Achieving a Favorable Outcome with a Well Thought-out, Strategic Plan-of-Action
Launching a marketing campaign can be an enormous feat and often requires months of pre-introductory discussions and careful planning. Campaign manager within an organization is often the person leading the communications with both sales and marketing teams to ensure that the campaign aligns with the goals of both teams and delivered in the most compelling, creative and unique way.
The best marketing campaigns are carefully-orchestrated, follow a distinctive theme that speaks to the brand, and are expertly executed. Before embarking on an actionable plan, it's worth taking into account that:
Timing is the Key for Ensuring Long-Term Success
It is heartbreaking whenever I see a visionary technology or product that garners a strong media attention but then withers away due the lack of market demand. Therefore, timing is important and the fact that a product was introduced too early, before its time, or too late may very well lead to catastrophic loss of revenue. Failure to correctly time the launch can sometimes result in the total demise of the business.
Creating A Winning Campaign
There’s no quick and fast rules when comes to planning and launching a marketing campaign. As a general rule of thumb, a campaign manager can take steps to ensure all pertinent details are covered and plan for the best course of actions.
Ideation
This is the first phase for the teams to come together to gather ideas and implement them into the actual campaign.
1. Define the goal
To clearly identify the purpose and objectives of the campaign. Marketers can focused on the objectives by following the SMART rule - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based.
2. Determine audience persona
Who are we promoting to? Aside from thinking of the demographics, it's helpful to think about the relationships the business have with the campaign audience including:
What kind of content will they respond well to? What are their interests?
What problems do they experience that our product/technology could help solve?
Which online platform do they use to access content - company website, social media, technology sites? How do they use them?
What sort of language will attract their attention? Do they prefer concise, clever content, or direct and serious content?
3. Brainstorm marketing campaign ideas
Time of figure out exactly how to bring the message to the intended audience by applying the concepts that will gain their attention. At this phase the ball needs to get rolling such as deciding on the budget and resources. The plan may require the skills of copywriter, video producer, graphic designer, or other creative professionals that may be available in-house or to be hired through agencies and freelancers.
Additionally, research into what the competition are doing or have done in the past and create something that's completely fresh and unique which speaks to the company brand.
Coordination
Ideation, as the first step, was just the tip of the iceberg. The next step is to put together an actionable plan with a workable time table to ensure that everything that needs to be done for the campaign will be launched successfully.
1. Identify your marketing mediums
Advancement in technology offers more and more tools available for marketers to utilize. Depending on the budget and the amount of time given for the team to execute, it is at this stage where decisions need to be made on the channel(s) to execute the campaign. This can range from news releases and press engagements; electronic newsletters (eBlast); placing ads on company website, popular search engines, social media, trade pubs; conducting webinars, and attending industry shows and events.
2. Measuring campaign success
Have actionable and quantifiable KPIs for measuring the success rate of all promotional channels. Review the results and assess what's working and what need to be changed in order to ensure a better future ROI.
3. Define your call-to-action (CTA)
The campaign isn't just about rolling out a new product or informing people about an upcoming event. Think of additional ways on how the audience can further benefit from taking an action to the published content. CTA adds value by encouraging audience engagement.
4. Delegate responsibilities and set a workable timeline
Marketing campaign management is never truly a one person job; it’s a team effort and those who are delegated tasks feel included and are empowered with making decisions and are contributions to the greater good of the company. This is an important step as each member is given specific responsibilities and needs to be well-informed of the campaign goals and schedule, including being able to communicate effectively and deliver results on time.
Execution and Follow-up
The execution phase of a marketing campaign should be followed-up by a careful review of whether the desire action or results have been achieved.
Much can be learned from the analytical data, such as audience behavior and comment, so that your next campaign can be launched to better meet their needs.
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