#1 – Know Your Audience
For effective marketing campaigns, the first and most important thing to establish is – who is your target audience? A good way to ensure you reach your target customer is to identify this person and create a character around them.
Brand personas are useful as they help you to give your target customer a name, age, occupation, home, character traits and behaviour patterns. This level of detail allows you to envisage and know your ‘average’ customer as a real person.
You might even take this one step further and act as though every marketing activity you carry out is aimed at this person. When you write an email you imagine you are writing it to them and when you create a blog post you think about creating it for them.
#2 – Know Your Message
Once you know exactly who you are talking to, you should master the message you are trying to communicate. Effective marketing campaigns rely on concise, easy to understand and clear calls-to-action.
A call-to-action is the action and behaviour you are trying to encourage in your target customer. For instance – book an appointment, call an expert, buy online, visit in-store, etc.
Ensure that each marketing message you create includes a relevant call-to-action. Online, this might take the form of a button and data-capture form. Offline, this will rely on instructional copy and accurate information – e.g. telephone numbers.
Read More: 8 Ways to Develop an Authentic Brand Story in a Competitive Market
#3 – Get Integrated
You’ve identified who you are trying to talk to and you know what you’re going to say, but how do you say it? Integrated marketing campaigns are not new to the marketing scene. What is new is the constantly evolving array of platforms with which to reach your audience.
Consider where your target audience is and what media they are consuming. Are they B2B LinkedIn buffs or B2C Insta-lovers? Do they read The Times or Tatler? Are they flying regularly or living life on the tube? Wherever your audience lives, is precisely where you want to reach them. This might be via email marketing or social marketing, or through paid advertising.
#4 – Be Consistent
Consistency is the key to all marketing activity. If your Starbucks cup suddenly boasted a lime green logo or your M&S bag was emblazoned with Comic Sans, you’d likely feel a little unnerved. We are all creatures of habit and we thrive on familiarity. Believe it or not, knowing something is stable, consistent and reliable connects a customer to its preferred brand.
To ensure your typography, colour palette, image style and logo usage are consistent across all your channels, you should take the time to create a thorough brand style guide. This should be lived and breathed by everyone throughout your organisation. It will help to ensure each brand touchpoint is the same, strengthening your brand identity.
#5 – Reflect & Measure
Following your campaign run, it is vital to take stock of its success. Use Google Analytics, Google Search Console and social media analytics to determine your conversion rate and ROI. Your conversion rate should be measured against your calls-to-action – how many times did your target audience take the action you anticipated?
Once you’ve measured your key stats, you can attribute these to the fundamental goal of the campaign and your overall marketing aims. Were you trying to drive sign-ups to a course? Sell a particular product online? Capture email addresses for your newsletter? Assessing how well you did this will be invaluable in directing your next marketing campaign.
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