How to successfully manage an advertising or marketing campaign.

So you’ve come up the big idea, you have a rough idea of how you want to execute it and you even have some budget to allocate to it.  You’re ready to go! Or are you…??

Stop.

Wait….

Have you carefully thought this through?

Planning is crucial to the success of any campaign.  Without running through a clear thought process, the success of your campaign will be down to pot luck rather than careful consideration and strategy.

So what can you do to make sure your campaign is as successful as possible?

We’ve come up with a few crucial steps to help you on your way:

1. Set your objectives.  What do you want at the end of this camaign?  More sales? More enquiries? More web traffic or more awareness of the brand/ products/ services? Without setting clear objectives at the beginning, you won’t know what you are trying to achieve, or in fact, how you will achieve it.
2. Set your budget. You know what budget you have available, now you need to stick to it.  And more importantly you need to allocate it accordingly – prioritise spend against activity that will help you reach your objectives and generate the best return.
3. Define your target market.  This is crucial. Without knowing who you are targeting, how will you reach them effectively?  Determine and reasearch your target market,  making sure you understand them, their needs and their buying behaviour.
4. Determine the most effective marketing channels.  Where, is your target market most active?  It is likely that they respond to a variety of channels, but which will you most likely reach your objectives through? An integrated approach will help remind your target market that you are there and will prompt them at various stages of their purchase journey.
5. Keep an eye on the competition.  Do you know what your competitors are doing?  You should regularly review competitor activity, not so that you can copy it, but so that you know what you are up against and you can also gauge what has and hasn’t been working for them.  You can spot holes in their strategy – which means opportunity for you.
6. Identify your core message.  Make sure you are selling the benefits of your product, service or company. People are often triggered by emotion. Try and solve a problem or at least let them know what it will do for them. Understand what the competition’s message is and try to come up with a different angle that will identify with your target audience more closely.
7. Monitor. Whether you are booking an advert in a paper, running a banner on a website or implementing a social media campaign for the first time, you need to make sure you monitor the results.  This could be through using and tracking a unique telephone number; setting up a unique landing page and using website analytics to track activity or using a social media monitoring platform.
8. Measure.  You have a monitoring system in place, which is great, but you also need to set up performance indicators to help you measure success.  What are you looking to achieve and what metrics can you use?  This could be the number of clicks to a web page or the number of sign ups to a subscription.  It could be the number of telephone calls generated and the call duration.  Or it could be the number of Retweets, the number of comments or the number of likes.  Whichever is the most relevant.
9. Analyse.  Time to analyse the campaign. Using the data you have collected and the measures you have in place you can analyse the results to determine; was it a success?  What did you achieve?  What was the cost and return on investment?  Did any unforeseen problems arise? Were there any influencing factors that had not been anticipated? How can you improve the next campaign to make it even more successful?

Got that?

All planned?

Now you’re ready….

Good luck!

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