Sometimes we miss our big opportunity to take advantage of success we didn’t anticipate – don’t let that happen to you and your business.
Marketing Campaigns Are Like Stories
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Marketing campaigns are like that, too. Certain things happen at different times – otherwise the story doesn’t make sense: the order of events and their dependencies matter. A story that’s read out of order doesn’t work – it doesn’t fulfill the intention of the writer and it isn’t fun for the reader. That’s true for a marketing campaign as well.
Campaigns Are Defined by Business Objectives and Timing
Marketing campaigns are a set of actions designed to achieve a result for your business: get more visibility, increase revenues by 10% this quarter, improve traffic to your website or your store by a certain percent this month, sell more of a particular product, or any number of objectives you may have.
Marketing can be thought of as a series of mini campaigns and major campaigns that line up to consistently produce a revenue stream for your business.
YOU Are in Charge
Here’s the challenge: for marketing campaigns, mini or major, to be successful you have to know both where you’re headed and what you are going to make happen with your prospect when they get there. When you’re developing a marketing campaign, you are the writer – the creator of the universe of that marketing campaign. Your prospects are the ‘readers’. You’re creating an experience for them and they may jump on board or they may not. If they do jump on board, you determine where they’re going, what that could feel like, and where they land.
What a Successful Campaign Sequence Looks Like
All of this may seem obvious, but it isn’t always. First let’s look at a successful campaign. Campaign #1: Say you run a Facebook Ad campaign that captures the attention of your prospective market. They love it! They click on it and sign up. You set it up so that you’ve offered something free for them if they signed up for your email list. And it was a big success because they connected with your message, followed your call to action and you achieved your objective.
An Incomplete and Unsuccessful Campaign
Now let’s look at something that is a mix of success and not. Campaign #2: You run a Facebook Ad campaign to see if your market is interested in your business. They love it! The ad is designed to get likes for your page. So you get lots of likes – great right? Well, maybe. Now you have lots of likes but an uncertain path in front of you to do anything with them. You don’t have email addresses (and email is still the BEST way of getting people to take action that involves buying anything or signing up for something), and Facebook has made it very hard to get your business page posts in front of your ‘likes’. While you have a lot of likes, you now have a lot more work in front of you to convert those likes into something that contributes to your revenue. You’ll probably have to run more ads and make them just as compelling – not an easy thing to do.
3 Key Success Factors for Marketing Campaigns
The problems with Campaign #2 were:
- Not having an action people could take,
- While they were inspired by your call to action,
- That would move you a lot further in the direction of getting more revenue.
Said another way: when your ad or your content really inspires people and they take action, you need to be ready to receive that action in a way that leads to something for your business. Just trying something out sometimes leads to a big response, and then where are you? You’re definitely not writing your own ending – mostly because you weren’t ready to be successful.
You need to have every step mapped out in case you have a hit on your hands, because creating another hit isn’t easy. And missing it is really a bummer.
Do. Or do not. There is no try. – Yoda
Be ‘All In’ When You Run a Marketing Campaign
Be serious when you run campaigns – be ‘all in’ – don’t assume that you may not get a response – don’t just ‘give it a try’. Think it all the way through and create the ending you’d really like to happen if your campaign exceeded all your expectations.
