Q: How do I Build a Marketing Campaign?
We’ll break it down for you in the simplest way without the industry jargon that’ll confuse you and leave you with more questions than you have answers.
A marketing campaign isn’t as daunting as people think that it is and it’s something that has become nuanced as something you can just throw together, create a pretty Pinterest board about and boom: launch.
While that’s just a piece of it, that’s not quite the way it works and we’re breaking it down for you to truly understand what it all entails so you leave feeling empowered to take action with newfound clarity.
Okay, let’s jump in.
Step One: Define Your Goal
What do you want to achieve from this? This is the question to ask as there are several goals a company could have ranging from e-comm, to DTC and hotels to restaurants.
But it’s dependent on what stage you’re currently at in your business. Also, it is possible to identify two goals at once.
We’re going to use this example: you’re a newer restaurant opening in the most exclusive area of SoHo and you need patrons to get into the door of your establishment, but no one knows who you are.
Your marketing plan should start off with brand awareness, with a subset of generating an amount of revenue in an x amount of time because people need to know who you are before they even come in to spend money with you.
We won’t get into the nitty gritty of the subset, but we’ll use the brand awareness goal for the purpose of this educational post.
Step Two: Identify the Strategy
You’ve now identified that your new restaurant is in need to ramping up their brand awareness to get people to learn more about you. Fantastic. The next step is to identify the strategies that’s going to get them there.
What channels will you use? For example, there’s social media, but exactly which outlet is best? Then there’s paid media i.e. running ads via Google, Rezy, OpenTable; earned media from press write-ups to hosting dinners. Don’t forget about your OOH options (out-of-house) such as billboards, posters, or business cards.
Identifying your strategy helps you get locked in to what avenues you’re going to take to reach your defined goal.
Step Three: Create the Plan
With the strategy in place, you can now develop the actual plan, which is your playbook for how you’re going to execute the strategy to hit that targeted goal.
Your restaurant has identified the channels that it wants to take and is now developing content specifically for that strategy and putting it into measurable, quantitative actionable steps, e.g.: post on Instagram 3x’s per week (Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday) with a chef behind-the-scenes reel, food inspiration and cocktail spotlight; develop wildposters with unique QR code tags and place around SoHo, Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods to identify who came from where; pitch to Bon Appétit, Food & Wine and Cherry Bombe. Take benchmarks of where you started (e.g.: initial follower count on Instagram, base website views, base email subscriber count and initial patrons) and measure up to 90 to 180 afterwards to see true tangible results.
Final Takeaway
As you begin to work through this, you’ll see that it can be simple and meant for you to build upon the more you start identifying what you need for this campaign to be successful. It’s meant to help you craft realistic goals for yourself and for your brand, that clearly relays the desired outcome. This helps you stay in line with your budget and actually understand the roadmap to get to where you want to be and being calculated and meticulous about it. You can take this framework and apply it to various plans that can run congruent to each other to maximize the outcomes (brand awareness and revenue growth).
We hope you found this helpful and can’t wait to see what you’ve developed.
