Marketing Campaign Planning: 5 Considerations To Avoid Wasting Time and Money
Define a Measurable Marketing Objective
With the abundance of channels and platforms at your disposal — it’s easy to get overwhelmed with marketing planning. Not to mention waste a lot of time and money executing ill-fated marketing campaigns.
To avoid confusion and improve your marketing results, it’s important to clearly define your marketing objective in advance. Because you’re not going to achieve your marketing goal if you don’t know the specific actions you need to take to accomplish it.
Is your objective to increase brand recognition? Or is it sales growth? If customers don’t know about your brand, you have an awareness problem. But if prospects who are already aware of your product and are buying from your competitors, you have a consideration problem. And the marketing strategies employed to achieve each of these objectives are quite different.
Only after you’ve defined your marketing objective can you determine how to measure it and start planning your marketing campaign.
Identify Your Target Market and Distinguish Your Unique Positioning
Essentially all marketing strategy is built on segmenting, targeting, and positioning (STP). It’s a three-step framework that helps you analyze and assemble your customers into identifiable groups for more effective marketing. It not only helps you segment and target customers but also develop an appropriate and effective strategic positioning statement that conveys the unique value proposition your product offers a specific customers segment.
Segment Your Customers
Customer segmentation is the process of dividing customers into groups based on shared characteristics, so you can deliver more relevant and effective marketing messages to those individual groups. It allows you to get inside the minds of your customers, see their perspective, understand their needs, and tailor a marketing offer that communicates your product’s distinct value in an enticing way.
They key is limiting the segment so that the needs and behaviors of the group are homogenous enough to act on. The more precisely you target a customer segment, the more accurately you tailor your marketing message.
Consumer segment variables include demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic characteristics. B2B markets also employ these segmentation strategies in addition to “firmographics” — think demographics for organizations such as industry, company size, revenue, and various buying committee roles.
Define Your Target Market
Defining the target customer segment has a direct influence on what you say, who you say it to, how you say it, when you say it, and which channels you use to say it. Start by clearly defining the customer segment you’re targeting and recognizing what gives you the unique ability to satisfy that customer segment in particular. Target customers not only by personal characteristics but also in terms of delivering promotional messages via the channels and platforms they prefer. This also helps guide the selection of appropriate channels to deliver your marketing message directly to that customers segment.
Uncover Your Strategic Positioning
After defining the target market, you can then position your product so that it resonates in the minds of those customers. Competitive positioning is a clear expression of how you differentiate your product — they way it fills a particular customer need that your competitors don’t.
Your strategic positioning should answer three essential questions: Who is my customer? What are their needs? How is my product uniquely suited to satisfy their needs? The end result of competitive positioning is a customer-focused value proposition, the compelling reason why the target market should but your product.
Your positioning strategy is one of the most important marketing decisions you’ll make. A well-crafted strategic positioning statement will help guide the rest of your marketing planning. Conversely, if you do a poor job of competitive positioning, your prospects will be confused as to the benefit your product offers over your competitors’.
Use our Strategic Positioning Framework to uncover and clarify the unique value your product or service provides to each of your targeted customer segments.
Understand Where Your Marketing Funnel is Leaking
The marketing funnel and customer journey are related tools help you gain a better understanding of your customers and provide actionable insights toward increasing the number of customers who purchase your product.
The concept of the customer funnel is a visual metaphor dividing up the stages of the buying process to better understand each stage that your customers go through — from awareness to purchase. You’ll have more customers at the top of the funnel (awareness) than at the bottom (purchase) losing potential customers as they “leak” out of your funnel along the way.
A simple marketing funnel includes the three most common stages of the buying process: awareness, consideration, and purchase. At each stage of the funnel, there are different ways to reach and influence consumers. This provides a useful way to think about the changing mindsets your customers may be going through as they move through the funnel.
Awareness: Consumers may not be aware of your product. The goal at this stage is to introduce yourself and help them get a sense of the unique value your brand offers.
Consideration: Consumers area aware of your brand when considering a product for their needs. You’ve made it to the short list they’re considering as a solution, along with some of your competitors.
