Speaker 1: Hello friends, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I make videos about marketing, career tips, and self-growth. If any of those subjects sound interesting, consider subscribing. I'd love to have you here and make a new digital friend. So today's topic is going to be how to create a marketing campaign plan. And I'm going to cover step by step what you should do from the day you start to think about and ideate the marketing campaign plan, all the way to the day that you actually go live. I decided to make this video several weeks ago when I was working with a client and I sat down to create a document to outline the step-by-step map on how to create a digital marketing campaign plan, all the steps that they need to take a look at and consider and work on before they go live. And eventually that document turned into a very useful guide in my opinion and I figured I will just share it with you because I think you can take a lot of benefit from this. So in this video I'm going to do a screen share and take you through each of the steps that I have outlined and I think that is really going to serve as a roadmap for you when you are creating your marketing campaign plans. And I highly recommend that you follow a plan when you are working on a marketing campaign because that's really half of the success already and if you have a very good outline, if you have a very good roadmap of what you are going to do, then I think you're halfway there. So have open ears for this video and if you want to take notes go grab a notebook and a pen or your laptop and as you listen you might want to pause and replay at some points or take screenshots whatever or if you don't want to do that I will also have a blog post up on my website to cover these steps so that this information is actually widely available. Before I dive into the step-by-step plan though, I just want to cover what a marketing campaign is very briefly, one sentence and then we'll get on with the screen share because I want to take you through the document and I just figured that's the easiest way I can take you through all my steps. So a marketing campaign is a strategic effort to promote a specific company goal where a combination of content elements and promotion tactics are being used. Hopefully that's clear now. All right, let's go to the screen share and I will start taking you through my steps and or outline of how to launch a successful marketing campaign. Yeah, let's get started. Don't mind the crib right behind me because we still don't have a proper home office. Number one is you have to identify your campaign goal. You have to know why you are running this campaign, why this whole preparation is for and you have to determine one main focus for this campaign. If you try to hit all birds with just one stone, it's not going to work. You're not going to succeed with it. So make sure to choose one main focus and make sure to also decide on the metrics you want to measure. How are you going to measure the success of this campaign? Is it new subscribers for your YouTube account? Is it your Facebook following? Is it to get your customers to fill out a form for you? What is the main metric of success for this campaign? You've got to determine that as well. The main point with this is you have to start with the end result you want to achieve and identify that very clearly to set your ground for success. Here I have a list of potential business goals that might apply to you or just inspire you for your next marketing campaign or just to get you thinking about it. They don't necessarily have to apply for you so don't worry if they don't. Number one I have here is branding. If you want to increase awareness of your company, product and or services in the market. Another one could be generating new leads or qualifying leads or nurturing existing leads. That is also a very important marketing campaign you could work on. It could be a direct sales campaign as well. You want to maybe actually close the deals within a short time period. Maybe you have a sales maybe you have a sale promotion or something like that that is coming up. You want to work on that. You could work on cross-selling to existing customers, upselling to existing customers, nurturing customers. You might want to generate referrals or you might want to target a training campaign. Let me do a mini pause right here and ask you if you're enjoying the video so far, if you're finding it useful. If you are please hit that like button now because I know that you might forget to do that once the video is over and I will be really sad if that happens. So please do that now and let's continue with the other steps. Number two is to identify your target audience and I debated if this was going to be number one or two but it is just as important as number one. I want to get that out. You have to know who your persona is for this campaign. You really need to know them really really well and get inside their shoes if you can. Try to master the empathy skill and don't make assumptions. Do a very very good research about them. Try to understand how they think, where they are, where they consume their information, where they spend their time, what do they spend their money on etc. You have to know them really well to understand how you can communicate with them and you also have to decide what stage of the funnel you're trying to reach. Is it where they still don't know anything about your product or company and you're trying to raise awareness of what you do and how you're going to help them or is it a campaign that targets the decision phase, the decision stage of the buyer's journey where you might be doing comparisons with other solutions or taking them through a demo whatnot. So think of the stage of the funnel you're trying to reach along with who your target audience is. Number three, determine the call to action, the CTA and what your offer is. So what is the specific action you want your audience to take after engaging with your content? Is it to go ahead and download something from your website? Is it to get a quote from you or talk to the sales team, sign up for a newsletter, follow you on LinkedIn? Whatever that is, you also have to decide what that specific one single action that you want them to take after consuming your content or coming across your campaign elements, what you want them to do. You need your content to have a purpose and you need to design all the content elements around it so that they serve that one specific desired action. Number four is check the available content that you have. So go ahead, do a content audit. You might already have that. There's actually a video on my channel about doing a content audit. So if this concept is strange to you, if it's new to you, then go ahead, check that video out. I will link it over here or here. And so what you essentially do is for number four, you audit and review all content available that you have currently for your brand and see if anything can be repurposed or used for this campaign too. So if you have any content treasures in your library, then why not use them? That is going to save you time and money. Number five, research the topic and determine your keywords. Do a keyword research, do a Google research, do a Google trends research. The