What Makes for a Successful Marketing Campaign?

The famous slogan of Nike: "Just Do It" is a quite bad idea when your business is launching a marketing program. But this is what's happening in many SMEs. They just place an advertisement here and there, set up a Facebook page or website, call it an achievement. Unfortunately, this approach is like catching fishes on a dry land; you might cast as much as you want, but you are not going to get anything simply because you are nowhere near a lake. So, what makes for a successful marketing campaign? Here are some simple steps to help you achieve your marketing objectives.

1. Create a marketing plan

Ideally, before starting a marketing campaign, you should have a detailed marketing plan. This is your master schedule that gives a full picture of the whole marketing strategies and objectives for engaging your services or products. Once you've fitted your overall plan with your marketing campaign, it is much easier to know the target market and how to communicate with them.

2. Set objectives and parameters for your marketing program

What do you want to achieve in your campaign? That is the objective. Make sure to keep it as specific as possible rather than just, 'We need more sales". Instead, answer which product and how many you need to promote? You can see parameters as a detailed list of the objective. One of the most common parameters is time, which should be included when a campaign lose the effectiveness over time.

3. Determine how to measure results

Which metrics will you use? How can you tell if your campaign is successful or not? Clearly, when your marketing objective is "Sales will increase 30% in 3 months", the metric that you use to measure the success of this marketing program is the sales number over the 3-month period. However, this might not be a proper metric if your objective is to enhance your site's SEO ranking or boost the awareness of the brand.

4. Set the budget

The amount of money that you want to spend on the coming marketing campaign can have a great effect on the marketing plans that you select. Therefore, make sure the set the budget first. Clearly, a Super Bowl advertisement is much more expensive than those on social media or local TV. Do not depend on free promotion or advertising strategies if your business is small. This is perhaps one of the most common mistakes that many SMEs often make. This is not to say that all of these free strategies are not good. However, there is always an expense to marketing, even when the time is the only cost, and you might spend your time much better.

5. Apply appropriate marketing enablement tools

To achieve high efficiency and productivity, the support of marketing enablement software is essential. These tools can help you to manage the process of the marketing campaign including strategy making, plan making and implementation. For example, TruEdit is a marketing enablement software that improves your campaign efficiency through simplifying your workflow enhance automation. Applying tools can save money, time and human resources to create high-quality content for your marketing campaign and maximize the profits.

6. Choose a suitable communication method with your customers

Which communication channels are you planning to use in a marketing program? Pay-per-click advertising? Email? Or social network? Keep in mind that several communications channels might be more suitable for your targeted market than the others. For example, having a radio advertisement would be a waste of money when your business is aiming at those customers who do not listen to the radio frequently.