4 Critical Questions to Answer While Planning Your Marketing Campaign

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You can?t have a successful marketing campaign if you don?t have a plan in place from the beginning. You need plan for your audience, your available budget, your marketing materials and most importantly, your marketing goal. Marketing goals often change from year to year, which is normal and expected. This means you can?t use the same marketing plan year after year because you need to take into account the changing marketplace and how your business has grown or changed.

By planning ahead, you can choose strategies that work well for your market at the right time of year and you?ll know ahead of time where you can afford to spend a little more money and where you might need to cut back to keep your budget intact.

To make the most of your budget as well as your people and their talents, you should ask yourself and your marketing crew the following questions:

1. What is our marketing goal? This is the first question you need to ask because the answer will affect the rest of the questions and your marketing campaign. The more specific and detailed your marketing goal, the easier it will be to create a campaign that will reach that goal. Increasing sales to a certain demographic by a certain date and by how much is far more practical goal than to ?increase sales.? If your goal is to develop deeper customer relationships, then you?ll know ahead of time to allocate some of the budget toward greeting card printing for the holidays rather than direct mail pieces aimed at prospects.

2. Who is our target audience? This question needs to be answered at the same time the first question is answered. Your audience is part of your marketing goal. This is an extremely important question to answer simply because you need to know who you want to be buying your product so you can get to know them. If you are planning on expanding your market to include Baby Boomers when you?ve been targeting Generation X in the past, you need time to research Baby Boomer spending habits and the type of marketing they respond to most. Once you have a target audience, your marketing plan can be focused and narrowed to be more effective.

3. What is the current market? You need to know where your competitors are so you know how much competition is out there for the year. Are any new stores opening in your area that might be a competitor? How are your main categories of products selling? If the demand is going down, you need to address that demand and either add a new product to your line or market your product aggressively to try to bring demand back up.

4. Where is our target audience? You need to know how to reach your target audience where they already are. For instance, if your target audience is teenage girls, you need to be online and in magazines aimed at teenage girls. Advertising in the local newspaper will not be the best avenue to reach this target audience. Your marketing campaign will be much more successful if you go to your audience instead of expecting your audience to find you.

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