Bruce Smith
Anecdote founder
5 fail-safe steps to deliver a super effective marketing campaign in the South East
Hey, Bruce here from Anecdote and welcome to another week of marketing insights.
For anyone who is new to our series on answering the questions, you want answered with anything marketing-related, then after you have read this, please check out our previous articles.
They are a treasure trove of really useful information for anyone who wants to learn more about marketing, pricing, processes, etc.
Anyway back on with the topic at hand.
5 fail-safe steps to deliver a super effective marketing campaign
Who are you targeting
This is the most critical part of the whole process. You need to have a cast-iron understanding of the people you are trying to connect with. The messages, sounds, and images you want them to click, phone, or whatever.
Understanding your target audience is fundamental. If you don’t have that, you are pissing in the wind, taking cash, and dropping individual £10 notes down the drain.
OK, great Bruce, that’s the bad news, how about some good news? How do you work out who your target audience is? Right, you need to do a couple of exercises to get a better understanding.
Look at your ideal customers first
Every business has them, the customer that really appreciates you, they’re respectful, they don’t continually moan on about how much things cost and they pay on time.
The bottom line is, they’re a pleasure to work with. Right, surely it makes sense to focus on finding more of these people?
The first port of call is to… just call them, don’t be all British, get on the phone and ask them why they like working with you.
Define a set of questions that will draw out the reasons why they like to work with you. One definitely being, ‘What media do you and your senior colleagues consume, for example, Facebook, Linkedin, radio (station), trade magazines, whatever it is, this is really important to understand.
The insights you get from calling your top 3-5 customers will be invaluable but let’s not stop there.
Maybe you are launching a new product or service which doesn’t necessarily align with your current market. How do you do this? Here’s some homework for you…
Exercise
Create a customer profile
Remember the business that can best describe the problem the prospect has will always get the sale.
With that in mind work through these questions to help define the new audience you wish to attract.
You have to get into being able to almost visualise them in your head.
Their profile
Name, age, sex, occupation, job title
Goals and values
Increase business, scale business
Media consumption
Books, news feeds, social media
Challenges and pain points
Increase business, scale business
Objections and roles
Decision maker, will this service provide value?
Got that done? Great, we’re on the road to delivering a super effective marketing campaign.
What is the goal of the campaign
As they say, if you haven’t got a goal, you can’t score. So what’s the purpose of your super-effective marketing campaign? What do you want it to achieve for you?
If in doubt turn to how Facebook breaks down campaign objectives. I think a lot of business still think, I’ll run an ad in the local or a national paper and watch the money roll in, haha, sorry it doesn’t work like that.
Let’s look at Facebook’s campaign objectives in more detail as they’re really useful to help you better understand which one fits best for your business. This isn’t about running Facebook ads, this is about their framework.
They break it down into 3 categories:-
Awareness
Brand Awareness, Local Awareness, Reach
Consideration
Website Traffic, Social Engagement, Post Engagement, Page Likes, Event Responses & Offer Claims, App Installs, Video Views, Lead Generation
Conversion
Conversions, Product Catalogue Sales, Store Visits
Really, whatever your goal for the super effective marketing campaign, it should fit into one of these.
Whether that’s delivering footfall in-store, claiming offers, or an uplift in traffic to your website, get your thinking caps on to see which best suits you.
The best way to think about it is by understanding how you generally close business. Is it face to face, over the phone, or directly through your website? Once you understand that, it will help lead you to the right option.
Primarily with Facebook ads, to get the best bang for your buck, Lead generation or Conversion campaigns are the ones to look out for.
Exercise
Define your super effective marketing campaign goal
Now it’s time to sit down and plan out your campaign goal to deliver a super effective marketing campaign.
Work out what it is you want your target audience to do when they are confronted with your advert.
This is where the call to action for your advert is critical. This could be to claim an offer to get footfall in-store, it could be to drive traffic to a new product or service page, whatever it is, drill into it, write it down, and get really clear on what you want the audience to do.
Define the media you will be using to deploy the campaign
Once you understand your customer and where they like to hang out, whether with a trade magazine in hand or scrolling through Linkedin you can now target where you would like to invest some money on buying media.
There is a treasure trove of channels to choose from. It can be a bit overwhelming. The key is to make sure you can measure every penny you spend. There are no excuses for not having eyes on this data today. If you can’t measure its effectiveness then don’t do it.
Facebook and Google are masters at providing this level of clarity when spending money on digital campaigns. Even with print, you can add tracking numbers to flyers, so you know with inbound calls whether they came from your flyer or not.
Exercise
Shortlist 3 media channels to deploy your campaign on
Do some research to find out which platform or media is best suited to your specific needs.
Always ask to see the data and numbers of effectiveness for any publisher who is trying to sell you ad space.
Our gut today is to either use Facebook or Google to advertise. They take time to set up and organise, you really want a proper expert to do this for you, especially Google. They have a habit of letting you run ads that aren’t really that effective and will continue to take your cash no questions asked.
But my clients aren’t on Facebook you say. OK, that is simply not the case. Granted there are those who steer clear of Facebook but the fact remains it has a gigantic audience of engaged users.
For example, my father is a joint Company Director of a business, 66, and is very active on Facebook.
The point we’re trying to make is, don’t assume anything about your audience until you know for sure, which takes you back to asking the right questions in step one.
Put together some knock out creative
Right, you know who you’re targeting, you know what the goal of the super effective marketing campaign is, now it’s time to come up with the creative idea which is going to drive action from your audience.
This is not easy, but if you follow some golden rules it will have its best chance of being super successful.
Use the AIDA method, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. We have written an article on this which you can find here.
A great way of creating engagement and urgency for your super effective marketing campaign is to create an irresistible offer with a deadline. That then creates urgency and demands attention.
Make sure the offer is one you know will resonate. Again, make it one of your questions in step 1 to your trusted customers.
Also, make sure the numbers stack up and you can afford to do it, it’s still going to make you money!
Exercise
DIY it or speak to an expert
If you have an interest in this sort of thing why not give it a go yourself? You never know, you may surprise yourself.
If as others put it, leave it up to the experts while you focus on the £10,000 per hour work, there is also equal merit in that.
Whatever you feel comfortable with. Commissioning a professional can provide complete overwhelm as there is too many choices, seriously, there are many agencies, freelancers, etc out there, providing these types of services.
So how do you make the right decision? We have written a comprehensive article on the subject which you can read here.
One way to narrow down your options for your super effective marketing campaign is to set a budget. Two budgets really.
The budget for the time it will take the creative to do the creative work and also the money you are prepared to spend to promote your super effective marketing campaign.
A bit like getting your car fixed, parts, and labour. The creative bit is labor and the media purchase is the parts.
Measure everything
Make sure before you spend a dime, you have all necessary tracking in place to make sure you know what your ROI will be.
The great thing about Google and Facebook Ads is once you crack it and leads start to flow in, you can then scale up your spending.
If for every £5 you spend on Facebook you get a return of £15, surely you’d want to spend as much as you can because the ROI is so high.
It’s not easy but once you get it right, Facebook or Google can become a license to print money.
Exercise
Make sure all your analytics and customer relationship manager systems are oiled and ready.
Your super effective marketing campaign is chomping at the bit to get out there. Now, before you go live, check all your back-end analytics, pixels, and whatever else, are all working so when you start spending, you can quantify the investment and calculate the ROI.
Well, we come to the end of another article. We hope this has been insightful and of interest to you all. See you, same time next week.
Thanks for reading right to the end. We know you’re busy and we really respect your time so hopefully, the fact that you’ve got to here means that you’ve found it worthwhile.
