Number one, and usually the biggest mistake, is a lack of a plan on their previous campaigns. A marketing plan is straightforward, comprising a few very specific parts.
Establish what the goals are – what the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are. How many people do I want to reach? How many prospects? I need to see the prospect being defined as somebody who showed interest, the opening of an email, the click of a link.
How many of those people do I need in order to make the number of sales necessary to hit the growth numbers? Those are all KPIs that should be tracked.
Establish who the target audiences are. I’ve seen people say, well, we made these offers and the offers didn’t get any response. Well, it’s a big marketplace now and it’s very, very niched or stratified. You’re going to need to identify who you’re talking to by demographics, which is age, gender, stage of life and then by the psychographic switches, and the way that they are making their decisions to your offer.
So, we need to establish those target audiences and then plan on which tactics you’re going to use to contact each of those target audiences. Establish a timeline – beginning, middle and end of the campaign and then establish a budget. Oftentimes there’s not a clear budget that delineates, if I’m going to spend this much money, I want to get this many dollars in sales out of this campaign.
The first big problem is the lack of a plan with the goals, target audience, marketing tactics, timeline, and budget. The second biggest mistake I see is clients and prospects are not modifying the content, the emails, the landing pages, the webinars to match each target market.
If you are targeting female executives who are early in their career, they need different content than older male executives because of the way they’re seeing the world of making decisions is different. We have a core content and then we modify the content to match the personas.
And then the third big mistake that I see with my clients and prospects is that they’re either not setting time to review the progress of the campaign. They haven’t established the KPIs or they’re doing it superficially and not modifying the campaign in progress. By not reviewing KPIs, you’re dooming your campaign to lackluster performance because it’s a very rare campaign that’s perfect, right out of the box from the starting date.
No one is smarter than the marketplace, not your CMO, not your marketing consultant, not me. We must compare our original goals with our activity and our success to verify milestone dates and make modifications in order to get better results.
If you need help with marketing campaign planning or review let me know. Email me at emanuel@strategicemarketing.com to get started.