How often should you be running marketing campaigns? All the time.
This is really rather straightforward. The days of the static web site and four campaigns a year are over.
You can never “finish” your web site. Content marketing is the approach that keeps adding new things to your site and other online marketing vehicles in a continual stream.
There’s no “Spring Campaign.” It’s the Everyday Campaign from now on.
Frankly if your marketing isn’t in continual motion you’re wasting your money with your individual, little, limited efforts. It takes time to fill a pipeline, to generate interested prospects. If you have gaps in your campaigns, in touching and interacting with your prospects, then you’ll have gaps in your pipeline. What you do in marketing can have results maybe 90 days down the road. Do nothing today, nothing happens in three months.
On the other hand, your online marketing can also take advantage of the interactivity of online systems. Let’s say that a campaign activity you do today brings someone to your site. That can trigger a series of interactions with that person that have been well defined and tested. Send them personalized emails shaped to their current state of decision making. Offer them white papers, ebooks, specialized articles. Direct them to things on your site that they might not find easily on their own. And do this all in a way that is automatically generated and ran by your Marketing Automation System.
It can be very, very effective. Individual consumers have come to expect this. Buy something from Amazon and they’ll suggest something else that you might be interested in. Watch something on Netflix and they’ll make a suggestion of what to watch next. Both are getting scarily good at it.
You need to get good at it, too. What your prospects want is regular, individualized interactions with you (or the appearance of interaction). It’s refined. It is in a very real sense a little campaign just for that person. While you are running big things that attract notice from a wide audience, the little campaigns are what do the real work. And they can be fully automated. That’s where you save money. Spend on the big stuff and the automated systems start cranking out qualified prospects ready to buy.
When you plan for your marketing year you will look at your seasonality, the big events for your industry, and the general buying patterns of your prospects and customers. That will shape the meta level for your campaigns. But below that will be a continual stream of activities, some directed and launched by you, others initiated by your prospects and running automatically.
How often do you need to run campaigns? Always.
Copyright © 2014 - All Rights Reserved
{ 0 comments… add one now }