The objective of marketing campaign planning is essentially to identify relevant, consistent, integrated, and measurable marketing activities and outlets to achieve campaign goals and influence consumers. An effective strategic marketing plan includes an engaging, shareable, and measurable campaign theme that employs both offline and online marketing communications strategies and media outlets. Marketing professionals must not only understand target audience preferences and buying habits but must create and execute campaigns that build awareness, enhance product or service quality, and increase brand loyalty. Campaign planning includes the identification of the media and digital channels to be used for different segments of the market and for each individual marketing discipline (such as print, online, and television). The appropriate mix of advertising media will influence how consumers will get information about a product.
Although marketing goals are easily defined, reaching them requires action plans. Many organizations lack a formal marketing strategy because they do not perceive themselves as marketers. Comprehensive marketing plan addresses marketing objectives as part of a more comprehensive overall business strategy. Creating action plans for marketing campaign planning includes defining realistic short and long-term goals, identifying appropriate channels to achieve those goals, determining the most efficient method of communicating with customers, developing marketing plans and tracking results, and evaluating and revising marketing plans periodically.
A powerful marketing strategy is comprised of multiple elements including product, customer, and promotional activities. Marketing professionals commonly incorporate content marketing, which includes strategic planning, search engine optimization, and online promotion activities such as blogs, articles, press releases, and web content. Strategic planning helps determine the timing and nature of various activities and determines how best to combine them to achieve the marketing campaign goals. Search engine optimization (SEO) and article marketing are some of the most common content marketing activities.
A key component of a complete marketing campaign plan is developing an effective strategy for achieving the goals. The content must be written in such a way that it targets audiences who will have the greatest impact on company goals. The primary audience for blogs, articles, and press releases is customers, whereas online activity such as web page promotion and web 2.0 strategies will reach more global consumers. In all cases, marketers should write for both the regular reader and a targeted market.
Marketing experts recommend creating several channels for promoting the company’s products and services. Through a consistent marketing campaign strategy, customers will come to expect certain actions from the company. Marketing experts also believe in providing multiple channels for tracking marketing success so that company goals can be easily achieved.
A successful marketing campaign is one that incorporates a well-defined set of marketing activities, a clear vision for accomplishing company goals, and a system for evaluating and revising future strategy. Marketing experts recommend using an objective, quantitative measure, or a combination of objective, quantitative measures and perceived outcomes in formulating a race framework for defining winning marketing strategy. Several channels may be defined and measured, including the amount of traffic, the response rate, the average time spent per customer, and the cost per sale. Evaluating these metrics annually will allow a company to track progress over time and find ways to optimize its marketing campaigns.