Committing to these steps below and following them through can create a cost effective campaign and guaranteed investment returns within a short period.
1. Make sure to define your customer
Just as important as naming your business or defining your product, it is even more important to define your customer. If you are yet to do your marketing plan within your business plan, you are missing the most important thing. Taking up this exercise now is the best thing to do. Creating your marketing plan should be focused on your unique Selling Proposition via promotions and advertising planning.
2. Know your targets
Defining your customer is one thing and knowing where to get your customer is another. Where you post your ads matters – how much customers do you generate from there? The most effective marketing campaign is the coordinated efforts across several venues and sites where your customers always visit. Having your ads on several places retains the strength of your message and your visibility in these sites. Cross-promoting complementary sites to your visitors will show your visibility in these sites too and this will provide reinforcement to your message. Areas to consider in this regard should be Holiday Specific sites which are often well promoted. You might have a different view too. Considering websites, newsletter or social media for your ads, your focus should be on the search engine placement, the traffic, external linking to this site, the types of messages in the current ads and the quality of the messages. Having a knowledge of these will reveal to you if;
You already have competitors on this site. The advertising is complementing your business. If the ads are completely related or unrelated to your business or calculated traffic of the site. With this, you will know if your message is fit to be on this site.
3. Set and examine your budget
It shouldn’t be surprising when some people think setting your budget should be the first move. But in reality, you can only create a better budget for your online business when you already know what is involved and you have a good idea about what it will cost. You really can’t do this when you have not figured out your targets so you can see why the idea of placing budget first may not work well if you need real online marketing campaign success. The mistake most people make is, they need the best for their budget without any knowledge what the best will cost. If you already have a budget made, going back to your marketing campaign sheet and totaling all your intended ad posts cost will reveal what your chances are, either below your budget or exceeds your budget. Until you have a clear understanding of your overall online marketing campaign cost, don’t be too sure about your budget. Once you have a clear list of what ads you intend to post, you would be able to prioritize them going with your budget as to where you will get the most exposure if your budget is below the estimated ad posts cost. Also, if you are involved in Pay-Per-Click advertising, it’s advisable to always ‘log in’ daily for the first seven days (1 week) to monitor the results of your ads. This is just to ensure you are paying for results. Make sure to ask if your payments cover ad swaps and bartering and consider this as part of your budget.
4. Organizing your Ad content
It’s true that online marketing works but best when the focus is on one or two things at a time. You may have different kinds of products but choose one of these or two that are attractive enough to your target market and this will do a lot of campaign magic than collecting all items and writing contents all about them. Most of your target customers just want to read something short and interesting with a beautiful image to behold. Now the question you should ask yourself is “what actually am I selling”? a product or a service. Make sure what you are selling is beneficial and attractive enough to capture the target’s emotional interest. For instance, if you are selling cosmetics, you are selling beauty and using ads that relate to the customer will have the most success. Next ask yourself again, “What am I selling”? It’s rarely the product or service. You are selling a benefit, something that registers at the emotional level. If you are selling fishing rods, for example, you’re selling the excitement of successfully landing that monster in the lake. If you are selling cosmetics, you’re selling beauty. Create many emotional words relating to the product- stimulating enough, addictive, relaxing, comforting and fun. You must be able to attract your target or customer.
5. Tracking and Monitoring Your Ads
In maintaining an effective marketing campaign, it’s essential to track and react to your campaign successes. Right from your Website Stats to the PPC Stats, there are diverse ways to check and determine what is really working out for you as planned and which isn’t working. With absolute concentration, you should be able to learn much about your ads and how to sharpen them for best results ever. The most effective way to track your campaign ads is using tracking services that help track your activities. There are special advertising management services which help you track your ad performances, free or less costly services that are relatively very easy to implement which give powerful ad tracking management and support. Note that some venues such as Facebook ads provide their own ads reports. The KEY Ensure that on daily basis for the first 14 days, you keep reviews of your different ads. Make an inventory of this in a tracking sheet and search out for any patterns. Which of the ads are performing, where they are performing and why are they performing there? From here you can easily detect which ads are not working and remove or replace them. Featured photo credit: business2community.com via cdn.business2community.com
