Managing a Successful Marketing Campaign That Meets Your Objectives

The process of developing and overseeing a campaign for a company’s advertising or marketing program can be broken down into these five steps that a marketing manager must oversee or personally complete: determine objectives; establish a budget; evaluate and select an agency (if you decide to go that route); manage the program; and monitor the program and assess its effectiveness.

1. Objectives

Generally, the intent of marketing, and advertising in particular, is to establish a brand image and develop product awareness by providing valuable information for prospective customers. In addition, persuasion is part of complementary marketing efforts to encourage action on the part of customers (i.e., make a purchase).

You will have to create goals tailored to your business’s needs. For example:

• One company’s goal for its advertising program may be to gain brand awareness and customer loyalty, increasing customer retention 10%.
• Another company’s goal may be to increase sales by $5.2 million by the end of the quarter.

Your objectives should always be realistic and achievable while maximizing profitability.

2. Budget

Several useful methods of creating a budget might fit your brand’s needs and strategy.

A company’s leaders or marketing managers decide on a budget at a level they think should be spent or believe the firm can afford, which is also referred to as the arbitrary allocation method:

• Advantage: The decision-makers are supposed to be experts in the field and thus their decision may be appropriate.
• Disadvantage: The decisions and judgment are only as good and efficient as the people making it.

When using the percentage of sales method, the budget is determined based on a decided-upon percentage of total sales. For example, a company may decide to allocate 10% of its total sales to be spent on advertising:

• Advantage: Once a percentage of sales amount is chosen, calculating the budget is quite simple.
• Disadvantage: The budget calculated as a set percentage of sales may not be ideal for the objectives set; accordingly, choosing the percentage of sales may be difficult in the first place.

The objective and task budget method revolves around deciding on how much should be spent to achieve established campaign objectives. Basically, a value is set on what each objective is worth:

• Advantage: It is highly customized and specific to the objectives meant to be achieved with a particular campaign.
• Disadvantage: The value of an objective can be misjudged, or the value might quickly change—before the campaign is completed. Accordingly, the optimal amount for the advertising budget would also change.

One of the simplest methods for selecting the right budget for your campaigns is to meet the competition—that is, choose the same amount of money as your competitors:

• Advantage: The decision on a specific dollar amount is simple, since you are simply mimicking your competitor’s decision.
• Disadvantage: You will have to figure out how to find out what the competition’s budget is. In addition, the amount your competitors spent on advertising may not be optimal or financially possible for your business, depending on your competitors’ sales, profits, size, and other important factors.

Higher budgets do not guarantee more favorable outcomes. The success of each marketing campaign depends on many factors, including the quality of its content, personalization or tailoring for the target audience, and the media and channels selected.

A campaign budget should always be realistic—in line with the objectives you set—if you are to avoid inconsistency between expectations and actual results.

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