AFFILIATE OR PRODUCTS MARKETING CAMPAIGN

To put up a good marketing campaign for your business, here are few steps that I will suggest.

1) Know how your marketing campaign fits into your marketing plan.
Ideally, before you plan a marketing campaign, you have a marketing plan for your business. (If you don't, writing the Marketing Plan will lead you through the process.) The marketing plan is your master plan for marketing your small business. It provides the full picture of your marketing objectives and strategies for your target market in your products and/or services. The marketing campaign, on the other hand, is one small piece of your marketing plan, a marketing action designed to achieve a particular marketing objective. When you know how your marketing campaign fits into your overall marketing plan, you know who your target market is and how you might best communicate with them.

 

2) Set your marketing campaign objective and parameters.
What do you want your marketing campaign to achieve? That's the marketing campaign objective. You want to be as specific as possible. Not just, "I want more sales", but how many and of what product or service? You can think of parameters as the details of the objective. Time is the most common parameter that needs to be included as marketing campaigns lose their effectiveness over time. (Even Tony the Tiger had to be retired eventually.) So a common marketing campaign objective formula is: what will be achieved + how long will the marketing campaign run? For example: Sales of face beauty marks will increase 50% in three months.

3) Determine how you will measure success.
What metrics are you going to use? How will you tell if your marketing campaign has succeeded or not? Obviously, if I have a marketing campaign objective such as "Sales of face beauty marks will increase 50% in three months" the metric I'm going to use to measure the success of my marketing campaign is the number of sales made over the three month period. But the number of sales may not be an appropriate metric at all if my marketing objective is to increase the awareness of my brand or to improve my website's search engine page ranking. For tracking online marketing efforts, you can use Google Analytics. Methods of Tracking Offline Marketing Efforts by Laura Lake, About.com Marketing, explains some common ways to measure the success of your offline marketing campaign. Don't forget to establish or note a baseline for whatever metric you've chosen; you'll need it to measure your progress.

4) Set your marketing campaign budget.
How much money you have to spend on your marketing campaign will greatly affect the marketing strategies you choose so you need to set the marketing budget first. Obviously, a Superbowl TV ad is much more costly than an ad on local television or in a magazine. I advise you not to depend on free advertising and promotion strategies for your small business. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest mistakes small business owners make. This is not to say that all free marketing strategies are bad. But there is always a cost to marketing, even if the cost is only time, and your time may be much better spent. Always think first; is this the best/ most effective/ most convincing way to reach my customer? These ways usually cost money so resign yourself to spending money on your marketing campaign. You don't necessarily have to spend a lot, but you do need to spend some.

5) Choose your marketing strategies to communicate with the customers.
What communication channels are you going to use? Email? Direct mail? Pay-per-click online advertising? Note that some communications channels are going to be better suited to your target market than others. For instance, placing radio ads may be a complete waste of money if your target market doesn't regularly listen to the radio. Think about your target market's haunts and habits when you're choosing channels to reach them. Where do they spend their time? Where are they most likely to see or hear and pay attention to information about your products and/or services? In a magazine? On a bus bench? On their iPhone or Blackberry? So far I've explained how your marketing plan and your marketing campaign relate, how to set your marketing campaign objective, how you'll tell if your marketing campaign is a success, the importance of setting your marketing campaign budget, and selecting marketing channels and strategies suitable to your target market (see page one of this article). It's time for the "Just Do It" part of the marketing campaign.

6) Create a time line/action plan.
Write down what exactly you’re going to do and when in your marketing campaign. It doesn't have to be elaborate, but writing it down will greatly increase the chances that you follow through and give you records to use when you go to evaluate the success of your marketing campaign. For instance, suppose you are selling bicycle seats designed to be more comfortable than most. You might come up with a marketing campaign such as: “Find comfort on your bike”.  Now that's about as simple a marketing campaign as you can have. My point is, they can be simple. Simple is fine if it gets results. This is also a great example of a marketing campaign that it would be easy to jazz up. Suppose, for example, that there was a local person who was going to be in the bike race that was willing to wear a jersey with my business name and logo on it for the cost of a free bike seat. Suppose as well that she was willing to be the face of an online marketing campaign, whether free or for a price, and I could then set up a Facebook page and Twitter account about her training for the race (and, of course, promoting my bike seats). On race day, I could tweet about her progress. See how easy? And all for less than $2000. You could also get more promotion benefit out of your race sponsorship by advertising in more places, such as buying banner ads on bike-related websites, and/or ads in appropriate ezines and magazines.

7) Do it. Write your ad copy.
Firm up your dates. Place your ads. Search for and approach someone to be the face of your online
marketing campaign. Whatever actions your marketing campaign involves, execute; do; activate. Go back to your action plan timeline and check items off, writing in the date that you complete them. It will keep you organized and you'll love the feeling.

8) Measure your results.
When the marketing campaign is over, it's time to see how successful it was. Go back to your marketing objective, measure what you've chosen to measure to determine the marketing campaign's success and see how it's done. Suppose that my marketing objective for my bike seats marketing campaign was to increase my sales of bike seats 25% over four months. It would be a simple matter after the fact to compare my May, June, July, August and September sales figures and do the math.

9) Tweak and repeat as necessary.
Once you've measured the results of your marketing campaign, you'll be able to make decisions about the marketing strategies you've used and future marketing campaigns. Suppose that my bike seat marketing campaign increased bike seat sales 41%. I would call it wildly successful and decide to repeat it again next year. Assuming I had the tracking in place to know which marketing strategy produced which results, I could tweak my marketing campaign accordingly. If I had the data that showed that only
2% of my increased sales came from my Twitter and Facebook strategies, I may decide not to bother with that aspect of this marketing campaign next year. Or I might decide to repeat the whole marketing campaign as designed and see if the results for these two marketing strategies improve. Of course, my sales results for the months involved may show no improvement or even a decline, making this marketing campaign a bust. That happens sometimes, too. I might have to go back and do some serious revamping or even scrap the whole bike race sponsorship campaign. But if I've set up my marketing campaign properly and kept records of what I’ve been doing, at least I have data to make these kinds of marketing decisions. The Best Marketing Campaign In a way, any marketing campaign is better than none, because it means you're directing your small business marketing efforts rather than just casting blindly here and there. But the best marketing campaign is the marketing campaign that gets the results that you want, and that takes some planning and a coordinated effort.