Whether you are running a specific marketing campaign like a launch or an event, operating quarterly campaign model ‘sprints’ or applying the campaign mindset to your whole marketing approach, there are some essential building blocks that you need in place – the fundamentals of an efficient campaign plan. Once you understand the type of campaign that you want to run, you need the structure and the systems to make it happen with a campaign plan and timeline. It’s this campaign structure that brings consistency, continuity and momentum to your campaign.
For an effective marketing campaign, there are a few things you need to consider before you wade in. This includes understanding:
- the results you want to achieve
- what needs to happen to get you there
- the deadlines that will make sure that you’re on track
- the resources you need
- the people involved, in particular having a campaign lead who drives that campaign through and makes sure everybody has the right tools and is held accountable.
- the collateral and assets you need to bring your campaign to life
- When you will schedule regular check-ins so you can see whether your campaign is on track
- What milestones are required to build momentum and create a sense of urgency?
Last but not least, a scheduled point where you can review the overall performance of your campaign, celebrate success, and learn from the wins and misses – building new opportunities.
Sounds like a lot, but never fear. In this article, we’ve broken it down into five campaign fundamentals to help you get an understanding of what great campaign planning and structure can look like for your business.
- Understand your numbers
- Set a timeline
- Roles and responsibilities
- Production
- Review performance
1. Understand your numbers
What do you want to achieve?
Just like your commercial strategy, with all campaigns, it is important to understand what you want to achieve and why. That could be the number of units sold, it could be new clients and customers on-boarded. It could be revenue created, event registrations, followers gained. Whatever your metric, it’s important to understand at the outset, what your overall objective is and what key performance indicators you’ll be tracking. A simple example could be a campaign focused on gaining 10 new customers. To gain 10 new customers you need to work back and understand your ratios from enquiries to prospect to customer sign-ups. Basically, how many people do you need to get in front of and speak to in order to convert one new customer?
Once you have set that first number – to gain 10 new customers – you need to know what your conversion rate to bring on 10 new customers is. It may be that you convert 1 in every 3 prospects after you’ve qualified them, and they have qualified you. This means a ratio of customers from prospects of 1 in 3. If that’s the case, then you need to create opportunities to present your business proposition and speak directly to 30 prospects to be able to convert 10 new customers. But the numbers don’t stop there. To get in front of 30 prospects you may need to actually communicate with and engage 10 times as many people.
Those are the key ratios that you need to focus on. These numbers will help you understand the type of campaigns you’re going to run, help inform which channels you need to use, the type of marketing activity that you’re going to create, the frequency and volume of marketing activity, and can even influence the style of messages you’ll use.
What budget is required?
Once you’ve set your target and understood your conversion rates, these numbers will help drive the next set of numbers that it is important to understand – your campaign budget. How much do you need to spend to get in front of your prospects? If you know you need to engage and communicate with 300 prospects in order to convert 10 new customers that may mean that you need to look into other marketing avenues to expand your reach. For example, are you planning to run an event to attract new contacts? Or planning on using digital marketing tactics, advertising through Facebook ads or LinkedIn ads or Google ads. Or you could look to partner with an organisation that has a larger pool of your key target audience than you and engage in sponsored email campaigns.
What other costs do you need to consider? Even without ad spend, sponsorship or any need for an events budget you need to understand what resources and materials you might need to create – websites, social assets, email templates, pdfs, videos – anything that needs time and budget to create should be factored in. Once you have understood your budget, work out how much you’re planning to spend to get your 10 new customers. It should then be easy to start seeing whether your numbers stack up – if you know how much each new customer is worth to your business, and you know how much you need to spend to get them, then you can quickly work out if the return on investment is worth it.
Milestones and measures
The third set of numbers you need to understand are your key performance indicators, your KPIs. Factor in key moments throughout the campaign where you review your performance. Taking your target numbers, for example, you should be monitoring some key performance indicators to help you understand if you’re on track – milestones, and measures that are related to your campaign objectives. These could be people who’ve registered interest in your product, people who’ve clicked on a button in your emails about your offer, visitors to your landing page or website, likes, comments, shares, or retweets of your social posts. All of these key performance indicators are signals from your prospects that they may be interested in buying from you. And it’s these KPIs that you should be continually monitoring to ensure that your campaign is on track. It could be purchases of a product, download of content, video views – all different methods combine to show that your prospects are interested in you as a business and build a picture of whether your campaign is on track.
2. Set a campaign timeline
We may have talked numbers first but, once your commercial objectives are set, the timeline is probably the most important thing you need to understand from a campaign methodology perspective. Deadlines are vital, they create momentum, and a sense of urgency for you, your team, and, importantly for your prospects. Setting a campaign timeline is also a great way to snap out of a marketing rut. Many businesses find that at some point they are going through the motions and doing marketing ‘just because’. Consistent marketing is important, however, layering a campaign over this will give you focus and momentum.
Your campaign timeline may be across two weeks, it may be across two months, it may be across a full year. No matter how long it is, the set timeline means you can build in key dates, such as when production needs to happen, when the campaign needs to be launched, for ongoing communications to be sent out, for advertising to start and finish and for an introductory offer to launch, along with reminders and special offers as you need them to drive engagement with your target audience.
Your timeline is also there to set regular touchpoints to monitor progress. It’s important that time is spent at the outset documenting the timescales, setting milestones, and allocating responsibility and accountability for all tasks. This creates a map and a campaign mentality where everyone is on the same page and the campaign builds with real momentum.
