6 Top Tips To Ensure You Plan A Successful Marketing Campaign

Before I started my own business, I worked for a number of different larger companies - all of which followed a formality of putting together campaign and strategy documents on a regular basis. Now that I’m my own business, however, I’m a lot more fluid and things can be much easier when it comes to decision making. Although you don’t need to follow the long process that I used to, I want to take the opportunity to talk to you about campaign planning in today’s podcast episode. We’re going to be looking at putting together a campaign plan, how you can structure your campaigns and how to execute them successfully. KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTOne of the first things you need to do is understand your objectives for the year. What is it you want to achieve? What are your targets? Once you know this, you can think about campaigns that will allow you to reach your goals.It’s also important to think about your target audience in the early stages of your planning. If you don’t know who you want as your customer, you’re really going to struggle.Write down ALL of your ideas, no matter how crazy they are. Write down as many as you can.Once you have written down all of your ideas, pick three or four for each objective.Take a look at your calendar and see what may impact when you do your campaigns. Split your year in quarters and put a couple of campaigns into quarters.If your campaign involves social media, you need to think about whether or not you need artwork. This can take some time and if you’re not planning in advance, you may find you’re unable to create what you need.On that note, if you need someone to help you with something, you need to work out when the latest date is you need to let them know by.Whilst planning, you also need to think about your expected outcomes. Make sure you’re realistic, yet optimistic.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Depending on your objectives and the stage you’re at in your business, you may want to limit the number of campaigns you’re doing each quarter. Make sure you’re not doing more than you can manage.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS#1 Understand Your Objectives for the Year – 07:05#2 Who Are Your Target Audience? – 08:08#3 Start Brainstorming – 08:30#4 Work Out Which Ideas Are Best – 09:50#5 Look at Your Calendar – 11:30#6 Deep Dive into Your Campaigns and Start Planning Them in Detail– 13:46Transcript below Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. And honestly, I have so excited that I can now say what on 101 that just seems like so much work and I am so honestly, I'm so proud that I've managed to be consistent all this time because actually I'm not very good at consistency in terms of like, I don't know when I try and start something new and new year's resolutions, obviously we're not far from the new year and I've been pretty bad at them over the years I have to say. And I'm just so pleased that actually I love doing this so, so much and I get such lovely feedback from people and people. It's a Monday today actually when I'm recording this. So the podcast has just gone out for today and I've already had a couple of DM's already of people messaging me and tagging me in and I love it and it really spurs me on to create more good podcasts, bring on more good guests.So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Also, I am going to take this moment to have a little cheeky request that if you haven't done a review on iTunes then I would really, really appreciate it. Like I said, I love doing the podcast and I love hearing from you guys. So if you would happily go along to iTunes and give me a lovely five star review and write something, that would just be amazing. So thank you. I feel like this is public service announcements or something. I'm trying to think. Is there anything else I need to say but I don't think so. So we will crack on with today's episode. So I hope you enjoyed last week's episode. I really do. I'm, this is really odd. I'm recording episode 101 before we've recorded episode 100 so I'm recording this thing. I hope you enjoyed it and I have no idea what it's going to be like cause I haven't yet done it, but I'm really excited about the prospect of it so I really hope you enjoyed it. I can't wait to hear your feedback from that.So yeah, if you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it. It is a bit different for me, but I think you'll like it. Hopefully. Like I said, I have no idea. I haven't done it yet. It's really weird. It's like I'm in some funny time warp thing where things are done in the wrong order. In fact, if you're in the UK, do you watch Dr. Who? I love Dr. Who. It's a bit of a sad admission. I don't know. You might think it's sad. You might not. My husband thinks I'm particularly sad, but it's a little bit like Dr. Who in the sense of the timelines are all out of sync and it's a bit like that when I'm doing the podcast cause I'm talking to you about things that haven't yet been done. Very strange.Anyway, I'll stop talking about Dr. Who and get on with today's episode. So you may know by now, obviously I've been in marketing a long, long time, but 15ish years at this point and I've worked for some big companies and worked with huge marketing budgets and some big marketing teams and big marketing agencies. And obviously when I worked at those places I was going to say I had to do things properly. Like I don't do them properly now. And I do. But when you're working with bigger companies, they do like the formality of putting together a big massive strategy documents or a huge campaign plan or the more formal stuff. Whereas now I would say I'm managing smaller business stuff and my own staff, I'm a lot more fluid. And actually what's lovely about working with smaller companies as opposed to, I used to work for Land Rover, so massive, massive company is that you had a million people that you had to speak to.You had to, everything had to be long and arduous and detailed because it wasn't just you making the decision. And honestly any campaign took forever, not only to discuss, to put together, to plan, to organise, to get all the elements together, but also then to actually go and go ahead and get it approved. So not only if you've never worked with a big marketing department, we would have obviously, you know, people way above me. So I might have to get it past global marketing or retail marketing cause I was corporate marketing. Then once I'd done that, I might have to check the product stuff with the product people, then I'd have to send it to legal and legal wants throughout an entire campaign because they didn't like the headline. And it was just so frustrating. So there was so many hoops that we had to go through and these long arduous like I these massive documents, these big processes that we'd put together in order to show everybody what we were going to be doing, what we expected to get from it and all that sort of thing.However, I want to talk to you today about some campaign planning. Now I'm not going to go into the long and arduous process of what I used to do, but sometimes it's good to do that more formal side of planning and actually this year I am doing this as I'm recording, this is the sixth of Jan, so like I said, it's a bit early in the year for me. So I'm actually doing my campaign planning now. I should have probably done it towards the end of last year. But anyway, I was really focused on personal and business goals rather than the actual campaigns that were going to help me get those goals. So what I want to talk to you about today is putting together that campaign planning so you know what you're going to be doing going forward in the year and then how you can structure each one of those campaigns in order to them and to execute them successfully.Because I don't know about you, but sometimes you have really good intentions and think, Oh yeah, I could do this. And then you leave everything to the last minute or not even that. You underestimate what's going to be in that campaign or what you need to do and therefore you start rushing some of those last things. And I, I am guilty of that. I'll happily admit it and I should know better because obviously I do this a lot, but I think we need to sit down and plan a bit. And although sometimes in the bigger companies, I'm not saying this as Land Rover obviously, but they could waste a lot of time and we still have meetings for meeting sakes and forms for forms sakes. And I'm not saying to do that at all, but I am saying a little bit of planning will actually go a long way in terms of helping you with your campaigns for this year. #1 Understand Your Objectives for the Year So I'm going to talk you through what kind of what I used to do but in a much more simpler and less arduous process in order for you to then follow along and start planning your campaigns for this year if you haven't already done so. Okay? So the first thing you need to do is you need to understand your objectives for the year. So what is it that you actually want to achieve this year? What are the objectives for your business? And they might be around various different things. So it might be around, I want to, there's inevitably a financial goal for the year for the business. I want to grow it by X amount percent. I want to increase it to X amount of customers. I want to put my prices up, I want to do a get more people on my email list. I want more people signed up for my lead magnet.Whatever your objective is for the business, I want you to write them down first because if you don't know what you're trying to actually get, then how on...