How to Plan an Explosive Campaign in 3 Months
Learn how to plan a successful marketing campaign over three months
According to the recent Marketscan Marketing Campaign Planning Survey, a third of marketers spend 3 months planning their campaigns. This guide looks at how B2B marketers can spend that time effectively and profitably and produce explosive results.
3 months to lift-off
The first stage of your campaign is to ensure that you know who your campaign is going to be targeted at and that you have the data you need to help you plan your campaign for maximum effect:
-
Identify your best customer profiles. Who are you going to target with your campaign? Which customer groups present the greatest opportunity for success?
-
Clean your B2B data. Your business to business data needs to be accurate, or you are wasting time and resources. Arrange to have your existing data ‘cleaned’ to ensure accuracy.
“Among the organisations studied, those deemed as being stronger than average displayed smaller amounts of [customer] database errors (10%). Typical organisations scored 25% for the volume of unhealthy data.” – SiriusDecisions.
2 months to lift-off
Having knocked your business to business data into shape, the next month should be spent putting it to work:
-
Beat your marketing data into shape. Does your marketing data currently match your best customer profiles? Less than 15% of data does.
-
Strengthen your B2B data. Make sure you have enough qualified leads that match your best customer profiles. Consider purchasing and importing additional contact lists.
1 month to lift-off
Now you know that your B2B data is usable, and who you want to target, you need to begin crafting the campaign specifics:
-
Build your message. What are you going to say to your customers? And is it relevant to their business pains?
-
Test your message. Make sure that you have everything in place and ready to go when the campaign launches. Are your staff fully trained? Does your messaging system work properly?
-
Make changes. Quickly! If you do come across any problems, this is your last chance to fix them before making an embarrassing mistake, or having to delay your campaign.
“The typical email has a 5% open rate, but you can get that as high as 95% if the message is relevant enough.” – Pratik Dholakiya – eConsultancy.
Lift off!
The big day has arrived, and you can launch the campaign. The previous three months of preparation mean that everything should go smoothly. Better still, your investment in targeting should result in a much higher success rate.
The three steps you need to complete for greater marketing campaign success are:
-
Get your B2B data in shape.
-
Identify your best prospects and ensure your message is tailored towards them.
-
Build and test your messages before launch date.
Next steps
Now you know the timescale, don’t let anything else get in the way of your perfect marketing campaign. Read Conquer your marketing campaign challenges to learn more.