Standing out among your competitors is certainly more challenging in today's market. Most Americans are exposed to around 4,000-10,000 ads each day. Being constantly inundated with content, many subconsciously screen brands and only interact with the ones that they have a personal interest in.  

To stay top of mind, marketers must plan and execute campaigns that ensure they are staying consistent, differentiating themselves, and crafting an effective and consistent customer experience. In this blog post, we’ll examine the elements that make up an effective marketing campaign, and how you can maintain success and consistency throughout all of your campaigns.

To Craft an Effective Marketing Campaign, You Must:  

1. Start with a Goal  

We recommend being really intentional about your campaigns. This can help you stay focused on the reasons behind the campaign and create a foundation for a consistent customer experience throughout its duration. Gather key decision-makers and clearly write out what you are trying to accomplish. Be specific and ensure that your campaign has a timeframe and a goal that can clearly be measured.  

These goals will differ depending on your position within the industry and your brand’s strengths and weaknesses, but some common goals you may want to consider are:  

1. Increasing brand awareness  
2. Growing web traffic  
3. Generating high-quality leads  
4. Improving your position as a thought leader in your industry  
5. Enhancing brand engagement  

When mapping out your goals, make sure to document every decision in a campaign plan. You’ll want to include items such as:  

1. The goals for your campaign  
2. Campaign duration  
3. KPIs that are captured and measured across certain milestones  
4. Potential challenges  
5. Required multi-media assets and copy  

This plan will help you delegate and ensure everyone is working towards the same goal.  

2. Define Your Target Audience  

Once you have a goal in mind for your campaign, it’s critical to pinpoint who you are trying to reach. Dig deep into your customer data to understand their preferences, behaviors, wants and needs, and most importantly, how they align with your goal.  

One of the biggest challenges marketers face when segmenting is not having their target audiences’ data consolidated. Customer data platforms (CDPs) seek to eliminate this issue by establishing a real-time view of your customer data in one place. For example, Salesforce’s CDP features an easy-to-use interface, a standardized data model, and drag-and-drop functionality to enable marketers to build comprehensive segments without being reliant on developers or IT teams to write SQL statements. This can enable your team to create rich nurturing journeys and personalized communications.  

When segmenting and defining your target audience, there’s a few things we recommend you keep in mind:  

• Focus on your most relevant and profitable segments first. Ensure that you are prioritizing your loyalists as they are the ones most likely to convert time and time again.  
• Don’t leave your other segments hanging. If you don’t have calls-to-action that ring true with your other segments, they are going to take their own actions, or worse, leave your website for a competitor’s. 
• Constantly test and optimize your segmentation strategy. The market is always changing, so it's critical to test your journeys and campaigns throughout their duration. A/B test copy, calls-to-action, and content to discover what resonates with your audience. Adjust your strategy accordingly.  

3. Choose Channels That Will Reach Your Target Audience Most Effectively  

These days, audiences can interact with brands via so many different channels and mediums. From social media, email marketing, events, and other channels, it's up to marketers to determine the best channels to prioritize. While your goals may ultimately determine your budget allocation, there are a few best practices to consider:  

1. Calculate your cost per lead. Your cost per lead (CPL) is a leading indication of the spend needed to gain a new lead. While simple, it’s an incredibly useful benchmark to compare across channels that can help determine what channels produce the best ROI. To find your CPL, divide your total spend by the number of leads generated. 
2. Benchmark your average conversion rate. Your average conversion rate and your CPL goes hand-in-hand. Prioritize channels that not only have a high average conversion rate, but also have a lower CPL
3. Consider your revenue goals and work backward. If you have a certain revenue goal your campaign needs to reach, work backward to determine how many leads you’ll need to fill your pipeline. To do this, you’ll need to determine your average revenue per customer and conversion rate, so you can determine the customer goal you’ll need to reach that revenue goal. From there, divide your customer goal by your average conversion rate to get the number of leads you’ll need for your campaign.  

4. Develop Messaging and Creative That Aligns with Your Goals and Target Audience  

Use your goals and target audience, outlined in steps 1 and 2, as your north star to craft your copy and visuals. Always consider what is the most important thing you want your audience to know, see, and do. If your communications don't stand out, go back to the drawing board till they do. Consider performing the following when developing a compelling campaign:  

• Use a combination of headlines and imagery with plenty of white space to allow for key focal points. Remember that images and copy should support and enhance each other, not repeat the same ideas or thoughts.  
• When it comes to visuals, consider if they are “pretty for pretty’s sake." Even if your imagery is stunning, it’s not going to matter if it doesn’t lead to your audience performing your desired action. 
• Less is More. There’s so much noise in today’s market, so if your messaging and visuals don’t immediately pop, you may not reach your goals. Consistently evaluate the length of your content and adjust accordingly based on results.  

5. Launch, Measure, Report, and Optimize