Marketing projects are usually filled with potential pitfalls, have poorly-defined goals, and might not even have a start or end date. And that’s a big problem, which can often help contribute to the failure of the project. So how can you avoid those pitfalls and make sure that your big marketing project can be safely labeled a success? We’ve sourced some amazing tips for success from top marketing analysts to help give you the blueprints you need to run a productive campaign.
Goalsetting
The major mistake campaigns make is not setting measurable and tangible goals. And most often, those goals should have a deadline attached. It doesn’t need to be big: it could be anything from 10 new subscribers in a weak or 50 new Facebook likes in a month, or 5% more sales in a quarter. In all cases, this goal should be something that all members of the marketing team feel is accomplishable. A goal that no one on the team feels can be met will have people going to work with a defeated attitude right out of the gate, so avoid that in all cases!
Set Up Tracking
Of course, once you have a goal, you need to be able to track your progress! But how do you know if additional subscriptions or sales are coming from your marketing efforts? Many business owners and marketers can quickly have their marketing efforts frustrated if there’s no easy way to track the benefits of their work. Often, this will require the use of tools like Kissmetrics or Hootsuite. These tools can give you far deeper information and data than can be found, say, on a social media website itself. And just as with good accounting, it’s good to have numbers confirmed with two sources.
Consider Your Budget
Almost all marketing campaigns have a budget… if sometimes a small one. And your budget should absolutely direct your efforts. If you have a small budget, for example, like $200 or under, you should focus that budget on one medium rather than reduce your efficacy over multiple streams. And instead of blowing a budget all at once, you should portion it into groups based on segments of time. For example, a month-long marketing campaign should segment its budget by week. Doing this can usually help avoid over-spending, and break the campaign down into smaller tasks.
Use Collaboration & Project Management Tools
Most campaigns which rely on a team rather than an individual usually break down because of poor communication, goal setting, and task distributions. As silly as it sounds, these tools can help keep everyone on-task and under-deadline, and even make communication and collaboration easier. There are dozens of such programs out there, too, so it’s usually not difficult to find one which meets your team’s needs. From Clarizen to Netsuite to CampaignMonitor, these multiple options can be optimized for large or small teams, and even offer some client-facing capabilities like easy email campaigns or reporting. Whenever possible, maximize your value by choosing a piece of software that can multitask for you.
Refine Your Tactics
Not utilizing a tactical approach to marketing campaigns is one of the problems which can lead to a campaign’s slow and miserable death by failure. For example, content marketing isn’t really a great tactic for an online store, and free promo subscriptions aren’t a great idea for a small web-blog wanting to make it big. Use tactics which are proven for the subject business’s industry, and which can directly impact the goal! For example, if the goal is more subscriptions, study the habits and tools which currently gain subscriptions and market in ways which either increase the subscription rate of current visitors or gain a large enough percentage of new visitors to reach the desired goal.
