Four Pillars Of A Successful Marketing Campaign

Marketing campaigns are generally expensive. The total cost is the sum of 1) the actual cost, 2) the time it takes to get the marketing campaign working, and 3) the hours of effort that have to be put in it. Even if at times the actual cost to place the ad is zero, the real cost is never zero. In order to justify the costs, it is an absolutely imperative for businesses to plan their marketing efforts well.

If a business does not plan its marketing efforts, and is not able to bring in new clients, the business may suffer quite heavily. While you cannot predict the future, you can come very close by having a deep understanding of the four factors that make up any marketing effort. The four factors are scale, cost, targeting, and conversion. Not planning for these four pillars in your marketing efforts is a very big marketing mistake.

Scale of the people reached

It is important for an entrepreneur to have an idea of how many people are reached by their marketing efforts; whether the potential reach will be hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people. To determine the potential scale of any marketing effort, the nature of that effort must be understood. The marketer must understand how the platforms on which he is advertising work. If the marketing effort is simply advertising by posting a Facebook update, then it will reach very few people even if the marketer or the group has many fans. The same is true on Twitter unless you have over 100,000 real followers. But if you do something amazing and a bigger publication decides to cover your story, thousands of people can easily be driven to your business.

Total cost

Marketing costs are not just the money required to place an advertisement. One example of this kind of marketing is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO campaigns can take months to show results. In this case, the costs involves not only the time it takes to do SEO labour for your website, but also the time it takes to get traffic to your website from Google, how many visitors you get and monitoring whether those visitors convert well. There is no real way to determine exact costs of waiting for results, the number differs for every business, but the cost is very large relative to the overall business. For more on marketing costs, please take a look at our article on true marketing costs for small businesses.

Targeting your target consumer

Reaching the correct target audience for the business is of utmost importance. Many entrepreneurs assume that everyone will enjoy their product or service but in almost all cases, that is a crucial mistake. Identifying your target market is not simple. Understanding your product or service as well as your audience allows the entrepreneur to give customers what they need and when they need it.

Conversion of visitors into paying customers

Once you have reached your target market at scale and at a reasonable cost, make sure your product or service is brilliant and does not turn customers away.

Your first point of contact by which people discover you becomes the "top of the sales funnel" for your business. It is vital to retain customers or do whatever you can to convert them into customers.

Conclusion

These four themes must all work together to create a successful marketing campaign. If a business strives to achieve all four of these themes in their marketing efforts, it is likely to have excellent results from its marketing campaigns, which will go a long way to help the business grow.

Introduction to marketing video

Further marketing resources

One site you might find helpful are SEO Moz to learn about SEO. Another site that might be helpful is Mashable which focuses on social media marketing. And here are some more marketing videos that you might find helpful.

Article by Alex Genadinik