Marketing campaigns are an exciting challenge to create and execute. They involve finding the right audience, identifying your audience’s need or want, presenting your company’s solution, and overcoming any obstacles that prevent them from making a purchase. After you have pulled together a great campaign, you want to make the most of your time and financial investment. Let’s look at 6 steps to maximize your marketing campaign.
Identify Your Target Audience
The first step to increasing your marketing campaign’s impact is to make sure you are targeting the right people. Not everyone in your target audience will be interested in your offer, so it’s important to identify the best candidates and remove the people who are least likely to respond. Getting your message in front of the right people will have a positive impact on your response rates.
Finding the right people requires analyzing your marketing list and finding common demographics, lifestyle, and behavioral data among your best customers. Through the analysis process, you will not only identify the best people, but you will also gain a greater understanding of who they are. This information will help you create more relevant marketing materials that resonate with your audience.
Determine What Channels to Use
Once you know who you are targeting, it’s time to look at the best places to advertise. Which social media platforms do your customers use? What websites do they visit? Do they use connected TV or streaming radio? Are you able to reach them through direct mail or email? Knowing where your customers are helps you make informed decisions about where to invest your advertising spend.
Use Multiple Channels
In marketing, it takes multiple touches before someone is willing to act on your offer. The standard rule of thumb has been to get your message in front of your audience at least 7 times. In the digital marketing age, it’s now recommended that you reach your audience somewhere between 10-25 times depending on your business and offer.
The best way to do this is to use multiple channels such as direct mail, email, social, display, and connected TV ads. Each channel will help build brand recognition and momentum for the overall campaign. Using multiple channels will also support the new way consumers shop.
Many consumers will receive a direct mail piece and checkout the company online, or a digital ad may inspire them to check out the product in store. They may start the checkout process from a social ad and finish it through an email. Shopping is a multi-channel experience, so if you can stay in front of your customers across the different mediums, you will have a much better chance of closing the deal.
Create a Unified Look & Message
People are exposed to thousands of advertisements every single day. How can you stand out in a sea of ads, especially when you need multiple touches to convert a customer? A key to increasing your campaign’s impact is to create a consistent look and message across all channels. Consistency helps you create brand recognition and build trust.
For example, let’s say a consumer receives your direct mail piece and later sees your ad on their Facebook feed. A couple days later, they receive an email from you and then encounter an ad on their connected TV. Each one of these ads has the same look and offer which helps the consumer recall the ad. Because the ads are unified, each is able to build momentum for the over campaign and help get the consumer closer to the purchase point.
Track Responses
Make sure you setup the ability to track responses across every channel. This will help you see where people encounter the ad, at what point they make a purchase, and to see which channels are performing best. If your social ads start outperforming your display ads, you may want to shuffle funds around to support the higher performing channel. You should track responses all throughout the campaign and be ready to make adjustments as needed.
Because the buying experience is usually scattered across multiple channels, it’s good to track who you targeted, what channels you reached them on, and who responded. This will provide clarity on your overall campaign’s ROI. Just because someone clicked on your pay-per-click ad and made a purchase doesn’t mean that was the first ad they were exposed to. They may have gotten an email and 3 social ads prior to clicking. Limiting your “success” results to crediting the final channel a purchase was made on can give you a skewed look at the buyer’s journey. Many companies miss the real impact of their campaign because they didn’t track individuals across all of their marketing channels.
Retarget Interested and Unresponsive
To fully maximize your marketing campaign, don’t forget to retarget the people who showed interest but didn’t make a purchase. They are now familiar with who you are and what you have to offer. If you can stay in front of them, they will be more likely to choose your company when they are ready.
You can also retarget the people who didn’t respond to see if your messages are being received. Are you able to move them to the “showed interest” category? Do they continue to ignore your ads? If you’ve targeted them several times with no response, they may not be a goo fit. When that happens, you can remove them from the list and focus on other prospects.
Ready to maximize the potential of your marketing campaign? Whether you need to identify the best households to target or launch your campaign across multiple digital channels, we are here to help you reach your marketing goals. Let us know how we can support you.