How to Hit the Ground Running With a Marketing Campaign After Summer is Over

We're all guilty of taking advantage of the summer months while they are available to us; the warm weather, long lunches, the social atmosphere coming to a peak, and the easy going nature of our days tend to take off some of our edge. It's summertime, and the living is easy. The harsh reality is that the Fall comes a lot quicker than most of us expect, and the slower summer months begin to affect our bottom lines, in whatever role we assume. The cyclic panic as Fall approaches is a fear we've all experienced since our school days, when the Back to School sales begin and the days become shorter. The start of the fourth quarter and the home stretch of the year is looming, so it's easy to want to refocus and reach for your lofty yearly goals. Instead of scrambling, we've broken down some steps to keep you on top of your game as you begin your first marketing campaigns to get back to business.

1. Start With A Strategy for a New Campaign

In the digital landscape, a little planning goes a long way. Strategy involves aligning your team and your marketing with distinctive goals that you set. Establishing consistency across a campaign is important to making it cohesive and unified, to avoid looking like your campaign is scattered and off-message. Everything from the graphics being used, to the copy being written, to the tone of voice your campaign takes on should all reflect back to one idea. This one idea should reflect a pain point that your customers are encountering and how you solve is specifically with your service or product.

It's important to always remember that your strategy should always keep the "ideal customer" in mind, and how you solve their issue. Think about your product or your service. How does your ideal customer react to it? What kind of push back does your least ideal customer (and we all have one) always point to? Address those things as you strategize, to make sure that the campaign is full-proof.

A tight strategy lays the groundwork for the campaign's success, and creates a path the can be easily followed to ensure the highest level of execution will bring results that you want.

2. Set Goals for Your New Campaign

One of the tent poles of your strategy is your goals. What are you trying to achieve? Likely, if you've been slacking all summer like the rest of us, it's to bring in more leads. Ultimately, you want to address the pain point that you as an individual or business are facing, and set a realistic expectation of how that could be solved. If sales are low, aim for a goal of bringing in 10 more leads in the duration of the campaign, with the intention of turning those ten into 4 sales. If your brand recognition is sagging and you're seeing a decline on all interactions on your channels from your customer, set a goal of gaining 30 new followers, or decreasing the bounce rate on your website by 5%. Whatever your goal ends up being, make sure that it aligns with your strategy, and in the end it solves a pain point for you.

3. Establish Some Baselines

The number one question we receive as an agency is, "so how are we doing." And it's a very important question to ask. Establishing a baseline for your campaign builds in solid accountability into each campaign because you have a definite starting point. This allows you to realistically gauge what it will take for you to reach your goal, and throughout the life of the campaign allows you to check back and make sure that your strategy is effective. Within the duration of a campaign, it's important to reference back to baselines to determine if you need to start making adjustments so that you can get closer to your goal. If you keep that goal and the baseline as your two static points, you can get creative with how you get from one to the other. It effectively gives you your answer on how you're actually doing.

4. Get Social and Spread the Word

One of the easiest channels to begin to implement change is your social media, because social media is continuously changing space. It's build on being dynamic, so your content can be dynamic with it as well. It's important that as a business, your social media if not directly involved in the campaign as a channel for advertising becomes an opportunity to develop a tone that draws back to your marketing. You want the process to be seamless, so that when people are ready to act they know exactly what to expect.

In any business to business transaction, one of the most important media channels to solidify is your Linkedin. Linkedin accounts for much of the social interaction and success when considering B2B business deals, so it's important to be present. Leveraging their advertising, as well as a solid inbound marketing strategy, can help you bolster your LinkedIn presence to the point where there's definite return on your investment in social media. And that's not to say that you should ignore other social medias. Facebook now drives more than 25% of all internet traffic, so it's important to be present in whatever effective media you can find.

5. Solidify Your User Experience to Maximize the Chance of a Conversion

So you've done it, you've worked the crowd, they see that you mean business, and they're in. The only problem? Your website stinks. It's hard to find your products, it's clunky, and it's unresponsive. Poof, all of your hard work developing strategy and goal setting, all for nothing. You website is your online storefront, so treat it like that! Make the best first impression, and make it easy for them to say yes to you. Make sure that when people are entering your site, they aren't leaving immediately by looking at bounce rate. Make sure that people are converting by setting up goals in Google Analytics. And above all else, make sure that they are engaged by checking your site duration and page views, because the longer a customer is poking around and inquiring about your services, the further along they are in the sales process, and the more likely they're going to make a move.

So shake off the cobwebs, flex those business muscles, and hit the ground running this fall with a refreshed and refocused outlook.