieve? What do you expect to accomplish? Who do you want to reach? Identify ambitious, yet realistic goals and use them to shape and steer your plan.
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Resources
Once you identify where you want to go, take an inventory of your available resources. This includes budget, in-house personnel, and available technology.
There’s a good chance that you’ll discover some gaps that need to be filled by an outside marketing agency. If so, then this isn’t a problem or a “red flag”. Most organizations – and virtually all small businesses – don’t have all of the in-house resources they need to run an optimized marketing campaign (nor should they!).
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Strategies
Here’s where you define strategies that take you from where you are now, to where you want to be at various stages of the marketing campaign. Naturally, your goals and resources will directly influence the strategies you develop, which is why it’s important to make sure those aspects are clear and well-defined.
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Tactics
Tactics are the “guts” of a marketing campaign, and cover how strategies will be supported – and ultimately, how goals will be achieved. While each campaign is unique, most of them involve a mix of content (e.g. eBooks, blog posts, articles, social media), online advertising (PPC), SEO, SEM, and possibly some offline pieces as well.
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Schedule
Although scheduling is last on the list, this by no means suggests that it’s unimportant. On the contrary, your schedule is essential! After all, a marketing campaign plan must be realistic for it to be successful. A poorly developed schedule means that resources will be wasted (i.e. spending too much to get too little), or more commonly, expectations will be too high (i.e. thinking that web traffic would jump 1000 percent in a month).
Be sure to include milestones in your schedule as well. These are events that don’t require resources -- they’re kind of like “sign posts” on a schedule that represent the completion/start of a phase, or designate any other kind of notable piece of information. Milestones can also be used to analyze/assess performance and make adjustments to optimize the marketing campaign.
Learn More
To learn more about creating a killer marketing campaign plan, contact the Leap Clixx team today. We’ll not only give you some powerful insights from our wealth of experience, but we can even help you create your marketing plan (but of course, you can take all of the credit when you submit it to your impressed and delighted boss!).
Your consultation with us is free, and it could be the most profitable conversation you have all year.
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Topics: Inbound Marketing
