The 3 Stages of Planning for Marketing Campaign Success

Marketing is essential to the growth of your business, but there are a lot of moving parts to plan, implement, and manage. There are multiple roles involved, and if you have a Marketing Team, multiple people. Effective planning is key to the success of your marketing campaign.

There are a few different levels of planning that need to take place. Not all of them need to happen at the same time, but they do need to be calendared in and communicated.

Planning the Timing of Your Campaigns

It would be nice if the logistics of a marketing campaign happened as quickly as the idea phase, but this just isn’t the case. While you are working on your strategic and tactical planning, take some time to think through which goals would best be met through a marketing campaign.

Then, take a few more minutes to think through the timing. Is there a national month or week that would go well with it? Perhaps a community celebration that could coincide, or a product or service you’re planning to launch?

Then, pencil in some dates, either on your calendar or in your notes. Give yourself some margin – each campaign will take a few weeks to pull together and implement. This will allow you to start to gather your thoughts to discuss with your coach or your team.

Planning the Marketing Campaign

Because you have planned ahead and have a good idea of what your marketing campaigns will look like throughout the year, you can take a few minutes to calendar in time to plan the actual campaigns. I recommend putting your plans together 2-3 months ahead of time; if you have a Marketing Team, this will ensure that everyone knows WHO Shall Do WHAT By WHEN and you can take a step back.

If you are your Marketing Team for the moment (we’ve all been there), it gives you time to pull things together. It also gives you time to talk with your coach or someone else you can bounce ideas off of. Having a second pair of eyes and another perspective can help greatly when it comes to marketing!

The first thing you’ll want to decide upon is your goal (or goals) for the marketing campaign. After all, if you don’t set a clear goal, you’ll miss it every time.

Do you want to expand your audience or increase engagement? Add a certain number of subscribers to your email list? Build a certain number of referral partnerships? Obtain a certain number of clients?

Not every marketing campaign will lead directly to sales, but every one of yours should do something to move prospects along their sales journey.

Something that my team and I find helpful is to create a full marketing packet for each campaign. This packet includes six main things:

• Logistics of the different parts of the campaign
• Timeline for the campaign
• Any announcements that will go out on social media, email, or your client portal
• Copy for any landing pages, emails, SMS messaging, and social posts
• Image and video ideas

This packet allows you, your team, and your marketing vendors to see both the big picture and get clear instructions on what they need to do to help pull everything together.

Pulling Your Marketing Campaign Together

This is the stage where you’ll most see the value of taking time to plan – when it comes to pulling everything together.

Your Marketing Team and vendors can do amazing things, but only if they have clear direction. When they know what you want and the purpose of each piece of content (which is in your marketing packet), they’ll be able to work effectively and efficiently to create all the assets.

They’ll submit all the work to you (or your Marketing Coordinator) for approval, you can take a few minutes to look it over and give notes, and you’re good to go.

If you’re the one creating the assets, you can work through the packet piece by piece to make sure everything is cohesive. Remember to plan in some time for your coach or a friend to look everything over – having a second pair of eyes at this stage is essential!

This is because even though you have a clear picture in mind of what you want to create, you’re not your client. They don’t have the context you do, and something that makes perfect sense to you may confuse them without that context. By having someone else look through your materials, you can make sure that everything is as clear as possible. (It will also do a lot to save you from typos!)

Once the assets are created and approved, they just need to be scheduled. Be sure to calendar in any time you need to go live, if that’s a component!

Of course, no amount of planning can guarantee your results; solid marketing can do a lot to bring in new audiences and clients, but there are a lot of variables that even the best marketers can’t control. An effective plan will allow you to make sure that you have done everything you can to equip your team (and yourself) for success – and it will save you a lot of time, energy, and money when all those moving pieces and parts come together!