Running a new business and getting a marketing department off the ground can take a lot of effort and know-how. You shouldn’t expect your first go to be a rousing success, but you can use some tips on how to plan out your first marketing campaign that will significantly help the chances of it going well.
Give Your Campaign a Purpose
When you’re creating your first-ever marketing plan, you need to give it a purpose. “How is this plan going to benefit my company?” is the first thing you should ask yourself. You can shoot for several goals. Here are some of the most common ones:
- Increase your brand awareness
- Promote a new product, service, or event
- Improve customer engagement and retention
- Help with overall sales
That last one is the main reason why many new companies kickstart marketing campaigns, but all of these are viable motives. For now, you should focus on only one of them. If you achieve any others, that’s just an added bonus.
Figure Out Your Target Market
The biggest mistake small businesses make when planning their first marketing campaigns is trying to target everyone. When you try to garner a large amount of attention, most of the time, you’ll get relatively none. And as a new business, you probably wouldn’t even have the capability to handle all those customers if you did manage to gain their attention.
That’s why you need to focus on your niche. Once you’ve nailed that through a handful of successful campaigns and feel like you’ve reached your limit, then you can start to expand into other markets.
Find Ways To Measure Your Performance
Many new companies avoid marketing near the beginning of their development because they believe there’s no good way to track results. That’s a very old-school way of thinking. Thanks to modern technologies, seeing how well your campaigns are doing is easier than ever. For example, Google Ads keeps track of a bunch of different metrics that allow you to see the success rate of your ads as well as who is actually seeing your ads.
Don’t Try To Do Everything at Once
The key thing to remember when you’re figuring out how to plan out your first marketing campaign is that you shouldn’t try to do everything at once. Advertising can be quite overwhelming, especially if you don’t have a sizable team dedicated to working on it. A small group can only do so much, so try not to overwhelm yourself.
Once you’ve got the basics down and found some success, you can then focus on bigger goals, such as scaling your Google Ads campaigns to better fit your future campaigns. All of this will come with time and hard work, which are necessary for finding success in the marketing field.