Failing to plan, is planning to fail. Follow these simple steps to plan your next marketing campaign.

1. Set a goal

Campaigns should be linked to your overall marketing and business objectives. What do you want to achieve? Be specific. Make the goal attainable.

2. Set a budget

Again, be realistic here – we’d all love to run a multi-channel marketing campaign on a shoestring budget but that’s probably not going to happen. A good way to start to set a budget is to look at your goal, your audience and what achieving the goal would mean to your business – then you can decide on a realistic budget.

3. Define your audience

Knowing your audience will allow the campaign to be more targeted and hopefully more successful. Segment your audience if possible, you can then tailor your messaging and your tactics.

4. Understand your market and your competition

Understanding the market and your competition is key to the overall success of a campaign. Competitor insight can help you to differentiate your offer or your messaging to stand out.

5. Develop your messaging

What is it that you’re trying to say? Try to be single-minded and use simple but effective language. If it’s a longer campaign (3-6 months for example), how will the messaging evolve and build over the campaign lifetime?

6. Develop your creative

The creative brings a campaign to life. It should be impactful, suitable for the audience and it should complement the messaging. Make sure that the look and feel is on brand too!

7. Advertising Plan

This is where you decide how you are going to get your message out there to your target audience. Here you need to consider both tactics and channels – think about where your audience is most likely to see your messaging – online, offline or both? Think about what you are asking your audience to do – what is the next step from seeing your message? For example, should you create a landing page or a microsite for the campaign? It may be that you decide to test your approach and measure responses before rolling this out to the whole of your target audience. You will also need to consider planning in your messaging to keep the campaign fresh.

8. Implement, monitor and adjust

The most important but often overlooked part of a campaign – how did it perform? Did you achieve your goal? It’s also important to monitor the performance of your campaign in real-time – messaging, creative and tactics can then be tweaked to improve performance.

If you’ve got a marketing campaign in mind and don’t know where to start or you’re just intrigued as to what we can do for you then get in touch, we’d love to help!

hello@hclmarketing.com