A Guide To Running Successful Marketing Campaigns to Grow Your Business

Running marketing campaigns is an essential component to a successful business, as the campaigns your brand runs (if executed properly) will draw in more customers, increase brand loyalty, and build your reputation as more businesses in your industry take note of what you’re doing.

Developing and executing successful marketing campaigns, however, isn’t an easy task. Especially as today’s digital space becomes more and more saturated with competition.

There’s a reason that many businesses employ dedicated marketing departments or outsource marketing work to skilled agencies, as poor campaigns and things like low-quality social media management can very quickly break a company in the contemporary world.

In this article, we’ll walk through some of the most important things to consider when running your marketing campaigns so that you can reduce the chance of deploying a poorly thought-out plan – and thus avoid wasting money and losing out on business opportunities.

Let’s dig into some ways you can rock your marketing campaigns to grow your business.

Assess Your Budget to Meet Projections

It’s common for your marketing costs to exceed your initial projections. Often, the tactics you employ will require adjustments. Some may not work as effectively as planned at first, and that’s ok. It’s normal to have to make adjustments.

To keep things headed in the right direction, however, first, you’ll want to identify exactly how you want to allocate each dollar in your marketing budget.

• Do you need to expand your team and hire new resources?
• Will you outsource any work to an agency or freelancer?
• Will you be advertising a lot or will your focus be more on organic methods for growing your business?
• What technology will your efforts require?
• What other unexpected expenses should you plan for…just in case?

These considerations (and others), on top of the costs of marketing materials (brochures, flyers, signage) for example can really add up. Once you’ve decided on how you’ll spend your budget, do your best to stick to it and be sure to track each dollar going out the door.

Make sure to set a budget that is in line with what you can afford to spend. Plan strategically and focus your spending in areas where you can get the biggest impact on your dollar. Use more organic approaches like content marketing and social media marketing to cut back on what spend as opposed to what you would spend on more expensive tactics like advertising. Do some testing and make adjustments so you aren’t too set on a losing tactic and end up wasting a lot of money.

Spend incrementally at first until you know what works, and what doesn’t work, so you can target your spending where your marketing dollars can make the biggest possible difference.

What Do You Expect To Gain?

You’re facing heavy competition in today’s digital space, so creating and executing a high-powered marketing strategy is a necessity. Standing out from the crowd can be challenging with so much noise online, thus, you need to understand what you want to do, who you want to target, and what results you expect to gain from your marketing.  

You don’t want to waste money executing on marketing tactics just because you hear something is trendy. Just because someone else is doing something doesn’t mean it’s a fit for your goals and objectives.

It’s so important to know exactly what you intend to gain from your campaigns so that you can effectively deliver them as well as analyze the success of each one.

You might be looking to boost your industry reputation or generate more leads to boost your sales. Whatever your reasoning, make sure you have a clear definition of your goals. This allows you to track both the successes and areas that need improvement so you can adjust your approach to improve your results.

Doing this, you are also able to target the right channels and use the right forms of content and messaging in your campaigns to ensure your content connects more effectively. Be sure to develop a strong understanding of your expected results, and you’ll be able to more effectively keep your marketing efforts on track.

Using Email Marketing for Generating Quality Leads

Email marketing can be a very powerful lead generation tool. And by lead generation, we mean turning your website visitors and others into prospects who may actively be interested in making a purchase from your business.  

Once a site visitor or prospect has shown some level of interest in your business, you’ll want to take certain steps involving targeted communications to turn these folks into actual leads and ultimately into paying customers.

While there are many different ways you can conduct lead generation campaigns, email marketing is one of our favorite tactics.

When sending your email campaigns to people, if you’ve done a solid job of lead generation, the recipients on your mailing list are warmed up and more likely to be expecting communications from you. After all, they have already supplied you with their email address through one of the lead generation tactics you apply.

For example, you may have a lead magnet set up. This is something like an eBook where you drive traffic to an optimized landing page and the visitors to that page give you their contact info by entering it into and submitting a form in exchange for the eBook, demo video, white paper, or other lead magnets.

Once someone lands on your page and you have their info, you also have their captive attention. You can then send targeted emails to try to move your new lead through the pipeline. You can send things like links to a free trial or coupons to test out your product. Make sure when you send these out, you’re tracking the results so you can see which offers work best and what messaging leads to the highest number of conversions.

