Depending on how you approach, getting to plan a new marketing campaign and building out a media plan for your advertising can be fun and exciting, stressful and anxiety-inducing, or a mix of both.
Luckily, if you break your planning into manageable steps, you’ll find it’s fairly easy to map out your campaign and determine your chances of success.
Since ‘marketing campaign’ can have a lot of meanings, in this case, we mean a marketing initiative across one or more channels that work towards the same final goal, such as raising brand awareness in a new market, generating sales during a promotion, or signing up new customers.
Determine What Would Be A Successful Outcome For Your Campaign
Before you even get started, you should already be thinking about where you want to end up. Map out when your campaign will be active, how much you would be able to spend, and what you’d like your marketing campaign to achieve. Be sure to use hard numbers as much as possible.
Maybe you have a fashion ecommerce site and you are holding a weekend sale on shoes. You would like to start advertising one day before the sale starts to generate excitement without hurting business leading up to the sale, and you want your ads to be active and highly visible the whole time the sale is running. After checking your finances, you determine that you can spend up to $5,000 on this campaign.
You know you want to sell 1,000 shoes that sell for on average $50 each, you also want to get at least a $5 return for every dollar spent on marketing to stay profitable, so your cost per conversion shouldn’t exceed $10.
Here’s what we have after Step 1:
Campaign Schedule: Friday through Sunday
Campaign Budget: $5,000
Campaign Goals: 1,000 conversions, $10 CPA, 5 ROAS
One thing you notice is that to sell 1,000 shoes for $10 each in marketing spend, you would need a $10,000 budget. We’ll come back to this later, but this is a sign you might not be able to achieve all your goals with this campaign.
Build Your Audience Segments And Targeting Strategy
Now that you know what you’d like to achieve with your marketing campaign, your next step is to pinpoint the people you would like to reach.
For that same ecommerce merchant, as our campaign is highly focus on conversions, your top priority audience might be:
- People who bought shoes from you last season or last year
- People who have recently viewed the items going on sale, but didn’t buy them
- People who are shopping for shoes online
- People who are interested in fashion even if they are not actively shopping for new shoes.
You’ll notice that each of those segments has a different way to be targeted. For your past customers, you would use either your database information or audiences that you’ve built within various ad platforms to remarket to these customers. Your website visitors will also be targeted by audiences built into the ad platform based on your tracking setup.
The people who are shopping online for shoes are considered to be an intent audience because it is related to their current intentions, which change frequently. The audience of fashion-minded individuals is an interest audience because they are being targeted on their interests which remain more static over time.
Since these people are different, you’ll want to set different goals and craft different messages for each of them. For example, you might expect your top priority audiences to beat your target ROAS, so your lower priority audiences would be able to have poorer performance while keeping your whole campaign on target.
Here’s what we have after Step 2:
Top audiences: Past customers and current product viewers.
Secondary audience: People with the intention of buying shoes.
Low priority audience: People interested in fashion mixed in
Location: Top-performing cities according to your data or wherever shipping is available.
Outline Your Channels
With a budget, goals, and an audience in mind, you’re ready to review platform fits for your campaign.
First things first, look at what you can afford, every campaign could benefit from a Super Bowl ad placement, or ads on a wide variety of channels, but most campaigns can’t afford it and don’t really need it for their success.
For our Shoe Sale Campaign, we only have $5,000 to spend, this means we need to restrict ourselves to just a few channels so as not to spread our budget to thin. We also want to ensure we get our message out on any free channels we can broadcast on, namely, email and organic social media.
Next, think about where your audience can best be reached when they’re looking for what you’re selling. Search engines and social networks are an obvious choice for many campaigns because of their wide reach and their ability to serve ads to people searching for the products we’re selling or, to serve ads on social media in people’s newsfeeds and other placements.
Programmatic networks and Google Display can reach people with banner ads as they browse the web and use apps. Even Facebook’s audience network can place ads outside Facebook’s own properties for wider reach and added value for your campaigns.
Many platforms, like Google, Bing, Facebook, and Pinterest also accept catalogs or product feeds for shopping campaigns that can work extremely well for the type of sale we want to promote.
We’ve decided then for this campaign we have enough budget to try a few channels, but not too many, and we definitely want to run shopping or catalog campaigns on the platforms we select. We also want a small search campaign for people who are searching for shoe sales. And we want to serve visual ads to our top priority audiences on display networks and social media.
Here’s what we have after Step 3:
Channels (this is the type of ad we’ll run): Shopping, Search, Social, Display, Email
Platforms (the advertising platforms we’ll use): Search engines, Social networks and display networks.
Budget Split: 70% Shopping Campaigns, 10% Search, 10% Display, 10% Social.
Step 4: Set your Message
Now that you know roughly what you want to spend, who you want to speak to, and where you’ll be targeting them, you can plan out the messaging that fits with your campaign.
Here are a few key points to keep in mind when preparing your ads and messages:
- Review the requirements for the platforms and ad placements you want to run before you start building your assets to save time and ensure your ads can be used the way you want.
- Review your internal capabilities and the cost of building the ads
- Ensure all of your ads include the following elements no matter who they are targeted to and on what platform:
- Branding: Your chance to stand out as a company.
- Specific value proposition, offer or promotion: Let people know why they should consider you.
- Call to action: How can your potential customers follow through?
- Attention to detail: It goes without saying, but your ads should be free of mistakes, this is an important chance to make an impression with your target audience, so be sure it’s the right impression.
Here’s what we have after Step 4:
We want all our ads to include our brand name or logo, details about our shoe sale, a Shop Now/Shop Online call to action, and we know we want our ads to look great and be free of spelling and grammar mistakes.
Put it all Together
Now that you’ve decided on your goals, dates, audience, platforms, messages, and ad formats, it’s time to estimate your potential results to see if you can realistically meet your goals.
When trying to estimate performance for a new campaign, historical data is normally your best place to look. What happened when you ran these types of ads in the past, what results did you get? Were there indications that you could have invested more into the same campaigns to get similar results, or had you maxed out your audiences?
If you don’t have historical data, you can also use tools provided by the ad platforms, like Google’s Keyword Planner, to get an estimate of performance, or search online for benchmark data.
If your estimates match or exceed your goals, move on to execution! Otherwise, go back to the drawing board to see where you can improve your plan to give it a chance for success.
For our shoe store, we would look at past shopping and catalog campaigns first to see if they produced the $10 CPAs and/or 5 ROAs results in the past at similar budget levels. If they did, we’re off to a good start for our campaigns. Otherwise, we’ll need to take a closer look at our other channel choices to see if we should be investing more of our budgets there to start.
If you want to learn more about planning great marketing campaigns, feel free to reach out to us.
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