Before we get into the nitty gritty execution of the perfect marketing campaign, you need to fully understand what a campaign is. The dictionary explains it perfectly:
marketing campaign
noun
an organised course of action to promote and sell a product or service.
“the company has launched its new global marketing campaign today”
Businesses run different campaigns for a number of different products and services. Marketing campaigns can also run over a different amount of time, for example, a business with seasonal products may run spring, summer, autumn and winter campaigns throughout the year. A service based business could run a ‘wedding campaign’ from September – March to pre–empt wedding season. We make decisions on when to begin a campaign based on any specific dates and deadlines and how far in advance a target audience needs to know about it.
To help with this blog post, we have made up a company and a campaign. Our fake business is called Digital-Blah Tech LTD and we offer IT support for business. We will be planning a campaign to launch our new automation service that will be running for three months, below we look into the tools that we will be using for our campaign.
Audience
Step one of a marketing campaign is to understand who your target audience is. Digital-Blah Tech LTD (DBTL for short) are a B2B service. Our audience are medium/large businesses who require technical support for their offices. Our new service is aimed at office/operation managers who want to save time and money while also improving team comms by automating their IT systems.
Social Media
In 2017, the total number of social media users in the UK reached over 39 million users. That is a lot of people who we can get our business in front of. It’s a great way for us to communicate the benefits of our new automation system to people who haven’t heard of us before.
We will be planning one or two posts per week, to each platform (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and LinkedIn) but will pay special attention to LinkedIn as this is where our target audience will most likely be consuming business-related content.
Email Marketing
Here at DBTL we have been building a mailing list for years on our website and asking existing customers if they would like to hear about our latest news and offers when we speak to them on the phone.
So, we want to tell them all about our exciting new automation service and how this will further benefit their business.
As we know who on our mailing list is an existing customer (thanks to segmenting data) we can offer them a discount on our new service, while we send a separate email to those who signed up to our mailing list but have never used our services before, filled with customer testimonials and reasons for them to use us.
We’ll schedule one email each month to our list about our new service and other exciting things our team has been up to in this time.
Paid Ads
To spread the word about our fabulous automation service and how it’s already helping a number of our customers save time and money, we will plan some paid advertising on both social media and Google.
The Google Ads (Adwords) will help people who may have seen our social media posts or email campaigns find more information about our new service, while also highlighting our business to people looking for automated IT systems.
The social media ads will help us reach our target audience as we will be able to select the location, job title and industries of the people we want to know about our service.
We will make sure to plan at least one ad per month to each channel, and keep an eye on them while the campaign is running.
Blogs & Content Marketing
Over the three months this campaign is live, we will produce three pieces of content that are relevant to our new service. During the first month, we will publish a blog post on our website titled ‘The Benefits Of Automated IT In Your Office”, which we will share to social media and include in some of our marketing emails.
Next, we will post a video to YouTube showing how easy it is to use our new system. We will put this video on the ‘Automated Service’ page on our website and also include it in an email and our social media posts.
In month three we will publish another blog post called “The Role Of IT In Team Productivity” which we will again speak about on our social media platforms and in our emails.
SEO
As we knew we had a new service launching, we made sure to update our website and optimise it in plenty of time (6 months to a year) before our campaign began. We did this so that people searching for IT automation services would see that it is a service we offer and can learn more about our company. We also included a sign up form where the visitor to the site could leave their details to receive updates about the soon to launch Automated services.
The other marketing activities we have been doing during this campaign (social media, email marketing and creating blogs and content) have also really helped our company ranking because we are driving lots of different traffic in lots of different ways to our website.
Analysis
DBTL have spent a lot of precious time and money on this marketing campaign for our new service, so we want to know how well everything is working and whether our audience is responding to our efforts.
We do this by making sure we can track the traffic on our new service page and see how people are interacting with it. We may even add an ‘Event’ in Google Analytics to see exactly how many people have filled in our contact form to speak to our team about the new service, and how they came to find our website. This helps us identify our best performing aspects of our campaign so we are able to concentrate on them for any future campaigns and service launches.
When creating the perfect marketing campaign, it’s important to utilise all of the tools at your disposal to give yourself the best chance of bringing in new business. The key is good planning, preparation and research. If you have any questions about a marketing campaign you are planning or would like some help, get in touch.