Direct email is much more targeted than other channels (like social media, for instance) and can be a great way of bringing in potential customers that aren’t familiar with your business. It’s also a better forum for having one-to-one communication vs. other forums where it’s more one-to-many.

What Platforms Are You Using and Who Are You Targeting?

It’s super important to utilize a variety of technology platforms and channels when conducting your marketing campaigns. Your audience is likely active on different channels. There’s a very slim chance all of your audience members are just all piled up on one platform or consuming your content in one place.

Of course, this also depends on the “why” of your campaign and who your target audience is. Identifying exactly who you want to see your posts and marketing content is so important. Armed with this information, you can then decide on which platform you’ll want to use in a more targeted way.

Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and other popular social media channels and online communities are used heavily in marketing by businesses across a variety of industries and niche business types, and while there is a level of carry over across the different channels, all of them are more suited to different demographics in some ways, and each will typically support a specific type of content more heavily over other types.

For example, TikTok leans more heavily toward a younger audience and features short-clip videos.

Research your audience. Then research the different channels available. Make sure you’re targeting your audience where they actually hang out online.

It’s okay to leave out certain platforms if you don’t think you’ll get much of a response from certain channels or if you feel your audience isn’t active on those channels. It’s better to not post to a particular platform than to spin your wheels creating content that no one actually sees.

Determine the Best Mix of Content Types

Similar to choosing which platforms to run your campaign on, you’ll want to have a good idea as to what type of content you’ll need to create. Your target audience segments will most certainly prefer to consume content in particular formats, and you need to have an understanding of those preferences so you’re creating the right content not only to boost your SEO but also to connect with your audience at the right stage along the buyer journey.

Instagram, for example, is very image-heavy, so avoid graphics and images with overwhelming amounts of text and information on them. Subtlety is key here, so be careful with what you post.

Another example would be Tik Tok, which is being used much more by marketers looking to target younger demographics. Videos on this platform tend to be humorous and it’s very easy for a user to skip advertisements that they’re not interested in, even if it’s something that would be relevant to them.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, targets an older demographic with more of a professional tilt. On this channel, text-focused content like articles or long-form posts performs better.

Here’s an example of a post I recently wrote that gained some nice traction on LinkedIn. You can see it’s all text, with the exception of some emojis sprinkled throughout the piece.

This content performed well on LinkedIn because this channel accepts long-from, text-heavy posts. Other channels would reject this type of content. No matter what type of content you are posting, however, each piece you publish needs to add value to its intended audience in some way.

Content needs to grab attention instantly to generate leads, and keeping that attention requires a level of entertainment, education, adding value, and being helpful in some way, which isn’t an easy task to achieve, especially considering all of the content out there against which you are competing.

To really stand out, your content needs to add value by:

• Answering questions
• Solving problems
• Providing a solution
• Making it easy to find info
• Entertaining your audience
• Enriching people’s lives

By making sure your content is helpful, adds value, and it’s in the right format for the right audience members, you’ll stop spinning your wheels creating content that doesn’t connect.

Who Do You Need In Your Team?

Due to the constantly changing environment of the digital world, content creators are an incredibly valuable asset to your brand to help your team expand and aid in your business’ growth.

Marketing professionals, graphic designers, SEOs, social media marketers, videographers, bloggers, copywriters, and others can be incredibly valuable additions to your team. Today, more and more businesses are hiring dedicated content creators or working with influencers and freelancers to promote their products and services.

Working with influencers, for example, puts your brand in front of tons of prospective customers by promoting it through influencers who have a captive audience. These are your average, everyday folks who worked hard, promoting their personal brand online, and then they built loyal fan bases that eat up their advice and recommendations. Brand’s leverage the power of these influencers’ voices and popularity by paying them to share content about the brand.

This is a great example of the power of word of mouth. While your marketing strategy does work wonders, if you add influencer recommendations to your strategy, you get the impact of word of mouth and that trust that the influencer has built with their audience.

Wrapping it up

The world of marketing, content, and advertising is ever-changing, so it’s important you keep your team as up-to-date as possible. And it’s equally important to keep your tactics and your approach to growing your business fresh.

By maintaining a vigilant eye on the trends popping up in the field of marketing and online communication tactics, you position your brand to stand out and continue to see sustainable growth. If you fail to keep up with the trends, you’ll miss out on tons of great opportunities to connect more effectively with your audience and to find new sources of revenue.

What trends have you been seeing in the marketing space? Leave your feedback in the comments below so we can start a conversation!