Guest post by Ryan Duffy:

Without a doubt, one of the toughest tasks faced by marketing managers is going through the process of leading a marketing campaign. There will be a multitude of different elements you will oversee – but the main areas will be leading the team, controlling the budget and ensuring that the campaign is successful. There is a popular saying that ‘to succeed, you must fail first’ – but in the world of business, getting the chance to recover from a failure is quite rare. To ensure you don’t face failure, take a look at some of these tips, which will help you lead a truly successful marketing campaign.

Setting Objectives

The most common aim businesses have for a marketing campaign is to create a brand image and to then improve the level of product/service awareness by disseminating information to consumers. Once this is achieved, the marketing programme should then result in these consumers turning into customers and choosing to purchase the product or service you are offering.

The main thing to remember when setting objectives is that they are practical and will be realistic to achieve, but are still able to guarantee a good ROI.

Budgeting

Once realistic objectives have been set, the next step is to plan how you will be using the budget you have been put in charge of. As the leader of the campaign, you are the one who is expected to ensure that the budget is used resourcefully.

This is a common area where leaders can trip-up, because they can spend too much too early, or miss-spend the budget on the wrong type of marketing tactics. When it comes to choosing the marketing mix for your business, the best way to make efficient use of your budget is by choosing the most cost-effective way of reaching and making a favourable impression on your target audience. That’s why you should always consider using high-impact, low-cost marketing methods such as social media or direct marketing tools such as wristbands or flyers.

When deciding on how to use your budget, you need to consider how it will be spent across your objectives and if the team you are leading will be able to spend the budget effectively with the tasks you set them.

Monitoring

Once the campaign begins, you will need to monitor how it is performing. This step will require you to use strong team management skills, as you will have to ensure that you can pick people who have a strong eye for detail and will be able to analyse the effectiveness of your campaign. There are a variety of different tools you can use to do this, but it is imperative you use one which shows you how your campaign can be improved (if it needs to be).

Once the monitoring process begins, you should start thinking of potential contingency plans. You can bring these into play if the campaign doesn’t perform well, but it is vital that you save yourself some budget to use new advertisement techniques or even hire new team members or agencies.

Analysis

Once the campaign reaches its end, the final step to take will be to sit down and analyse how the campaign performed. The key areas to assess are

• return on investment (ROI),
• measuring the team performance
• thinking about what areas were good and bad

Next, you should review your own personal progress: this stage can be a good opportunity to ask your team what they thought about your leadership throughout and whether they believe it had a good impact on the campaign.

Finally, you will also want to prepare a presentation to show to the business or product owners, and give them a full break-down of how the campaign performed. Once this is done, you will have a clear idea of how the campaign performed and how you performed personally – which will allow you to continue with your current approach to campaigns or see how you can do better with your next campaign.

About the Author: 

Ryan Duffy is a freelance writer who is a recent university graduate in Media Studies. His passion for people and writing has encouraged him to pursue this career full-time. He enjoys writing about business and lifestyle topics and this is where most of his work has taken him.

You can meet Ryan on Twitter and find him via his Gravtar ID.