goal is basically to identify how our audience searches for that specific topic. Don't just figure out the specific keyword that you want to rank for, but also do a research on how they research the topic. What are the questions they're asking when they go ahead and enter it on Google or YouTube or whatever platform they use? Or maybe they do their research offline. They go ahead, ask their friends, go to Facebook groups, whatever. So try to figure out the path and the way they describe their problems, the way they are posing that question. Next one, number six, identify a creative concept or the theme of your campaign. This doesn't have to apply for all campaigns, but it is worth considering. Just think about if there will be an overarching theme for your campaign. Another thing to think about here is if it's going to be a podcast or a video interview, for example, are you going to reach out to someone for an interview? Determine if you are going to do an outreach and how you want to plan the collaboration. So that is part of the creative concept that you want to think about here as well. And brainstorm headlines as well. Headlines are what get people interested to continue reading on and engaging with your content. So that is one of the first steps to think about even at this stage, even before you have any content elements. This could also get you inspired for the other content elements that you're going to create. Number seven, decide on the content assets timeline and theme. Big one. So you have to determine the timeline. You have to create a project plan, however you prefer to do it. You might have a project management tool that you want to use for this campaign as well. It works wonders if you want to do that. If you have a team, if you want to organize them, that is a great way to work on the timeline and the deliverables. You should also use this time or this step to allocate the resources and the team members as well. The timeline is going to help you keep accountable and on track. And just a pro tip right here is I'd highly recommend to leave some buffer for timing because things might go wrong when you have many different elements that you're working on and the production of those content elements might be slower than your expectations. So leave in some buffer for that. Decide who is going to work on the different pieces of the campaign. Maybe you have a copywriter that is going to work only on the social posts and the other ones are going to work on the gated assets or the video or the blog posts, whatever. So make sure to let them know how you plan to work on this campaign and carve out their time and make sure it fits into their schedule as well. And regarding the timeline, if you don't have a project management tool or software that you pay for or use commonly, then you might just go with a spreadsheet as well. Whatever really works for you. I know some people do it on Notion as well. This is actually a Notion page that you're seeing by the way. I am trying to explore this tool more and more. If I feel more comfortable around it, I might actually do a video about it too. It's really useful. Anyway, back to my list. So I have a list of potential content assets as well. If again, this is a new information to you. I know for most marketers, this is like common sense, but some potential content assets could be blog posts, microsite, landing page, ebook, checklist, guide, whatever, video, social media, email, PR. Are you going to pitch your story to journalists or bloggers or third party sources? Are you going to host any events? Think about that. Podcast, online advertising. So look at the list of the potential content assets and try to map out everything that you want to be created within your campaign. Number seven, think about your distribution strategy. Which channels are you going to promote and distribute your assets on? Are you going to use your website or are you going to use a third party platform? Social media, which channels? Think about it. Think about the own media, third party sources. Are you going to collaborate with a brand or another influencer? Are you going to interview someone? Will they publish on their own channels, website, so on? Make sure to think about the whole picture, understand the whole picture. Also consider the paid ads as well and which platforms, which type of ads you want to run for this campaign. So the overall distribution strategy. Number eight is creating your editorial calendar. This is going to let you know what goes live and when, and this is one of the essential templates, one of the essential documents that you are going to use for a marketing campaign. It's really essential for any marketing team, actually, because I mean, if you create content, you need an editorial calendar. Basically, that's just simple. And if you don't have an editorial calendar yet, if you need one, if you're thinking right now, how am I going to create my editorial calendar? Don't worry, I got you covered. There's a video on my channel, again, about how to create an editorial calendar. I actually take you through how I structure my calendar, how I use it, and I even share with you my template for free. If you want to check that video out, you can do so. There's also another offer that I could mention right here, is that I have an ultimate marketing template kit. So if you don't have these content audit, editorial calendar, marketing campaign planner kind of templates set up for your brand business already, then I highly, highly recommend that you go ahead and check the kit that I have for you. Essentially, it consists of the top templates that any marketer needs to have. If you don't have those templates already in your folder, then just save yourself some time and headaches and check out the kit that I have. I will drop the link in the description bar below. I think it's going to be really useful. Anyway, the editorial calendar is there to map out how to execute your campaign successfully, the timelines, when is what going live, that it is basically your map once your content elements are ready. And I don't know why I am skipping number 9 and 10 and 11 over here. I think there must be some mistake with my bullet points. So I guess this is number 9 and this is 10. Number 9 is to create the assets. So follow a strategic writing guideline for all of your assets. I hope you have something like that. If you don't, and if you're interested in learning more about the strategic writing guideline that I have for myself and my team, let me know in the comments. I might also make a video about that, too. And number 10, go live with your campaign, obviously, duh. Be a rock star, hit all of those marketing goals that you had, and let me know if everything goes successful. All right, those are all the steps that I have outlined. I hope you found this useful and helpful, and let me know if you are going to follow these steps once you're ready to create your own marketing campaign. If you have any questions about anything that I covered in the video or anything else that you want to comment about, please drop your comment down below. And again, if you forgot to hit that like button, do that now. And if you're not subscribed already, please consider that as well. And I will see you in the next video. Take care.