Look­ing to cre­ate a mar­ket­ing cam­paign?  Fab­u­lous, keep read­ing.

Suc­cess­ful cam­paigns take time to devel­op and in our ever-chang­ing mar­ket­place, you can count on your mar­ket­ing plan chang­ing as your busi­ness grows and the needs and expec­ta­tions of your cus­tomers evolve.  Mar­ket­ing cam­paigns should be detailed and thor­ough.  Spend suf­fi­cient time research­ing your cus­tomers, your prod­uct or ser­vice and your com­peti­tors.  Under­stand­ing your cus­tomers should be your num­ber one pri­or­i­ty, how­ev­er.  Below is a quick guide on how to get start­ed with mar­ket­ing.

Step 1:  What are your busi­ness objec­tives?

What does your con­ver­sion look like?  Mean­ing, what do you want your vis­i­tors to do when they arrive at your web­site or brick and mor­tar?  Do you want them to sign up for a newslet­ter, buy a prod­uct, try a ser­vice, down­load some­thing for free or raise aware­ness?  In order to under­stand your posi­tion in the mar­ket­place, you need to know what it is that you’re try­ing to accom­plish with your busi­ness.  A sure bet would be to focus on being of ser­vice.  Build prod­ucts and ser­vices that solve a prob­lem and offer val­ue.

Step 2:  Iden­ti­fy your cus­tomers

The sec­ond step in cre­at­ing a mar­ket­ing cam­paign is to know who your cus­tomers are (this should actu­al­ly be the first step).  Are they women, chil­dren, men?  Find out your demo­graph­ic; find out what moti­vates them.  Find a niche to offer your prod­ucts to.  Once you know who they are, find out how they like to be com­mu­ni­cat­ed to and where they cur­rent­ly hang out.  Are they Face­book users?  Do they pre­fer watch­ing videos over writ­ten mate­r­i­al?  Are they cur­rent­ly sub­scribed to cer­tain mag­a­zines or blogs?  What sites do they vis­it reg­u­lar­ly.  All of this infor­ma­tion is nowa­days, read­i­ly avail­able.  (More on this top­ic).

Step 3:  Chan­nels

What chan­nels are you cur­rent­ly using and how are they work­ing out?  Depend­ing on your busi­ness, you’ll prob­a­bly have no need for all of them.  Iden­ti­fy which are the most appro­pri­ate, keep track of the ones cur­rent­ly work­ing and focus your ener­gy on those.  Are you respond­ing to all queries?  Don’t be shy or worse, dont’ be arro­gant.  Your cus­tomers will appre­ci­ate your “real­ness.”  Fol­low peo­ple back, ask ques­tions and inter­act.  Be human!

Social media diver­si­fies your vis­i­tors.  Make sure you’re spend­ing ample time on all venues cur­rent­ly in place and par­tic­i­pat­ing on key sites.  You may not be able to post or tweet 3 times per day, espe­cial­ly when your mar­ket­ing team con­sists of one or none.  But do try to respond with­in a few days and post at the very least 1–2 per week.  An aban­doned site usu­al­ly means you are closed for busi­ness and your audi­ence will even­tu­al­ly move on.  What I usu­al­ly do when I’m pressed on time is cre­ate mate­r­i­al that I can use inter­change­ably across all plat­forms.  I’ll use tid­bits or nuggets from a post to tweet.  I some­times also use blurbs from a newslet­ter to pitch to pub­li­ca­tions.  The key is to keep your ideas and con­tent fresh and use­ful.

Step 4:  Brand­ing

Are all com­po­nents inte­grat­ed?  Always keep the user expe­ri­ence in mind.  Make sure all links on your page are fresh and kept up-to-date.  Make sure your site is clean and easy to nav­i­gate.  If your site is cur­rent­ly all over the place, now is the time to tidy things up!

A quick review on SEO, Search Engine Opti­miza­tion:  Make sure your con­tent is thor­ough; use key words.  Always keep the user in mind.  Peo­ple tend to search for specifics, make sure you’re pre­cise with your words.  If some­one is look­ing for food recipes, they’re more like­ly going to be spe­cif­ic.  For exam­ple, they’ll type in, “Indi­an dish­es” or bet­ter yet, “chick­en masala recipes.”  Also take a look at how oth­er sites are cur­rent­ly rank­ing, study your com­pe­ti­tion and “bor­row” some of their lan­guage, but don’t be a full-blown copy­cat.

Here’s my favorite: design and lay­out.  If you’re sell­ing some­thing high-end, your graph­ics, col­ors and typog­ra­phy have bet­ter demon­strate just that.  You must also trans­fer this mes­sage across all chan­nels.

Do your pages make sense?  Do they have the right titles?  Are users able to nav­i­gate back to the home page or will they have to take part in a scav­enger hunt?  Please keep things neat­ly orga­nized.  I’m not only say­ing this because I suf­fer from a seri­ous case of OCD and my idea of a good time is orga­niz­ing my clos­et, but because clut­ter is not only annoy­ing, it’s also quite dis­tract­ing.  Your guests are busy.  They have oth­er sites to vis­it.  Please keep things orga­nized; keep imagery at an absolute min­i­mum so that your pages reload as fast as pos­si­ble.

Make sure all mar­ket­ing mem­bers are involved in your brand­ing efforts.  If you’re going to use a hash­tag, please use it con­sis­tent­ly and respon­si­bly.

Key mes­sage to take:  Keep your cus­tomers at the fore­front, get to know who they are and remem­ber to cre­ate prod­ucts with their needs in mind and not your own.  Make sure your con­tent is both help­ful and friend­ly.

If this arti­cle helped, if you’d like to read more posts like these, if you’d like to share your expe­ri­ences, or if you just want to say hi, please don’t for­get to leave a com­ment. 🙂 —