For many companies, marketing campaigns are the main method for both communicating with their market to reinforce their positioning, and for customer acquisition.

Good campaigns follow a theme and include a series of touches with the market. It’s noisy in the marketplace, and a message delivered once through a single medium rarely makes a difference. While there’s no magic number regarding the best frequency for a message to make an impact, opinions range from three to twenty times, with seven being an old marketing adage.

Many marketing campaigns contain an overarching theme, which can be leveraged over extended periods of time with multiple variations, or different elements, to tell an entire story.

How Planning for Marketing Campaigns Aligns with Your Brand Strategy

Your marketing campaigns are the vehicles for connecting with your marketplace, to generate leads and sales, and to position you as that certain “something.”

Campaign copy and creative should always support your brand strategy and messages, even if you’re running a tactical lead generation campaign. They’re one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics in your marketing arsenal. If you want to see what your target market is thinking or doing, there are cutting edge tools using AI for market research and market intelligence that can help you better understand how to shape your campaign creative and messaging.

Target your audience

• With more specific targeting, you can speak more directly to the prospect and raise your response rates in the process.

Deliver one or two key messages and your call-to-action

• If you include every detail about your offering, it’s easy for prospects to become overwhelmed. Move a prospect just one step at a time.
• Be creative — your market is bombarded with messages daily, so grab their attention and engage them.

Create your budget and estimate your return on investment

Projecting marketing ROI is a powerful exercise that forces you to think through and estimate results for the important metrics of your campaign:

• Impressions, or exposure to your campaign creative
• Conversions, or those who take action from the impression
• The steps required to move from a conversion to a customer
• The number of units sold, and the profit from each
• The items of your campaign budget
• The estimated ROI of your campaign

Plan your fulfillment

• Your fulfillment processes can help or hurt your close rate, so be sure you outline your requirements. For example, if you’re running a campaign where prospects request a software demo, and it doesn’t arrive for a week, your prospects may lose interest.

Plan to measure

When you measure your campaigns, it’s easier to gain budget approval the next time around. You’ll also know exactly which programs produce the highest return.

• Establish how you’ll measure each campaign. If there are variables you can’t measure, decide how you will account for those results.
• Identify how you’ll capture the data you need – unique phone numbers, unique URLs, etc.

Continually test and improve

• Even on a small campaign, you can evaluate your ad, your copy, your list or other factors before you spend your entire budget.
• Choose a subset of your list or two versions of an ad; test them in small quantities and choose the best one for rollout. Then you can test a second variable against the winner of the first test.
• Keep the testing cycle going and track your results over time. You’ll improve your response rates and your return on investment.

Improving Your Marketing Campaigns

After you plan your campaign, it’s time to focus on tactical execution. That means having a deep understanding of the media you’re using, carefully planning your media buys, tracking your results, and following the best practices and steps for each media you use.

Check out our marketing packages for best results and brand growth.