The Race For Advertising Space: Getting To The Core Of A Great Marketing Campaign

Marketing campaigns are in abundance now, and it can seem that there are so many different things to choose from in order to make an effective one. You might be going for a specific demographic, or you think that the product should speak for itself, but whatever you decide; it’s always about getting to the fundamental core of it. What do you need to understand in order to strip away the superfluous ideas and imagery, and just get to the bare bones of it? 

 

Fit The Campaign Into Your Marketing Plan (Not The Other Way Around)

It’s far better for you to have a template to follow, rather than going off-piste and coming up with an abundance of ideas that might not yield that return on investment. Your advertising spends can be a limited entity. This is why it’s better to use specific tools, especially in terms of marketing attribution, so you can increase your insight, as well as improve your Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS). Much like you’d follow your business plan to the letter, the same applies to the marketing. Before going deep into a campaign, you need a master plan to market your small business. This means having the appropriate actions in place to achieve a certain objective. This makes it far easier to identify what you need to promote, your key demographics, and how you intend to reach out.

 

Setting Your Budget

We are always conscious of the fact that money can get the better of us. You need to set aside a certain amount to spend on your campaign, this will then provide you with the parameters necessary to realise your vision, or at the very least, to make compromises. Social media campaigns are relatively cheap, but it’s not all about finding the cheapest advertising methods. It’s about finding that right balance between free marketing strategies, and using the right ones. It’s important to be realistic when setting your budget, as this means you have boundaries that you cannot overstep. In many ways, boundaries force you to be more creative.

 

It’s All About The Timeline

We can spend a lot of time waiting for another department to come up with the logo, or relying on an external marketing agency to deliver the goods on time, but if you don’t have an action plan in place, you could run the risk of going over budget, and very much over deadline. It’s about catching the zeitgeist right now, that means you’ve got to record what you were going to do and when you were going to do it. It’s far better to evaluate the success of a marketing campaign based on a specific set of rules. If there’s an event going on in December, you can send out a press release at the end of November, but prior to that, place local ads in September and October. And way before this, you can start posting information on your social media page. Working backwards is key, because you’ve got a deadline in mind.

 

Figure Out How You Will Measure The Success

It all depends on the goal. Do you want to improve your website search engine page ranking, or do you want to increase the awareness of your brand? There are so many different metrics tools that you can use to measure specific success. While Google Analytics is one of the most common, it is still one of the best. But it’s all dependent on how you want to check your campaign and if it’s succeeding, and after that, if it is worth continuing.

 

Executing With Gusto

Creating your ad copy, finalising dates, and acquiring talent to be the face of your campaign; whatever sort of actions you need, be sure that you stick to them, and never veer off course. If you put in enough detail into the planning and preparation, the marketing campaign should go off without a hitch. It’s when people started out minimal parts of the process that everything can be thrown into chaos. When you start to execute with the best of intentions, it will keep you organized, and continue to motivate you. 

 

Once it is over, you can measure the success, and it all depends on your specific goals. As such, once you find the appropriate results using the best metrics, you can then figure out if the campaign needs to be altered next time. When running a small business, you need to understand the importance of a great marketing campaign, but when it comes to delivering the goods, too many cooks spoil the broth. Get to the core of it, and you won’t go far wrong.

Marketme

Marketme is a leading small business to small business news, marketing advice and product review website. Supporting business across the UK with sponsored article submissions and promotions to a community of over 50,000 on Twitter.