From the course: Small Business Marketing

Creating campaigns

From the course: Small Business Marketing

Creating campaigns

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- Once you know what marketing channels you're investing in, you need to develop marketing campaigns. Campaigns are the collection of all the activities and messaging needed to move the buyer through the customer journey. But with small business marketing, it can feel tedious to think through creating campaigns. So I have some ways to make this easier. For starters, simplify. Less is truly more. The more information that you try to pack into your campaigns, the less attention they often receive. Let's say you're putting a flyer together, don't pack it full of words, highlight enough information to make the viewer curious and then leave them with a URL to visit to capture all of the remaining details. As marketers, we often want to make sure the prospective customer knows everything about our product or service. And in an ideal world, we would have their undivided attention and we could walk them through each aspect of our value proposition. But the truth is, we don't have that luxury, you cannot succeed by saturating the creative with every detail. Next, be concise with your words. It goes along with a saying I hear often in sales. Once you've made the sale, stop talking. There is no reason to continue your messaging and your campaigns beyond what is absolutely necessary. Now I've got a very basic formula that you can follow when you develop any advertisement or campaign. Protect the brand, everything you do must be on brand. Grab attention, you must stand out from all the noise. Show the value, you want to demonstrate or state the value proposition in a clear way. Invoke action, give the consumer a reason and language that inspires them to take action. And then affirm action, you want to make sure they feel like they've made the right choice. Let's put this to practice. If I was creating an advertisement for a newspaper, I would start by protecting the brand. This means I'll make sure the logo is clearly displayed, that it's not obscured and that the placement of the advertisement will not be near anything controversial. Next, I'll find a way to grab attention. With a newspaper ad, it might be a really catchy headline, and that headline should be written in my brand's tone. If the brand is cheeky, be cheeky, if the brand is confident, be confident. It just has to be attention grabbing and on brand. From there, make sure your value proposition is clear. As a small business, this is your differentiating factor and it's important that you display it. And finally, make sure you have a call to action and a reason why. Maybe it's call today and save 10%, or book now for a free consultation. Make sure there's that call to action and then the reason to take it. And from there, affirm that call to action. If they call, will it be a pleasant experience? At the end of the day, your goal is to create campaigns that connect the dots through the marketing funnel. It's not just one post or one email, it's an entire series all connected together.

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