Campaign

How often do you refer back to your marketing plan? Every week? Once a month? Never?

If you’ve invested the time and energy into a marketing plan … great! You’ve taken the first step. Now to make your plan successful, turn it into a living, breathing part of your revenue generation process.

To bring your plan to life, it’s important to link your campaigns and sales activities to the goals you’ve defined in your marketing plan. How are you going to generate leads, customers and revenue? How do you focus on the right options for your business?

When you invest in careful campaign planning, you’ll make better marketing investments and give yourself the best chance at hitting your goals. Here are the key steps in the process.

1. Quantify your goals. Set specific, measurable targets – for example,

Increase revenue by 25%
Double the number of customers you serve
Increase profitability 10% from your existing customer base?

2. Define your overarching strategies. What are the general things you’ll need to do to hit the goals you’ve set? For example:

Generate 1,000 qualified leads for a particular product or service
Generate 100 new customers from a specific industry vertical
Improve sales effectiveness to increase your qualified lead-to-customer conversion rate from 12% to 15%
Increase average revenue per order by 15%
Sign up 50 new channel partners

3. Define your sales process. What are the steps your prospects go through as they decide to buy from you? When you define your sales process, you can determine exactly how many prospects you’ll need at each step – and you can design your campaigns to produce those prospects.

Here’s a simple way to define a sales process. In an Excel spreadsheet, list

The step in buying process. The first step is typically identifying a problem that needs a solution and the last step is becoming a customer.
What needs to happen for the prospect to move to the next step
Length of time a prospect typically spends at this step
% of prospects who move from this step to the next

At the bottom, sum the column with the %s in it. That’s the percent of leads that end up buying.

4. Design campaigns to meet each of your specific goals. Your sales process figures will help you evaluate how many leads you need to generate.

For example, if you want 100 new customers in an industry vertical and you typically close 10% of the leads you generate, then you know you need to generate 1,000 leads from that vertical. With that information, you can design better campaigns.

5. Know your numbers. Marketing campaigns are investments that should produce a financial return. Your goal is to design campaigns that produce your desired results at the lowest possible cost. Be creative and choose media that delivers the highest ROI.

6. Execute, measure and improve. Monitor your campaign results closely. Are you hitting your projections? If not, what do you need to do to improve? It’s easy to get caught up and forget this step, but if you’re not keeping a close eye on your numbers, you won’t know whether you’re on track.

After all, that’s why you developed a marketing plan in the first place! Right?

{ 0 comments }

Are you generating enough leads to meet your revenue goals? If you’re winging it, you’re less likely to hit your numbers. If you have to feed a village, you can’t toss your line and hope for the best.

Instead, tie your marketing campaigns into your company’s customer and revenue goals. A few simple calculations can help you understand

The # of impressions you’ll need
The number of leads you need to generate
Whether your campaigns will produce enough customers/revenue to hit your goals

Here’s how: First, calculate the number of customers you’ll need to generate.

For what timeframe do you want to generate this estimate?
What’s your revenue goal for this timeframe?		A
How much does an average customer spend in this timeframe?		B
Total number of customers needed (A/B)		C

Now estimate the % of leads that become customers. (If you don’t know this figure, the head of your sales team should – or use the calculation below.)

Number of new leads you generated in the last 6 months		D
Number of customers generated from those leads		E
% of leads that become customers (E/D)		F

Now you can project how many leads and impressions you’ll need from your campaigns in this period:

Number of leads you’ll need (C/F)		G
Average response rate you get from your campaigns (as a %)		H
Number of impressions you’ll need to generate (G/H)		I

It’s a simple formula but it’s a starting point. When you set up your campaigns with a focus on the end result — customers & revenue – you’re in a better position to hit your goals. And if you’re falling short, you can work to:

Increase your reach – generate more impressions (send out more emails, launch another campaign, etc.)
Improve your response rates with better offers, better targeting, better creative
Improve your conversion rates

We explored this topic in more detail during a 20-minute webinar last week. Contact me directly with questions!

{ 1 comment }