You’ve created your product/service. You’ve spent weeks or months planning out how it will work, how it will change your customer’s experience. Now you need to make your customers just as excited about using it as you are. Your Marketing Campaign strategy is essential because you need to directly appeal to your target market and differentiate from the other advertisements . Starting from an understanding of where you stand in the market, you want to end with a successful product launch.
1. Set goals
It’s important to start with the basics, you need to have goals so you can measure and efficiently plan your success. Don’t be fooled, this isn’t as easy as simply thinking about by how much you should increase sales.
This includes project deadlines based on specific strategies on how to achieve certain goals. Deadlines need to be realistic and must take into account the entire team – what is each department doing to achieve this goal and who is responsible for each task? Take this further and base it on solid market and industry research. What are your competitors doing? It’s also very important to be realistic, expecting 100x ROI isn’t feasible so look at industry benchmarks to drive your goals.
2. Budget
You’re not Gatsby: know your limits. Assign an appropriate total project budget while also referencing your goals & strategy. At this stage it is ok to go back and adjust your goals based on your Budget, and don’t forget to each part of the project. Down the line, you’re going to be thankful you gave yourself limits on specific aspects of the campaign.
3. AB testing
You may have developed what you think is an amazing strategy that fits within your goals and budget, but how do you know if your campaign is performing as well as it could be? This is where AB Testing comes in, markets are constantly changing and your customers are always absorbing information differently, so test more than one strategy before committing to it. AB Tests can be as minor as changing a word or picture in your campaign to determine which one optimize your conversions.
4. Iterate
AB testing only counts if you do it multiple times. Like I said, the market is constantly changing, so keep testing different strategies and keep thinking of new ones. Your goals haven’t changed, but you will see your approach to achieving them change. Frankenstein the perfect method by iterating, and re-iterating.
5. Appropriate tools
I am going to spare you the misery of reading about how important social media platforms are one more time. Rather, I’m going to tell you about the magical powers of less obvious website tools.
Google Analytics will give you stats about consumer behaviour on your website. This goes deeper than stats on views, and instead gives you information on how long these visits were, who they were, and the likes. Another cool trick is keeping track of how many emails were opened by current or potential customers to test the effectiveness of your email strategy.
Aiming for something less intense? The Google URL Shortener will track visits on any given site – quick and easy.
Last (here’s a fancy one to wrap this up) is the SEOmoz toolbar. You know you google stalk your competitors, it’s only right – but make this process easier with this app. It gives you insight into rankings on search engines, the power of a domain name and how hard it is to get specific results on a search based on certain keywords. Basically, get real metrics on how your competitors are doing.
You’ve now got some tricks up your sleeve. Run along, market, and don’t forget:
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