Lastly, we believe one of the most important yet overlooked aspects of this timeline is the campaign production itself. Many businesses often struggle with delivery when it comes to campaigns because they rely on having to create new content, new assets, and collateral on a week-by-week basis. The campaign launches and then, when business gets busy or other priorities crop up, campaign activity falls by the wayside, loses traction, and fails. Failing to factor in time at the outset for production can be one of the reasons many campaigns falter and why messages and materials are one of the five campaign fundamentals.
3. Messages and materials
With a clear picture of your target audience, how many people you need to get in front of, and the time and budget you have allocated to do it, it’s time to work on your messages and campaign materials.
Planning your messages means you can think about the ‘so what’ factor – what do you need to tell people? Why should they care? What would they want to know? What do they need to do as a result? Create engaging messages and agree the ‘Calls to Action’ (CTAs). You may have a sophisticated campaign that has a series of phases and several different target audience segments and so will need to create some different suites of messages that are adapted to each segment and phase. You may want to use the campaign to split test within segments so you can learn more about the messages that work and the CTAs that make sure people engage.
Even with the simplest of campaign messages such as an offer, working on messaging upfront is valuable. It avoids falling into the trap of repetitive phrases, being stuck for what to say, and allows you the opportunity to test things out and see what works best.
The messaging and materials phase is also where you understand your channels. Just like with your messaging, the understanding of your audience, timescales, and budget mean you can identify which marketing channels you need to use for your campaign and what collateral and marketing materials you need to create. Do you have a landing page ready? Do you have email templates that need designing? If your campaign includes an event, what materials do you need to create in advance to get everything set up, from invitations to on-the-day assets and any follow-up materials? If you know that the audience that you need to target is most likely to be found on one social media platform and not on another then your materials need to be created to focus on that platform. You might not have access to the volume of numbers that you need within your followers or your mailing list and need to collaborate with another partnership or a membership organisation and create marketing materials to share with their audience.
The messaging and materials production phase means that all of the hard work is done and dusted up front and the rest of the campaign is focused on getting that content out, monitoring results, and iterating and improving. So, at the outset, in your production, you should be creating all of your collateral. Your brochures, your landing pages, your content, blogs, videos, e-books, adverts, everything is created in one go. This also means everything will be consistent with the wider campaign theme and the target audience. It will be signed off in one go. And then you have a whole suite of campaign assets that are ready for action throughout the campaign cycle.
4. Roles and responsibilities
Everyone in your campaign team should know what their part in the campaign is, when it should be actioned and what success looks like. Roles and responsibilities are not limited to the team delivering the campaign marketing activity – who is responsible for sign-off? And when it comes to the milestones and reviews who needs to be involved? You should have somebody who is in charge of managing that campaign and keeping it on track. When everyone is clear on their role and understands who is doing what it means not just that the campaign delivery can run smoothly but also the team can be agile and adapt quickly to any issues or bumps in the road. In smaller teams and businesses, individuals may fulfill multiple campaign roles or it may be that you have members that can do all and any of the campaign activity. Again, clarity on roles and responsibilities avoids duplication of effort and also avoids actions getting missed and slipping through the net.
In setting out the roles and responsibilities it gives you the opportunity to review the skills and resources in the business and identify any gaps that will need filling to ensure the campaign can be delivered effectively. These gaps may be simply related to capacity, you might have a team ready and able to deliver the collateral, materials, messages, and marketing activity but the timescales mean that you need an extra pair of hands to deliver on time. Or you may discover a lack of capacity in a specific area such as no-one available to do the actual follow-up when the leads and enquiries actually come in. Maybe you have gaps that relate to skills or resources and need to engage with an experienced agency to produce some of your collateral or deliver elements of the campaign for you, such as video, graphic design, digital ads, PR, etc.
Look at your numbers, your timescales, your messaging and materials – set the roles and responsibilities and build the campaign team you need so that, as a team, you can work effectively and seamlessly. And as a team, you have those milestones and moments to come together and learn from experience and celebrate success.
5. Review your campaign performance
This campaign fundamental is probably the one that is most frequently missed out by many businesses, either by not setting clear milestones for reviewing performance during the campaign or, most often, failing to review campaign performance on completion and as a result missing the opportunity to take forward key learnings to shape future marketing activity.
It may be that your campaign will be focused on continual sales throughout the campaign lifecycle, or it may be focused on building momentum for releasing a product in one go. It may be launching a new business, a new product a new system, some new content, whatever your focus is, if you have set out your numbers including your KPIs then you can review how well the different elements of your campaign performed and ultimately whether you got the results you set out to and what the return on investment was. The review point can also uncover business insights that you might not have expected. You may find that, although you didn’t get the results you expected from your target audience, the messages engaged people you weren’t anticipating and have identified a new target audience for your business. You might discover a marketing channel that you hadn’t previously prioritised, performed well for you, and is worth further investment. You might find that some of your key messages deliver better engagement than others and that you can better position your brand as a result.
Ultimately reviewing your campaign performance gives you an opportunity to take stock, learn from what’s worked, what hasn’t and what can be improved, and celebrate success as a team. This is a vitally important moment and one that often gets forgotten as the business becomes busy and day-to-day activity take over however it might just be the difference between the ‘busy-work’ and truly targeted marketing that grows your business.
These five campaign fundamentals pull together the overarching methodology of Build. Getting all of these aspects working for you and your business will mean that your campaign timeline and production schedule will be highly targeted to your audience, will be focused on what you want your campaign to achieve, and will deliver highly targeted messaging at the right time to the right people and help you learn from the data that it creates.
Keen to learn more?
If you’re eager to drive your business forward and want to learn how marketing can systematically drive that growth, Build is the programme for you. Build is packed full of education and insight, activities and mentoring, accountability, and coaching. It’s designed to help you push your business forward with purpose and power.