How To Choose The Right Marketing Campaign For Your Business

If you want to get more customers, clients, and patients, you need to do marketing. You get that of course. The challenge is deciding WHAT marketing to do when the number of options seems dizzying. There’s online marketing; there’s offline marketing; there’s acronyms like SEO, PPC, CTR, and more. Where do you start?

PLANNING A MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Marketing your business is so essential but figuring out what will work for your business often takes creativity, patience, and trial-and-error.

With so many options your marketing campaign can aim to do any number of things, from raising awareness, persuading people to take action, or influencing how people feel about your product, service, or organization.

It’s also easy to get drawn into new tactics. The art of marketing changes so quickly, it’s easy to feel that you’re always trying to catch up—which makes chasing the latest trends or getting a great deal seem so appealing, especially if the risks seem minimal. This sort of distraction does have its drawbacks, though: The time, energy, or money you spend pursuing a great idea may be better spent doing something else.

Before you launch into any marketing activity, get the market research you need to make an informed decision. Then, outline what you want to accomplish as well as your expectations.

Objective: What would a successful campaign look like? What measurable objectives do you expect it to accomplish?

Opportunity: What’s the context and motivation for the campaign? How will it sync with your other promotional activities?

Audience: What’s the target audience for the campaign? What action do you expect them to take?

Messaging and content: What sort of message will connect with your audience? What type of content—advertising materials, landing page, coupon code, FAQs—will you need to have in place for the campaign to succeed?

Timing: Find out when you’re most likely to reach your target audience and identify when the campaign will start and finish. For example, is your market driven by seasons? Is there a budget cycle you need to be aware of?

Logistics: Once you’ve identified the type of content you’ll need, decide what sort of support you’ll need. What skills do you need to have on-hand? Remember that a successful campaign could impact your administration or sales staff, your IT systems, customer service, stock, and more.

Measurement: Your objectives for a campaign should be measurable. What data do you need to determine whether you’ve succeeded and to identify what you can improve on in future?

GETTING YOUR MESSAGE OUT TO THE MASSES

If there’s anything you have an abundance of when planning a marketing campaign, it’s options: there’s paid and free, online or offline, broad or one-on-one.

Use what you know about your target audience to figure out the best way to reach them—not just which channels to use but also the type of content that they’re most likely to connect with.

Often, the best mix is a blend, an “ecosystem” of information and activity that reinforces your brand and gets the attention you’re looking for. Here are some of the more common tactics:

Advertising
Advertising typically means paying to get your message out. It traditionally included print, radio, television, or in person; it’s expanded to include online channels like social media and display advertising networks.

Content marketing
Part of a big shift in how businesses promote themselves, content marketing aims to attract customers, earning their attention by offering information they find valuable. It’s part of what’s called inbound marketing.

Email marketing
Email marketing is a strategic approach to using email correspondence to stay in touch and engage with clients and prospects.

Public relations
While public relations (PR) and marketing often seem similar, there are differences between the two: While much of PR is about building relationships and maintaining a good reputation, marketing is more directly tied to the bottom line.

Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing uses paid advertising on search engines like Google and Bing to drive traffic to a website.

Social media marketing
Social media marketing uses networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to promote a product or brand. Often used to support content marketing efforts, one aim of social media marketing is to encourage people to share branded information with their own networks.

What type of marketing is working best in growing your business? Leave a comment below.