For every marketing campaign, be clear with what you intend to do and the outcome. But remember to acknowledge your customers and understand their pleas.
Every product launch requires a marketing campaign.
You can’t just build it, toss it out there, and see profits. Truth is, we’re already drowning in digital noise as is. Don’t add to it. Instead, seek out your customers and pull them into the comforts of your landing pages.
Because marketing campaigns create interest for your product. But you need research first.
If you go into it without knowing your customer or having set goals, your marketing campaign will fail.
So, you need to research right. Here are a few questions answer for a successful campaign launch.
1. Who are you marketing to?
In marketing, buyer personas are everything.
Only 44% of B2B marketers even use buyer personas [1]. But ads and campaigns that target specific people are twice as effective than ads that don’t [2].
What this means for you is that you should never neglect to research your target market before a marketing launch. Because if you don’t know the person you’re marketing to, why would they care about your product?
More importantly, how will they know your product exists?
When starting a marketing campaign, you never want to say the words “I don’t know”. Not with your budget, product, and especially your customer. Customers don’t buy from the confused, and neither do you.
So, you’re going to create a buyer's profile. You may need a few, depending on your product and target market. But they’re simple enough to create.
Buyer personas define who your buyer is, what they do professionally (and personally), plus their salary income and their goals related to your product.
Let’s say you’re selling a spray that eliminates foot odors in shoes. Your ideal customer could be:
- Active children
- Frequent travelers (business and leisure)
- Professional athletes
Different customers have varying motivations, incomes, jobs, and problems. Paint a picture and don’t be afraid to go into too much detail with buyer personas.
The more information you have, the better targeted your campaign will be.
2. What media channels are they addicted to?
Also known as “where does your customer hangout online?”
Once, companies didn’t care about customer values. All that mattered was profit. So companies shoved their product down throats until people paid them. This method is outdated, hated, and not effective in online campaigns.
Now we actively get into the heads of customers and see what they want and where they are online.
Because if you run a food truck in the desert but hungry customers are 4 miles in the city, it doesn’t matter how loud you are about quality food and free samples.
No one is there to hear you, so no one cares.
This is the same with your marketing campaign. So we select the best marketing channel based on where customers are.
62% of marketers said social media became more important to the marketing campaigns in the last 6 months [3].
This is great. We’ve lots of social media channels to choose from. And with proper data, this won’t be a flustering decision.
As said earlier, there’s no room for guessing with marketing campaigns. We can’t leave business and profits up to chance.
So you need to do:
- Keyword research: Your customers will use certain keywords when searching for solutions. Some keywords will have a high search volume, some will be nonexistent (you don’t want those ones). Hint: You can pay for a program, or use Keyword Planner by Google. It’ll show you search volumes of specific keywords while also suggesting other similar keywords that may rank higher.
- Competitor research: Chances are you have at least one competitor out there. Use tools to analyze which keywords they use, which channels they dedicate their time building, and where they interact with customers most. Hint: Here’s some tools to help you out.
- A/B testing: Particularly with visuals. Your marketing campaign needs visuals to attract customers. But customers respond better to some images than others. Test different versions of advertisements and gauge reactions. Hint: Facebook groups are fantastic to get feedback from real customers.
With this information, you can find out what appeals to your customers and where they spend all their time. Which means, that’s where you’ll be spending your time.
3. What are your long term and short term goals?
“To make lots of money!”
Yes. But no.
The goal is always to make money, whether through direct purchasing, ads or affiliate marketing. But there’s more to it.
For this campaign, what is the one thing you want your customers to do?
A customer doesn’t click an ad and throw money at you without further information. They click the ad to take them to a landing page. Which then leads them to the call-to-action.
What we’ve accomplished here is (what should be) your first goal:
Making customers interested in your product.
That’s it. We want their interest to be strong enough that they want to know more.
From there, other goals can be set and met. For example, B2C businesses #1 marketing goal (related to content marketing) is to make a sale (83%), increase customer loyalty (81%), and engagement (81%) [4]. Marketing campaigns are similar.
For every marketing campaign, be clear with what you intend to do and the outcome. But remember to acknowledge your customers and understand their pleas before launching any marketing campaign.
It’s a surefire way to lead to success.
Sources:
[1] http://www.itsma.com/pdfs/research/ITSMAPersonasandB2I_AbbSum.pdf
[2] https://www.hipb2b.com/blog/infographic-science-building-buyer-personas/
[3] http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-2012-state-of-inbound-marketing-webinar
[4] http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/10/b2c-content-marketing-research/
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