Category: Strategic Marketing

If you want GIANT results from your marketing efforts, “good” isn’t good enough. Make excellence your standard. Follow our five quick tips on how to elevate your marketing from good to excellent.

5 Quick Tips to Take Your Marketing to Another Level

1. Define excellence.

How will you measure the results of your campaign, classified ad or clever guerrilla tactic? How will you know you succeeded or failed? What would demonstrate runaway success?

2. Know the audience better than your spouse.

What keeps your ideal customer up at night? What makes her heart beat faster?

3. Be a creative decorator crab.

Always be looking, reading, asking, learning and absorbing. What ideas and innovations can you glean from other industries? What awesome thing did your competitor just do? How can you turn that on its head and make it better?

Interested in thought provoking topics? Check out Seth Godin’s blog.

According to a famous saying, “Originality is the art of concealing your sources.” This quote is, fittingly, attributed to several different people.

4. Go one more step.

There’s always something you can do to make it better. One more phone call you can make. One more hour of research. One more brain to tap or pair of eyeballs to look over the work. When you’ve gotten to “good enough,” keep going.

5. Check again.

No matter how pressing the deadline, you’ll never regret taking a moment to stop and look through the work—really look through it—one more time before hitting “send.”

Do you use a consistent case (sentence or title) in headlines? Is everything spelled correctly? How’s your grammar? You purchased usage rights for that photo, right?

Always check again.

A quick online inquiry about elements of a successful marketing and communication campaign will net thousands of results. Insights, suggestions and answers abound at every swipe of your finger.

Here’s a Giant snapshot of what it really takes to launch a successful marketing or communication plan in today’s marketplace and examples of campaigns that have inspired and impressed our Giants.

How to Launch a Successful Marketing Campaign

Define Success

The first and most important aspect of ensuring a successful marketing and communication plan is to define what success looks like and set the ambition for your organization. To put together a road map to anywhere, you must first decide on your destination.

Think specific and measurable goals and objectives for the campaign – how much money would you like to fundraise? How many new customers would you like to secure? What revenue would you like to generate for the various segments of your business?

Define Your Audience

Knowing with whom you need to communicate is critical. Are you speaking to business leaders, students, or the public in mass?

Identify who your potential customers are, what their persona is and where you will find them. Most importantly, identify their motivations and concerns and understand how they make decisions.

Develop the Narrative

Craft a message that resonates with your audience. You just identified their motivations and concerns – speak directly to those.

What problem does your product help solve? How does your service provide a successful solution for your customer? How can you mitigate their concerns?

Provide your audience with as much information (narrative) as possible to ensure they are able to make an informed decision about your product and/or service.

Giant Voices’ partner, HubSpot, identified examples of successful marketing campaigns throughout recent history. Take a look. We welcome your feedback and discussion.

Get Tactical

Put your campaign into action. At this point, the rubber hits the road.

Develop project teams, establish a budget and define communication channels. Get face time with your target audience – host an event or promote your organization at a trade show.

Put yourself in front of your prospects to every extent possible within your determined budget.

Measure

It’s time to look in the mirror. Did you meet your objective? Did your campaign produce the outcomes you defined for fundraising, new customers, or revenue growth?

Assess your progress early on so you can adapt your message if necessary. The concept of “fast fail” holds true here.

If your message did not resonate or produce conditions of success be sure that you analyze whether you defined the right audience, message, and/or executed on the right communication tactics.

If at first you don’t succeed, try again.