Speaker 1: Hey everybody, welcome back. Let's talk about how to launch a successful marketing campaign. Marketing is a lot like rocket science. You can have lofty goals, crazy ambition, crunch the numbers, but if you don't execute flawlessly, everything is going to blow up on the launch pad, you're not going to get anywhere, and you will have wasted a ton of money. Planning and launching a successful marketing campaign can be a daunting challenge, but believe me, it pays to do it right. So in this video, I'm going to share with you seven steps that are going to help you create the most effective campaign possible, avoiding everything, going up in smoke, and leaving you broke. Step one, I want you to begin with the end in mind. Analyze your business. What are you lacking? Do a little bit of a SWOT analysis, so strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, but pay close attention to the weaknesses and the threats. And then you want to identify your goals, the KPIs, the key performance indicators of your marketing campaign. These are things like brand awareness, lead generation, lead nurturing, customer acquisition, customer retention, and revenue and sales. Think about what is going to be your best case scenario after your marketing campaign, or what could be your worst case scenario after the marketing campaign. You want to really look ahead and try to predict the future to prepare yourself for setting up your campaign. Step number two is where we get into campaign planning. You have to decide on whether you're doing a promotion campaign, so that's ads, and or attraction marketing, content marketing, inbound marketing, and if it's a mix, how much of each. You also want to set your timeframe. When are you going to start? When are you going to start testing? When are you going to start running the campaign? When are you going to end it, and when are you going to evaluate it? Don't lock yourself up into unreasonable timeframes that will increase your chances of being rushed and decrease your chances of success if you don't have time to really iterate and test along the way. One of the things that's very helpful to do in planning your campaign is to set up a RACI structure, which is a R-A-C-I structure, for the team that's involved in the campaign. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. People who are responsible are the people who are going to be responsible for the ads and the content and making decisions. The people who are accountable are the ones who are going to be the accountable people for the actual results of the campaign. People who are consulted are gathering and evaluating input and feedback from other people, and they are consulted on the decisions that are being made throughout the campaign. People who are informed are actually just simply being told what's happening, and they don't particularly have any decision-making rights or input rights. This helps streamline the process, and it eliminates uncertainty about who's responsible for what during the campaign. Number three is identifying your milestones. This is figuring out and deciding how you're going to define success. What are you going to be tracking? What kind of common metrics are you going to use? So for brand awareness, you track things like traffic and impressions, shares, reach, increase in followers or subscribers, visits to your website, downloads, mentions, and media coverage. If you're trying to get lead generation, you track things like form fills and calls and contacts to your sales team. If you're looking for increasing lead nurturing, you track things like the number of follow-up touches or time to sales or close rates. If you're looking at customer acquisition, you're going to look at things like average close rates and customer acquisition costs and average sales value. If you're tracking things like customer retention, you'll look at customer lifetime value, retention rates, churn rates. And then, of course, you're also going to be tracking the metric of revenue or sales, and you do that through monthly and quarterly reports. Step number four is planning your budget. This is how much you're actually going to spend on the marketing campaign. You want to make sure that you're keeping your eye on cost per click and click conversions compared to the revenue that's being generated. For instance, if your cost to generate a conversion is $20 and your product cost is actually $50, you're not going to be in business very long if that's the way you're going about it. You also have to allow time for testing and ramp-ups. This is where you do a number of smaller ad buys and evaluate initial traction and costs and optimize creative and copy before you narrow down to the creative that's performing the best and then committing to larger budgets behind that creative. And finally, will your budget actually get you to where you want to go? You have to crunch those numbers. Step number five in setting up your marketing campaign is that you want to choose your channels. This is what channels should you be appearing on. One of the best ways to save time is to do an audit of your competition and their marketing. What platforms are they on? What does it look like they're actually spending on their marketing? Now, you also want to think about where are your customers? And this can be a hard question. One of the best ways to answer this question is to actually ask your customers. Do some quantitative consumer research to determine what are the most popular platforms that they happen to be using. What platforms do you really need to be on? Everyone wants to be everywhere, but certain platforms are more expensive than others. LinkedIn, I'm looking at you. Or some have really unreliable metrics when it comes to judging the effectiveness and success of your campaigns. Twitter, I am looking at you. Step number six is you want to execute your plan. This is where you're going to launch. And after you launch, you want to make sure that you're going into it slowly. You're testing, you're evaluating because metrics don't lie. You want to refine your creative and refine your copywriting and refine your audience targeting over time. And as you kind of narrow down and tweak your ad sets, then you want to put more money behind it in the budget. And then you want to repeat. Be sure to have all of that backend functionality set up before you start this. So make sure you have your landing pages set up, your email nurturing sequences, your customer service and your sales representatives are on call and ready to go. You want to have coverage on your phone and your DMs and your texts and your email and your social media profile communication lines. You want to have that backend functionality so when you start your marketing campaign and anyone is reaching out, taking action or contacting you, you have the mechanisms in place to respond to that. There is nothing worse for sales and the business and the brand's reputation than getting a lead and not responding appropriately. And finally, step number seven is you want to optimize your results. It's important to use data and use analytics that you're going to tweak your campaigns with for better result. You want to be sure to have the stakeholders and the employees in place that are going to be gathering and analyzing the results of your campaign. You need to be closely watching large volumes of data and interpreting them constantly. You're going to be using your ad dashboards, Google Analytics for site traffic. You're going to be looking at comments and emails and subscriptions. The list goes on. Now I frequently see clients who are glued to the analytics when the campaign is in the test mode, but once it starts running and the budget is really put behind it, they don't seem to watch it as closely and budgets can drain away while an ad set or some other activity has stopped returning really great results. And when that happens, it should really be stopped and re-looked at and things should get tweaked and refreshed. So be very careful that once your campaign starts running, you're making sure that you are staying on top of it and really continuing to look at the analytics. So in conclusion, following these seven steps are going to help you create the best chance of launching a really successful and awesome marketing campaign. And if you do it, they're going to send you right into the stratosphere and you are going to be a king of rocket science. So that's it. I hope you liked this video on how to launch a successful marketing campaign. And if you did like it, hit that subscribe button and make sure to bang that notification bell so you can get alerted when I post something new or when I go live. And if you need help with your branding or your marketing campaigns, reach out to me at philipvandusen.com and let's get your business to lift off and head right into the stratosphere. And with that, thanks again for watching. Bye for now.