Purchase Stage: You’ve convinced consumers of your product’s unique value and they’re ready to buy. Unfortunately, there may be certain barriers which prevent them from actually making the purchase. Your goal at this stage is to alleviate as much friction as possible.
Depending on your company or industry you may have different stages with different labels. And for B2B firms with a sales force, you’ll likely have a multi-step purchase funnel that the sales team uses to convert leads. Nevertheless, identifying the specific stages of the buying process for your product can help you evaluate where your current marketing efforts are working and where you may be losing customers.
So, take the time to map out the different stages of your own customer funnel. Then, think of the customer mindset as they move through the funnel. Considering which parts of the funnel customers could be leaking out of provides a more concrete way to deploy marketing strategies and optimize them later.
In some cases, instead of a top-down funnel the sales funnel may function like a loop. After purchasing, customers may return to purchase again and again while influencing others to do the same.
Map Your Customer’s Journey
Mapping the customer journey helps you to understand and visualize a customer’s first-hand experience as they learn about and interact with your brand across various touchpoints. From a customer’s first contact with your brand, all the way through purchase, the customer journey map details every marketing channel and highlights how prospects engage with your brand.
Think about your customers and what a typical journey may involve as they move from awareness to actual purchase. The focus is to visualize every section of the journey to identify customer needs, questions, worries, and barriers to purchasing throughout the buying process.
Keep in mind the customer journey isn’t necessarily sequential. Customers may switch channels, jump over certain parts of the funnel and repeat others.
The key is to reflect on the rough spots and the places where customers are dropping off to uncover missed opportunities and identify some specific pain points you can improve upon as customers move through different parts of the funnel. This allows you to allocate enough budget and attention to the right places in the right channels to reach your customers and communicate more effectively with them.
Use Quantifiable Marketing Metrics To Measure Success
Marketing, especially digital marketing, is highly trackable providing very granular data on your customers and their behaviors. There are a ton of metrics you can use to get a sense of how effective each of these channels is and to guide your decision making. And although metrics are critically important, it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking you know a lot about your customers – when in reality you don’t know that much. Or what to do with that data.
For example, tracking page visits doesn’t tell you the number of customers who end up purchasing your product. There may be a positive correlation between the number of people that visit your page and the number of purchases. Bu that doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s important to dig deeper and understand what the actual customer behavior looks like.
The key is pause and ask yourself exactly what type of behaviors matter to the bottom line of your business and then find a way to measure them. Clearly define what constitutes success before launching your marketing campaign. Then choose the quantifiable metric you will use and the tool you will use to measure/monitor it. Even unsuccessful campaigns can serve as a learning opportunity to understand your mistakes, iterate, and improve upon your results.
Cost Per Acquisition & Lifetime Value
How much should you spend on marketing to acquire a customer? The answer depends on how much you charge for your product, your margin, operating expenses and how often customers repeat purchases over the lifetime of their relationship with your brand. This puts limits around how much you can spend to acquire a particular customer or your cost per acquisition (CPA). This helps determine who you want to reach, the channels you will use to reach them, and the promotional messages you want to convey.
Conversion rates are a primary indicator of marketing success, but CPA provides the financial perspective by which to gauge campaign success. CPA measures the aggregate cost to acquire one paying customer on a campaign or channel level. It’s a simple ratio of the amount you’re spending on marketing over the number of customers you’ve acquired. This give you a sense of how much you are spending to acquire each customer.
Depending on your business and the type of campaign you’re running you can divide CPA by the different channels you’re using i.e. mobile, display, social. CPA can give you a sense of the effectiveness of acquiring and the cost of acquiring these customers by different channels. So, you want to get a sense of the maximum allowable CPA.
Related to CPA is the idea of lifetime value (LTV): the amount of money you’re brining in per customer over the course of their lifetime. How you calculate LTV depends on your type of business What’s your purchase frequency? Do you have a subscription model? Simply stated, LTV is the sum of the gross profit from an individual over their lifetime as a customer.
There’s no end to the metrics you could potentially apply. But at the end of the day, it all stems from CPA and LTV. And it goes without saying you want to keep the LTV some multiple of the CPA.