Starting a marketing campaign is a nerve-wracking time for any business. Get it right and you’ll be watching a stream of well-qualified future customers beat a path to your door. Drop the ball and you could have the unpleasant experience of watching money evaporate before your eyes. Which will it be?
Though you can never truly remove risk from the mix when it comes to marketing, you can at least maximise your chances of success by asking yourself key common sense questions before pulling the trigger on any individual campaign. Let’s look at four of the most obvious things to consider.
- Who’s The Target Market?
Though it seems a question that’s almost impossible to avoid, we’ve probably all witnessed at least one marketing campaign that’s gone down in flames due to failure to really consider this question in depth.
Before a single cent goes out the door, you need to have a crystal clear, documented idea of exactly who you’re trying to target. Skip this stage and you can almost certainly kiss any money you spend goodbye.
- Where Are You Going To Find Them?
Knowing who you’re trying to reach is part of the puzzle, but where are you going to find them? Whether online or offline, different demographics band together and woe betide the marketer who goes fishing in the wrong pool.
Senior citizens aren’t going to be hanging around the skate park, and young mothers probably aren’t poring over body-building websites. Trying to address a niche audience on a general interest platform is a recipe for disaster. You need to do some serious research on where your target group congregates to get the most bang for your marketing buck.
- What Price Point Is Your Market At?
Different target groups will have different price sensitivity. Even within wider groups, you’ll often find people arranging themselves into different pricing tiers in terms of what they’re prepared to pay. Some people are, to put it politely, frugal. Others feel more comfortable paying top dollar for perceived quality.
You need real-world feedback about the price point of your product or service from your target group before you commit to spending money trying to attract their attention. Your marketing campaign shouldn’t be functioning as a form of pricing research – it should be targeting people based on what you already know about what they’re prepared to pay.
- Why Should They Choose You?
You know who you’re after, where they are, and what they’re prepared to pay – it’s a good start. But why should they pick you? Fail to address that and your campaign will be lost at sea.
Regardless of what market you’re in, there’s no shortage these days of competitors trying to attract exactly the same crowd. You need a carefully considered USP ready to rock and roll in order to stand out from the herd.
The four questions we’ve covered all fall firmly under the heading of common sense, but the list of disastrously expensive marketing campaigns that have failed to address them is not a short one. Give your marketing dollars the best possible chance of coming home with some friends by making sure you’ve considered them all carefully in the context of your own campaigns!
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