Campaign Preparation – Develop a Strategy with 12 Initial Steps

Imagine this: You have a goal in mind, whether it’s to increase sales, raise awareness of your cause, or stand out in a competitive market. How do you get there? This is where a marketing campaign strategy comes into play; think of it as your go-to road map.

Set Your Objectives: Do you want online clients, and more people to know about your business or visit your store? Your goals will serve as a guide during your journey. Establish your marketing objectives clearly, whether they are engagement, lead generation, sales, or brand awareness. Sometimes, focusing on one goal at a time seems reasonable. However, blending and testing different campaign objectives must be more productive.

Define Your Audience: Consider your audience as people you might meet on your way. What do they like? What interests them? What is their routine and behaviour? Knowing them better enables you to craft your message to appeal to their needs and preferences. The audience needs to be segmented based on their demographical, geographical, behavioural and physiographical characteristics. The more you understand your audience, the better the chances to deliver the correct message and estimate the results.

Choose Your Geographic Location: Traditional approaches may work well if your audience is local, but digital marketing allows you to target a larger audience within a single campaign.

Identify Your Competitors: Examine the tactics employed by your rivals. It can shed light on the best strategy for your sector if they succeed with a specific format. Competitor benchmarking helps us estimate our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) in a particular market. It is not about imitating your competitors but about being aware of them and their tactics.

Craft Your Message: Keep it entertaining and straightforward. Consider it your invitation to your destination; it should entice others to follow you.

Pick the Right Channels: Pick the channels that your audience uses frequently. Go where they are, whether through social media, email, or good old-fashioned flyers.

Budget Wisely: Every journey needs resources, and campaigns are no different. Decide on a budget and spend it wisely, adjusting it based on performance. By assessing your available funds, determine whether traditional strategies like print ads or digital ones like social media advertising better fit your financial limits. In traditional marketing, budgets are fixed, but with first-time digital campaigns, thorough research needs to be done. Every channel has its minimum daily budget requirements. After a couple of months, with the calculation of return on ad spend (ROAS), you may increase or decrease the budgets based on performance.

Set a Timeline: Consider the start and end dates of your campaign. You might need extra offers if it coincides with a special event or a holiday.

Develop a Plan: Write down your goals, target audience, message, preferred media, spending limit, and schedule. Similar to your trip schedule, it keeps you on course.

Execute and Monitor: Put your plan into action and monitor how things are going. Track vital signs to make sure you’re moving in the proper direction.

Adapt and Optimize: There are times when detours are required. Be prepared to modify your approach if you are still waiting for the desired outcomes. Ask yourself whether your company can quickly adapt to the constantly evolving digital environment or whether a more traditional strategy would be preferable for your operations.

Examine the Journey: After your campaign is over, consider your journey. Did you succeed in your goals? What was successful and what wasn’t? You may make future travel plans better by using these insights.