How to Plan a Marketing Campaign for Your Business
Today I want to talk to you about how to plan a marketing campaign. Some of you may already know that within my CEO Strategy Planner, there is an insert dedicated to creating a marketing campaign for your business and that is the process I am going to share with you today. If you already own the CEO Strategy Planner, perfect! You will be able to use your insert to map our your own marketing campaign quickly and easily with the help of this little tutorial. If you don’t already own your own copy of the CEO Strategy Planner and you are someone thinking about or currently trying to manage campaigns, you’re going to want this insert because it really is a tremendous tool to use to streamline and execute your marketing campaigns.
Before we get into the process itself, I just want to introduce you to how I use marketing campaigns and ease your mind a bit if you are someone who is overwhelmed at the idea of planning and executing one for your business. So, a marketing campaign can be any time sensitive promotion for your business, products or services. Think of it like a dedicated period of time where you are going to share marketing materials to attract your audience and create buzz around your products. I think a lot of times business owners just getting started can get overwhelmed with marketing campaigns because they think they need to do all the things in order to execute on a success campaign, but I’d like to reassure you that you can plan a simple, elegant campaign for your business that hits your goal without having to go overboard on content and messaging. In fact, I think simple is best when it comes to creating a successful campaign. I like to err on the side of simple instead of complicated because I’d rather have a simple campaign that I complete than a complicated campaign that overwhelms me and doesn’t get finished.
Now, in order to execute on a marketing campaign, you are going to need at least one online platform that you use to attract and talk to you customers. For me personally, I have a few different platforms that I use. I have my blog, my youtube channel, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and of course my email list. When I am planning a campaign for myself, I might use all of these platforms, but if I’m trying to keep it simple, I like to stick to just a few. At the very least you need one. And there needs to be an active audience on the platform you choose. That’s important. You see, there are two ways to market online. You can pay for ads to send your message to new folks that might not already know you, or you can market for free to the audience you have. The later is what I do and thats the process I am going to show you how to plan right now.
Planning a Marketing Campaign
Step 1: Name Your Campaign
The first step to creating your marketing campaign is to name it. I know it seems like a little thing but when you are planning out your marketing for the month or quarter you need to have a name or designation to use that clearly refers back to the different campaigns you are running. So make sure you have a clear name to use that is descriptive but simple. A recent campaign I finished was called CEO Strategy Planner Launch– it’s clear what product was being promoted and what type of campaign it was, a launch.
Step 2: Define your objective
For every marketing campaign you need to have a clear objective that you are trying to reach. It could be the number of sales you are trying to make of a product, the amount of money you want to earn, or even the amount of followers you are trying to gain. If I didn’t mention that before, campaigns don’t necessarily have to be able making money, they can be about gaining followers as well. Again, they are just a dedicated period of time where you are focused against marketing your business in some form or another. As an example, for my CEO Strategy Planner Launch campaign, I set a target for the number of units I wanted to sell during the launch period. It’s always good to have objectives defined, but if you feel unsure about where to start with setting them, I recommend trying the good, better, best method where you define what objective would mean you had a good result for your campaign, which would be better, and which objective would be the best case scenario. That way you can start learning how to set expectations for objectives like this.
Step 3: Outline your key messaging
With every campaign and objective there is going to be some key messages that you are trying to share with your audience. This could be information you are trying to share, or it could be a call to action you are trying to get your audience to fulfill. For example, if you were creating a campaign to sell a product, one of your messages might be about the limited time sale price or bonus’ the customer would receive. Another might be the key outcome your audience can expect to receive from purchasing your product, and a final message might be the end time for the promotion. We want to outline these key messages for a reason- so that all the messages we send out, all the posts, videos or emails associated with your campaign hit those few key points that you want to drive home. Knowing these message points going into a campaign makes it much easier to create all the different posts and updates you will end up sharing during the campaign itself.
Step 4: Define the start and end date for the campaign
Again, a simple detail but a very important one. After all, marketing campaigns don’t last forever, so you need to define the time period where the campaign and it’s objective are going to be your top priority. The time period you define for your campaign is going to be up to you and your schedule and the objective you are trying to reach. You could be holding a one day sale in your shop, planning a week long launch event or focusing on increasing your IG following for a month or more! Whatever the time period you think makes sense, define it so you aren’t working on this campaign forever!
Step 5: List out the marketing assets you will need for the campaign
A marketing asset is any digital promotion material that you can use or reuse as needed during your campaign. I break my assets into four categories. First, are Copy meaning text that I might use for blog posts, emails, or social updates. Next, are Photo meaning pictures or graphics I will use. I also use Video assets, pretty self explanatory but any video content I need to produce to go along with the campaign. Finally, I have an Other category where miscellaneous assets might be listed, like sales pages on my website, email landing pages, or opt-ins. Creating this list is important because its like the pre-campaign to do list of all the things you need to create to successfully market your business and meet your objective.
Step 6: Define the metrics you will track during the campaign
So, I’ll be honest, this step is one that I think a lot of business owners miss when they are planning a campaign but it is a crucial element that you can use to not only track the effectiveness of your campaign, but to also learn from to make future campaigns more successful. So, a metric is some factor that you are going to track to understand the success and impact of your campaign. Going back to my example of my CEO Strategy Planner Launch, I used the metrics of Sales, Email Opens and Email Clicks to measure the effectiveness of my campaign. Sales is an obvious metric. I had set a sales goal as my objective so tracking the target sales vs actual sales would be a good indicator of how successful the campaign was. I chose email opens and email clicks as well to gage the engagement of my audience. But I could have chosen from any number of other metrics as well. Video views, clicks on a specific tracked link, etc. If you are just getting started with marketing your business, some of this might be new to you, so take it slow and just strive to understand key factors that you can track to use a metrics for the success of your campaign.
Step 7: Compile a list of all broadcasts
The second full page my campaign builder from the CEO Strategy Planner is dedicated to a Broadcast Tracker. This is essentially a master list of all the messages I will need to send out during a campaign. Again, we are preplanning these messages out so this master list is important. On this list of broadcasts I make sure to track the date the broadcast will go out, you could also list out the time if that is important for your promotion as well. I list out the platform for each message so I know if its a blog post, video, IG Story or post or email, etc. I track the message itself, by providing a brief summary of what the message is about, and finally I track it’s completion with a checkbox. Looking at my CEO Strategy Planner Launch campaign page, I had 14 broadcasts that I made over a period of six days that spanned four different platforms, so that was a lot of communication to not only create, but ensure I was posting on time for my launch. Having a list like this helps me manage my workload going into a campaign and manage my daily expectations because I can see what the most important thing to do for my campaign is each day.
Well, that is exactly how I plan a marketing campaign for my business. I hope this information helps you to create your own marketing campaigns in the future, and of course, if you need a simple, strategic tool to help you make these plans, I highly recommend checking out the CEO Strategy Planner inserts. Not only do you get access to the Campaign Builder and Broadcast Trackers mentioned earlier, but you get a total of 60+ different business planning inserts to help you make a strategic plan for your business. The CEO Strategy Planner covers everything from Brand Vision, Yearly, Quarterly, and Monthly Business Plans, to Marketing, Objectives, and Finances as well. So, get your copy of the CEO Strategy Planner today because this is the ultimate business planning tool with everything your business needs in one bundle!
xoxo,
