In today’s digital world, marketing is the heart of your business. Many creatives will say that it is the business. Marketing attracts customers and sales; without these, there is no turnover and no company to run.
Advertising is the most obvious marketing activity, although there are many more elements to this: product design, PR, consumer research, digital campaigns. There are elements of marketing in every corner of your business.
With this in mind, building a strong marketing strategy is essential. So where do you start?
Understand your goals
The first task is to outline your goals. This may be to gain a specific increase in sales, to sell more product or to attract more clients. Use SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely) when working through the things you want to achieve. This can help you get a grasp on what is short term and what may be long term.
Set your budget. Then don’t budge.
Marketing costs can spiral out of control, especially if you have a team of creative minds coming up with innovative ideas. So it would be best if you decided how much of your cash you want to put into your marketing campaign. Set this out at the beginning, add a little contingency, then stick to it.
Research is king
Part of every marketing campaign is market research. This forms part of an essential guide so you can rule out any issues or any potential clashes with rival brands. It may also help you discover a USP that you didn’t realize you had. During this process, you need to determine your target consumer. Making a list of who you want to aim the marketing campaign at. This should be a detailed analysis breaking down your demographics, how they live, what excites them. You should start with the basics of age, gender and go from there. The idea is to understand your audience and consider why they would buy the product. This way you can aim your campaign specifically at them.
The Big Idea
By this point, you will have determined how you are going to sell the product or service and who you are going to sell it to. So it is time to decide the precise details of your campaign. Your big idea will help you decide how to connect your audience and convince them you have what they need. Using SMART, you can create your objective and determine whether your main focus is brand awareness, growth or customer retention.
This is also the time to choose what types of content you are going to apply. If your target market is young and on-trend, you may choose quirky Tik Toks or a campaign based heavily around Instagram. If your target audience is retired females, will they respond better to videos, written word or static advertising? Whatever your focus, try to create content that can be reworked on multiple platforms.
Time to get creative
For many within your marketing and design team, this is the bit they have been waiting for. While the research stage is valuable, you don’t get the same buzz as you do when creating content. Use your plan all the way through your design and creation process. It can help to revisit it multiple times to ensure everyone involved is still on point.
There are four main areas your creative process will lead you—Social, E-marketing, print and online. If your target audience meant your focus heavily relies on written content, you could use bold images or memes to help attract your social audience and steer them to your page. If you are going for bold videography or highly visceral images, social and online will be your playground, you can then write content which links back to sites such as YouTube or your website. Now maybe the time to outsource a content writer. You also should make sure your website is ready to take new hits and new sales. If you are marketing a product that you sell through your website speak to a Shopify Plus Agency and ensure that you don’t end up with a killer marketing strategy which is let down by a crashing website. You will lose sales because of it.
Time to shine
Once your content has been signed off, you are ready to release your campaign to the world – or your chosen target market. From your research phase, you will have already highlighted which of the platforms your audience will use the most. You can use all of the channels available, but this could take you out of budget. Choose the ones that are strongest for your campaign. If you do decide to go down every avenue, remember that the consumers that see your campaign and don’t buy today, could be customers in the future. Brand awareness is key to future success.
Once a campaign goes live things can go a little wild. If your campaign was successful immediately, you might find yourself with a lot of interest very fast. Particularly if you produced video content and it went viral. In these cases, you may find yourself dealing with the press and other media outlets who want to discuss, review or learn more about your project and / or your fantastic marketing campaign. This is where your PR team comes in. They should have a proactive and reactive PR strategy already set up. This will have been revised to prepare for the buzz from your marketing campaign. Anyone who deals with your company communications should be wholly briefed by the PR team on how to deal with questions and issues that may arise, and these answers need to represent the voice of your company at all times. You can find more details about PR strategy in this article.
Your e-commerce team should have everything under control on the website. However, if any issues do arise, be sure to communicate this effectively with your audience. You could lose valuable sales leads if your website is down for too long.
Analyze this
The last part of your marketing plan is one of the most important. This is where you will start to see the success of your project. You will see if there were any failures and learn how to build better campaigns in the future, or know if you are on the right track.
Using Google Analytics, you can find out the number of visits to your content via your website. This will only include click-throughs from your campaign that came to the website, and it doesn’t show how many people you reached in total. The number of website visits is an excellent indicator of how well you captured the public. You can also see how long the average time spent on your page was. This can help you understand if your website kept a curious lead, engaged.
If your email campaign went out through a marketing software such as Mailchimp, it would have a detailed analysis of email open rates and click-throughs (this will show how many people clicked the link to your website from your email marketing campaign) most of the effective marketing software programs enable you to resend your campaign to non-openers, which can be useful a few days down the line.
If you have paid for advertising, then you can see the referrals from those via Google Analytics. It’s essential to look at the ROI from any paid advertising. You could find that the platforms that generated the most interest and referrals were free to use. This would render your paid-for ads a potential waste of budget and lead you to avoid them next time.
All of your business social media platforms will have some form of analytics built-in, but for a more in-depth look, you might prefer to use tools such as Measured. You want to look for engagement on social media. How many likes did you get, was the post shared. Comments are also valuable, so make sure throughout your campaign your digital PR team are engaged with your audience. They need to answer all questions promptly. If someone writes on your Facebook post and you don’t reply or acknowledge them, it’s like somebody walking into a shop and being ignored by your staff.
After all this analysis has been compiled and built into a post-campaign report, you will know if your budget was correct and have a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses – if there were any! This will enable you to make better decisions for future campaigns and might highlight it is worth investing more into your future marketing campaigns (which will really please those creatives!)
Building a successful marketing plan may require a lot of hard work and focus, but it is always worth the effort to get it right. There is no such thing as too much preparation when it comes to the growth of your company, so make sure you put the time in to develop a robust and comprehensive plan before you let any campaign go live.