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Five Steps to a Winning Marketing Campaign

by: Admin on Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 Time: 1:18 PM

No matter how long you’ve been marketing, it’s a great idea to refresh yourself and your team with a great game plan. These five steps are guaranteed to start you off right.

1. Know where you want to land, even before you take off. Take the time to ask yourselves, your partners and your creative team all the right questions before embarking on your next campaign. Try this list on for starters:

* What are your company's overall business goals?
* What are the desired results of your campaign?
* How does senior management value the campaign?
* What are your budgetary and time constraints?
* What criteria will be used to measure your success?
* Who is your target audience?
* What are the products and service features you’ll be highlighting?
* What makes your products and services different—or better!—than the competition’s?
* What campaigns have worked and failed in the past, and why?

2. Create a message and stick with it. Often, marketing teams feel the pressure to squeeze several marketing messages into a single campaign—but don’t give in! Message-overload can be confusing, off-putting or even annoying to your target.

Instead, make sure your goal is clearly and narrowly focused to communicate one dominant message. Looking for a good way to do that? Have your marketing executive work directly with the creative team to draw up a hierarchy of messages. The task: list all of the campaign’s possible or desirable messages, then distill the list to one dominant message.

3. Put your audience first. It’s crucial that your marketing team resists the temptation to simply please their bosses, or one another. Instead, focus on how your target audience will respond to the campaign. If you're leaning toward a clever solution, make sure that your message is still clear. If you’re looking for a direct message, make sure it offers enough of a benefit to make your targets respond. 

4. Respect your team members’ functional expertise. Creating a marketing campaign involves a whole collection of cross-functional professionals, including copywriters, art directors, graphic designers and marketing executives. Allow enough time for your team members to introduce themselves and contribute what they know to your campaign planning process. It’s a great way to build a high-performing team, and to teach your newer team members an appreciation for the collaborative process.

5. Communicate, communicate, communicate. As with all good business, you should use good communication as the foundation for monitoring progress and expectations. Schedule status meetings, send memos, and make sure you’re all on the same page. (To this end, a good project manager can be worth their weight in gold.)

Regularly scheduled meetings go a long way toward minimizing confusion or mistaken assumptions amongst team members. And more importantly, they’ll guard against any sudden turns of events, such as change-order costs or deadline upsets, discrepancies in expectations, or breakdowns in communication.

A marketing campaign is a complex orchestration involving a considerable investment of your company’s time, money and talent. These steps will help ensure that your team has the business understanding and practical tools needed to develop a successful marketing campaign.

About the Author

Written by AccuTiips. —Excerpted from an article by Rose Weinberger, principal of Cayenne Studio, an integrated marketing communications firm in Westford. http://www.cayennestudio.com

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