The total marketing budget for U.S. businesses crossed $240 billion last year. While finance is crucial to marketing implementation, it’s not the ultimate guarantee. A recent study revealed that businesses worldwide lose about $611 billion due to poorly targeted digital marketing campaigns. If you’re curious about the best strategy to use, the following will help you execute a successful marketing campaign.
Conduct Market Research
Developing your marketing plan without research is almost like driving without a roadmap. Therefore, it’s crucial to make the market reaching your first step as you develop your marketing plan. Experts recommend businesses focus on a specific niche or marketing segment, and it takes research to know which marketing group fits your business’s products.
Starting your marketing planning with research also helps you determine the best types of marketing forms and communication mediums based on your business’s marketing goals. For instance, you may want to use MMS messages for an election campaign. But you need to ask yourself several questions like “are political text messages illegal?” before closing your planning phase.
This due diligence can help you avoid negative legal implications as you implement your marketing plans.
Develop Marketing Goals
Seeing your marketing goals right sees you halfway through your marketing plan implementation. Setting your campaign off the ground without a well-defined goal has several adverse implications, including budget spills, low conversion and ROI rates, and more. When marketing, experts recommend following the SMART acronym. This details that goals need to be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.
Other dimensions you can add include gender and minority considerations. The more SMART your marketing goal is, the easier it becomes to populate your plan with key strategies and programs.
Determine Your Budget
The next step after developing your goals can be determining your budget or developing your marketing activities. Some professionals or companies switch these steps, but the former has a lasting impact on implementation. Developing your activities before finalizing your budget conversations is akin to putting the cart before the horse.
You can phase your budgeting or financing with long-term and short-term considerations. With a clear budget in mind, you can scale your activities up and down based on the budgeting limitations.
Develop an Implementation Schedule
Implementation schedules are timelines to guide your marketing activities. Each marketing action must have a duration and a team responsible for the execution. Your schedule must also feature activity-by-activity costing to improve financial transparency. Several resources exist to create your implementation schedules. You can opt for schedulers that favor automation and real-time collaboration to simplify implementation, especially if you have remote working team members.
Generate Key Performance Indicators
Nothing is promised in marketing and concluding without a well-informed understanding can sway your marketing plan away from your goal. You need effective monitoring and evaluation mechanisms as you implement. Key performance indicators should speak to your goals. For instance, if you have a marketing goal to improve social engagement, you can select corresponding indicators like the number of likes, shares, and comments for social media posts during the planning period. Using integrated measuring tools can be a great way to centralize your analytics tracking efforts.
All in all, executing plans can be daunting, especially if you have no baseline to compare and assess your progress. Beyond all these tips, you can pilot your marketing plan serving a smaller audience to avoid huge losses.
To read more on topics like this, check out the Marketing category
Leave a Reply