A simple framework to maximise results from your big creative campaign

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Ben Fitzpatrick – I’m the Head of Operations at Webprofits. Today I’m going to talk about how to plan a big budget marketing campaign.

I want to talk directly with senior marketers and business leaders about how you’re approaching these important campaigns. I’m talking specifically about when you have the opportunity to increase your normal advertising spend by 10-fold or more.

These campaigns take months of creative development and planning, and they deserve a great advertising strategy. So whether you’re going from $20K to $200K a month investment or from $200k to $2 million, I’ll provide a framework you can use to achieve your goals and minimise the waste.

So let’s get into it.

Set goals

Whether your campaign is a new product launch, an end of year sale, overall branding, entry into a new market or just an opportunity to ramp up your budget, the first step is setting goals and picking the metrics that define success. I would urge you from the start not to simply focus on awareness and impressions. In fact, some of the best campaigns don’t look at the top of the funnel as their top priority.

I’ve worked on a multi-million dollar campaign centred around a video competition where most of our initial advertising was actually targeted at our existing customers. We knew we’d grow awareness across the market, but we didn’t start there.

The primary goal of the campaign was getting our customers to enter. This allowed us to then leverage their content to promote the business to the broader public. And it led to a huge uplift in positive awareness as people learned about the business through our customers rather than directly from the brand.

For that campaign, the most important metrics for us were user generated content, social engagement, impressions and traffic. But you’ll need to customise these metrics to align with your campaign.

Outline your media plan

Once you know how to define success, the next second step is to create the outline of your media plan to help determine where and how you’re going to invest. Keep it simple and start with a spreadsheet.

First, list all available marketing channels and every type of content involved in the campaign – for example, Facebook Advertising with a Teaser Video, Facebook Advertising with Blog Content, Remarketing to a Landing Page, Search Advertising to a Landing Page, and so on. This gives you a complete list of all activity you’re going to focus on within your campaign.

Then simply add in the metrics you’ve chosen to measure. With this framework in place, you can easily compare, for example, the cost of promoting a video on Facebook versus promoting a video on Youtube – or the cost of an email address when promoting a competition on Instagram versus on display advertising.

Set benchmarks

Now that you’ve got the outline of your media plan in place, the third step is to set specific benchmarks for every channel, content type and activity.

How much do you expect to pay for 1,000 video views on Facebook? What’s your expected cost per email collected through remarketing. What’s the likely cost per thousand impressions of your Instagram ad?

While it’s difficult to make these numbers exact, if you have good historical data from your campaigns or you’re working with an agency who has experience in your industry, you should be able to make very educated estimates for every metric involved.

Make informed choices

You’ve now got all the information you need for the final step, which is to start making informed choices around where you invest your advertising dollars. Make a week-by-week plan for the campaign and start allocating ad budget. Because you’ve already put specific benchmark metrics in place, you’ll immediately have measurable goals to report against.

Remember though that even if it looks like one channel is going to be your best performer, you’re likely to have diminishing returns the more you invest. So you always need to diversify. This has the added benefit of giving you data across a broad range of channels at the start of your campaign which you can use to optimise and prioritise as it progresses.

Finally, you can always customise this media plan to fit your business and marketing. Most important is that you’re working to a detailed plan.

Too often what I see is a great campaign idea and awesome creative assets paired with a sub-par advertising strategy. It often comes in the form of a set and forget campaign through programmatic ad buying, a campaign focused only on optimising for awareness or simply an inexperienced marketer trying to manage complex ad targeting.

Regardless, it’s a waste – wasted money and wasted opportunity. So if you’re concerned that this might be your business, just send me a message and I’ll get in touch.

If you want a template of this media plan framework, just leave a comment and I’ll send you one directly.

And thanks for watching.

Ben Fitzpatrick

Head of Operations at Webprofits

With over five years tenure and extensive experience across all areas of digital marketing, Ben Fitzpatrick is Webprofits’ Head of Operations and a consultant for some of our largest Growth Marketing clients.

Across the business, he is constantly working with the team to innovate and improve in order to keep Webprofits at the forefront of digital marketing.