Anatomy of a Well-Rounded Marketing Campaign

How do you achieve the perfect marketing campaign? It's a question all businesses would love the answer to. Despite the perceived ambiguity over which marketing investments offer the best returns, a strategic approach can yield measurable and profitable results you can use to build future successful campaigns. The following offers insight into the anatomy of a well-rounded marketing campaign.

Define audience and goals

The first two things you should consider before developing your marketing campaign is who your target audience is and what your campaign goals are. Identifying your audience is critical to developing every element of your marketing campaign in order to convert customers. Identifying your goals helps you measure the success of your campaign and allows you to set up tracking parameters. Once you have identified your audience, you need to define your distribution strategy.

Direct-mail marketing campaigns require targeted mailing lists. Other direct marketing methods require you to know places your customers go, what sites they visit, and what they watch, read and listen to. Once you know your goal, you should develop a means to track it. If you're sending a postcard with a special offer, for example, you'll want to include a coupon or coupon code that customers must submit to get the deal. In this manner you'll have accurate data you can use to track campaign performance. 

Choosing your medium(s)

You have decide what avenue you're going to use to reach your customers, whether it be television, radio, Internet or print. What's more, you have to decide what avenue you'll utilize inside each of those; for example, print marketing entails posters, stickers, postcards, brochures, flyers and more. Print marketing perhaps offers the most diverse opportunities for your campaign.

A single campaign can be deployed in one medium or multiple mediums. For example, you might send a single postcard; or, you might develop a campaign deployed on postcards, posters, flyers, radio advertisements and online advertisements. When you saturate the market in this manner you stand a greater chance of success because your marketing mediums will complement one another. That is to say, someone who gave your online ad a cursory glance will remember and be persuaded when they see your poster advertising the same thing. 

Offer, design, copy

Great marketing campaigns are almost always packaged with incredible time-limited offers that motivate customers to buy now. Package your offer with a dazzling design and compelling copy (including a powerful headline, features and a call to action) to make sure your chosen medium is ready to be presented to your customer base.

Profit

If you have a targeted distribution strategy and a solid offer packaged in compelling design and copy on your chosen medium, you're well-primed for a successful marketing campaign. The final piece of the puzzle is repetition – you have to ensure each person in your target audience is exposed to your message several times, not only in terms of using different mediums but in terms of repeating the same efforts, albeit with minimal twists.