Research - how to create a successful advertising campaign

As I do not study advertising and marketing I needed to research into how to create a successful advertising campaign.

6 Steps for a Successful Marketing Campaign

1. Determine your buyer persona/campaign target and outline the desired outcome.  Likely, you will already have a good understanding of your buyer persona profile; this step in the cycle will identify which of those personas you are trying to reach.  For example, your buyer personas may be both mothers of elementary schoolers and elementary school teachers, but in this particular campaign you’ve decided to target the mothers.

Most importantly, start with the end in mind.  What are you trying to accomplish?  This may sound basic but, spoken from experience, it can prove to be more difficult than you think.  Determine what, EXACTLY, you want this campaign to accomplish and how you will know if you’ve gotten there.

The goal for this campaign is to bring more visitors and donations to Ecotopia.

2. Campaign design—graphic, creative, and copy.  This is where you can get creative.  Start your brainstorm with the sky as the limit; don’t get caught up in your resource limitations during your brainstorm because it will inhibit ideation.  After brainstorming, you have to come back down to earth and figure out what your resources will allow.  If you have no budget, you probably can’t hire M.C. Hammer (I heard he was busy with a new project too).  Not every campaign has to be earth-shattering.  Once you’ve developed the campaign outline, proceed to creating graphics and copy.
3. This will be easy for me as this is my area of expertise. I can create a campaign doing this.

3. Determine tools for a successful outcome.  Go back to what you want to accomplish (step 1), your buyer (step 1), and your campaign (step 2).  Often, steps 2 and 3 may be run concurrently.
4. When determining the tools to use, consider your target audience’s sophistication (especially digitally), your resources, and a quick to market approach.  It’s better to use Facebook and your company blog if you already have both of those tools in place.  Don’t build a brand new website until you gain traction on some smaller similar campaigns.

Ecotopia already have a Facebook page and website, however they are not massive, the Facebook page only has 1250 likes and a similar following. As you can donate online it may be best to promote the campaign over the internet, including social media and the website. 

4. Schedule campaign implementation and benchmarks.  Create your campaign calendar.  If it’s a longer campaign (more than 4 weeks), set sprint benchmarks along the way.  This will keep your team energized and moving.  If the benchmarks are not met, it will also let you know if you’re on the wrong track.  Put all dates and to-dos in your project management software (we use Basecamp) and include various members of your team.

5. Implement the campaign.  Surprisingly, this will be the easiest of the 6 steps.  If you’ve planned appropriately, you know your target audience, and you know what to measure, step 5 will be a walk in the park.  Most important in step 5 is to pair it with step 6 and to begin measuring and analyzing your campaign immediately.  Especially if you’re running a digital marketing campaign, you will get an early read on the success and will know whether any tweaks need to be made.

4. In this step we can measure the effectiveness of the campaign through the number of donations made after the campaign. Maybe include a reference when donating to get a discount in store? This will show how well the campaign has worked. Also create the campaign to announce when interim targets have been hit which may encourage more donations.

6. Measure, analyze, and learn for next time.  Again, step 6 should walk hand-in-hand with step 5 as measurement along the way is imperative.  Just because you’re heading for a mountain that you didn’t expect doesn’t mean that you should crash, burn, and start the next campaign.  Make adjustments.  At the end of the campaign, be sure to note everything that you learned and measure your final success against your original campaign goal.
7. This section is not really applicable to me but if the campaign was actually used by Ecotopia they could use this as a basis to create another campaign.