Marketing is the heart of your business and a key aspect when it comes to keeping clients and attracting potential ones. Without marketing, current customers as well as prospects may not be aware of all the services that you offer, which could decrease the opportunity to expand your client base. To help ensure that this doesn’t happen to you, we interviewed our Marketing Manager on the steps of building and planning a marketing campaign to better help your business.

Target Market

The first step in carrying out a successful marketing plan is defining your target audience. Take a look at your top clients, the ones you enjoy working with and who gives you the most amount of business. According to the 80/20 rule, defined by Smart Insights – 80 percent of your business is done by 20 percent of your client base.

Look at that top portion of your book to get an idea of who your target market is, given that you want to attract more clients who emulate those you enjoy working with the most.

Demographic Research

Once you have identified your target market, you can conduct some demographic research on your geographic area of interest. This is dependent on your current location as well as where you can reach a large amount of your desired audience. A suggested demographic research range that NEXT’s Marketing Department uses is a 50 mile radius.

An important thing to keep in mind when doing demographic research is how your target market can be reached both from a geographic and marketing channel standpoint.

Marketing Channels

Marketing channels are the different ways to reach current and potential clients. There are two primary channels used; traditional and digital media. Traditional media includes letters, post cards, magazines and newspaper advertisements, while digital media includes social media, email blast campaigns radio/television exposure and more.

While planning these campaigns, look at the age range you want to target along with your budget. For instance, when marketing to young adults, a social media strategy may be an affordable option that has the potential to gain traction. On the other hand, when marketing to older adults, newspaper or specialty magazine advertisements might be a more fitting marketing tactic.

Repetition and Tracking

One key element of a successful marketing campaign is repetition, so don’t create a budget that only allows you to engage just one channel of marketing. Make sure to establish consistency in your marketing to build brand recognition and achieve maximum results.

After determining your strategies as well as a timeline, it’s important to determine how you are going to measure the results. Whether you track clicks from online campaigns or record outgoing and incoming calls, measuring results can define the success of your campaign as well as what methods work best for you.

Creating a marketing campaign can be difficult when you don’t know where to start. Hopefully these tips we have gathered for you can help you build the campaign that’s right for your business. If you have any questions about building a marketing campaign contact the NEXT Marketing department.