No matter what product or service you produce or sell, it is highly likely that at some stage your business will require a marketing campaign. Before the internet, marketing was an arguably simpler affair, with physical and print-based campaigns dominating the scene. Now, as Facebook surpasses 1 billion members and mobile internet has become widely and inexpensively available, the definition of what marketing campaigns involve has blurred.
While the boom in the use of digital media for marketing has certainly provided more tools in the marketer’s toolbox, the essentials for success still remain the same. Whatever routes your campaign chooses to explore, whether online or offline, here are 3 essential factors that ensure you make the most from your marketing:
Create a Plan
Before you carry out any aspect of your campaign, it is vital that you have a clear plan of attack. This plan should be driven by what goals you want to achieve.
These goals can range from such traditional marketing targets as an increase in sales and revenue to less obvious objectives such as diversifying your demographic through the use of social media.
This approach can be more effective with a clear cut set of goals rather than just setting out with a vague and broad-reaching aim; it is simpler to trim your campaign for maximum efficiency with clearly defined objectives.
Monitor Progress
Now you have a set of objectives to work towards, it is important to create a set of metrics by which to measure the success of your marketing approach. These metrics will be specific to the goals you have set out. For example, if one of your goals is to increase the influence of your company’s Twitter profile, the metric you measure your marketing strategies’ success could be the ratio of how many people you follow to how many follow you, and the quality of your followers.
If your objective is to encourage new customers to enter your shop, you could monitor how the level of new customers in a given time period, compared with an average you will have already established. Remember, some goals will be harder to quantify than others, brand awareness and reputation may be difficult to measure unless you are an expert with access to clear data for insights, but they can play an important part in a marketing campaign.
Manage your Project Efficiently
To get the best results from your marketing campaign, you must take control. Even if everything goes to plan, keeping track of all the different elements of a campaign can be difficult, with multiple contacts, metrics and calendar dates to track. It’s all too easy to miss deadlines, get behind yourself, or leave staff members wondering what they should be doing next. Effective project management is essential for taking the reins, ensuring that everyone knows what they should be doing, and when.
While it is possible to keep track of your team via whiteboards and meetings, team organization and collaboration can be extremely efficiently managed via project management software. These solutions offer effective ways of prioritizing goals, sharing information or simply notifying team members of changes or looming deadlines.
With these essential practices in place, you should be set to achieve optimum results from your marketing campaign.
This guest post was written by Jonny, on behalf of Cosine UK, a leading field marketing agency based in Thame, Oxfordshire.
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