As a business owner, you have to be prepared to wear many different hats. You have to be a salesperson, a motivator and an accountant. You are required to have a handle across so many disciplines. One of the most important areas is marketing. Understanding how to build a marketing campaign is an essential skill for any successful business. Ensuring that your products are seen by potential customers is the life blood that will keep your sales rolling in. However, given that many people who run businesses are not marketing specialists, how can you be sure that you are getting it right? What can you do in order to ensure that when you are putting your message out there it is reaching the right people? Is the message resonating with them?
Getting this right is no mean feat. There are so many different aspects to consider when you are pulling your marketing campaign together. In this blog, we have pulled six of the most simple, yet powerful questions you need to ask yourself to make your campaign succeed. The questions will give you a structure to your planning and make sure you consider what you need to do to create a powerful marketing campaign.
Why?
When considering how to build a marketing campaign it can often become quite overwhelming. However, there are some extremely simple questions you can ask yourself will help you focus your thoughts. The first of those is why are you carrying out your campaign? Ask yourself, why are you putting this marketing together? What is its purpose? Is it to fill a workshop with business owners, sell a product to teenagers or inform people about a change in your company? You must first know why you are carrying out a campaign in order to steer your decisions to successfully complete the campaign. This gives focus and clarity on any subsequent decisions you make about your campaign. This allows you to set your goal.
What?
Now you have defined your purpose, you can now take the next step. What is it exactly that you are going to be marketing? Is it a new product, service or competition? Whatever it is you need to refine it down to its simplest form. Many people often try to promote more than one thing at a time. However, it is important you know exactly what you are promoting. It is absolutely essential that there is clarity and focus within your message. By defining the exact product you are marketing, it leaves the consumer in no doubt as to what you are looking to promote.
Who?
The next step is to consider who exactly is going to buy this product. It is helpful at this stage to try and create some personas of the customers you are targeting. What do they like? What do they need? Where do they congregate online? What language do they use? What social spheres influence their decisions? This step is critical in tailoring your message. Through the process of building their persona, you can understand how to tailor your message. You can understand their language, their needs, their desires. This process will ensure you create content that will connect with the right audience.
How?
After defining your audience you can then consider the next question. How are you going to communicate your message? By examining the customer profile you built you can understand how your target audience communicates and by knowing this you can ensure your messages will use language that will appeal to your them. This will also help inform your decision on the format of your message. Perhaps it is a video, a letter, a poster or a combination of various media types. Also, consider how you will write your message. What language is key to your demographic? Someone who is retired in their seventies will have different expectations to someone who is a twenty-year-old student. Understand their language and use it to your advantage. Aim to speak to one person and build a rapport with that unique human being. Don’t think of your audience as one big crowd to broadcast to. Marketing is a two-way conversation and each prospect wants to feel that you understand their specific needs as an individual.
Where?
Once you have managed to define your audience and your messages, time to think about where you are going to put them. This is all about considering where your target audience consumes content. Is it on public transport, on TV, on social media, in newspapers? It is absolutely essential to know where they are. This ensures you get maximum exposure for your messages. There is very little use in placing an advert on the radio if your target audience is known to spend the majority of their time on YouTube. Consider the places they congregate and make sure you are there for them to see. Research is key!
When?
The timing of any campaign is an essential ingredient to consider. It would be ill-advised to market to mothers with young children during summer holiday breaks when a considerable amount will be away. Likewise, a busy business owner is unlikely to be scrolling through their Facebook feed at 9 am. This is another aspect that can only be done once you have defined your target. By knowing who you are talking to, you can consider their lifestyle. This will allow you to make more informed decisions about the timing of your campaigns. There are also many different tools out there which will help you test and measure the best times to get your messages out there. So, get experimenting and see what performs best, then optimise your campaign.
When considering how to build a marketing campaign it can get a little confusing. On the face of it these questions may seem like a very simple set of things to ask yourself. However, when you delve a little deeper into them you can see that they really provide a great structure for you to think through your marketing campaign. In answering each of them one by one you slowly build a well thought out and highly targeted marketing campaign.
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