One of our greatest challenges as marketers is selling the value of “marketing” to our non-marketing business executives.

Since many of the executives of small to mid-market companies view marketing as an expense instead of an investment, it’s challenging to gain their buy-in for our ideas, and to get budget approval for our campaigns.

One way to attempt to gain their buy-in is to provide them with detailed marketing campaign plans for each campaign — plans that outline the business case and projected return on investment before you run the campaign, along with updates to key metrics as the campaign progresses.

Marketing Campaign Validation Steps

Campaign outcomes are difficult to predict. There are so many variables which affect any campaign’s final result:

• The quality of the campaign concept
• The list quality or audience targeting
• The value of the offer
• The impact of the message and the creative
• The quality of the fulfillment
• The timing
• Sales follow-up and conversion

Sophisticated marketers gain an understanding of how all of these work together through experience and have a good feel for how to design a high-performing campaign.

To gain this experience, create a detailed campaign plan before running any marketing campaign. Thinking through all of these key elements and putting numbers into spreadsheets to project campaign ROI will increase your likelihood of running a successful campaign.

Define Campaign Strategy

Every marketing campaign should tie into defined business goals. By now, almost everyone’s jumped into social media, but how many have done so with a clear understanding of how these activities will impact their top and bottom lines?

Instead of trying the marketing “trend of the day” and hoping for success, clearly define your business goals and match them to your campaign strategy before building out your campaign plan.

This is typically the first deliverable in each of the marketing campaign media subjects in the Marketing MO app.

Create Your Campaign Plan

Your campaign plan ensures that you’ve thought through all of the tough questions. Whether you’re using search marketing, social media, traditional media, online media, email marketing, events, publicity, telemarketing or direct mail, your campaign will outline your:

• Campaign Objective
• Target Audience
• Offer
• Creative Concepts
• Campaign Goals
• Response Rate Estimates
• Total Targeted Impressions
• Metrics to Track
• Preliminary Budget
• Fulfillment
• Testing Criteria