Planning My First Marketing Campaign

[BootstrapBill]

I'm planning out my first marketing campaign and I just wanted to run my idea past the collective wisdom of the hive to make sure I'm on track.

I may be wrong, but I guess that part of creating a "big brand" is having people associate your brand with your space - for example, eventually one of the biggest search terms will be "your brand name". People will seek out the traffic source directly, rather than find it through the SERPs

All good marketing campaigns start with the goal and in this instance I have 5 options:

• Traffic generation
• Product sales / Affiliate link clicks
• Email sign-ups
• Brand visibility development
• Brand authority development

With this campaign, I'd like to grow my following on Twitter (brand visibility) to start and diversify traffic sources.

The obvious content 'hook' is creating ego-bait; a blog post titled "35 Most Influential Anglers To Follow On Twitter". The post will list 35 anglers (if I was in the fishing niche) with a little about them.

Listicles are always easy to write and hopefully the ego-boost will allow the post to be shared with the "anglers" twitter follower (giving my brand access to their audience, sort of borrowing credibility).

To measure if the campaign was a success I'll judge it on two criteria:

• Number of times the post has been shared
• Increase in Twitter followers (compared to the baseline)

As far as brand building goes - is growing a Twitter audience a good first campaign?

 

[stackcash]

I would quantify your goals. Just saying that you're going to "grow your twitter audience" doesn't make you accountable for anything. Instead, decide how many followers you want and create a deadline to reach that number. At the deadline, you'll have a clear win or fail. If you won, you can identify what worked and try to scale it. If you failed, you can adjust appropriately and try again. It's all trial and error.

This goes for any campaign / project / goal - decide what you want to do, create the goal & deadline, create the process for accomplishing your goal, put the process into the action, review the results, and adjust as necessary.

As far as building your own "big brand" - my best advice is to not overestimate the work involved. Attack something that you *know* you can dominate. Going too big on your own can be a real motivation killer.

 

[BootstrapBill]

I would quantify your goals

I can't believe that I overlooked setting SMART goals with how often this is drilled into me at work!

You're right - to be a truly focused campaign the goals must be specific!

Lets do some marketing math to establish a more specific number ...

The total follower count of the 30 profiles is around 600,000 and if I can reach 1% of that audience, picking up 2% of everyone who sees the tweet/article then that will give me somewhere in the region of 120 potential followers.

Obviously a lot of unknowns in this equation such as the percentage who will retweet the article and the percentage who will follow my account after seeing the article but 120 new followers seems like a nice round goal to go after.

So...

We will add 120 new twitter followers within 10 days of the article going live.

 

[Sutra]

If your goal is to simply get 120 followers you'll get that much faster just by following a bunch of people in your niche. Many of them will follow you back. There's a cap on how many people you can follow in a day, but just follow as many as you can and in under a week you'll easily have over 130 followers.

Possibly anywhere between 500 to 1000. After a week go through all the people that you follow and don't follow you back and then unfollow them, which will bring down your ratio and increase people's perception of your social influence.

When you do start promoting your list post to people on Twitter I found it best to phrase it in a way that looks like you're helping that person out even if they are a big name.

Start the tweet with their name. It's a small personal touch that increases the likelihood they will share your tweet. Say something like hey Joe here's a best fishing list your audience might like.

I've also used Twitter to get a lot of email subscriptions very quickly. I did that with a giveaway and sending over 5000 individual tweets in a month. Doing that I went from zero subscribers to over 1200 within four weeks, but that's a whole different story.

You asked if using Twitter is a good first campaign. The answer to that depends entirely on where your target audience hangs out. If they spend a lot of time on Twitter and Twitter is likely to be a good first place to start. However, if they spend little time on Twitter and a lot of time on Facebook, Instagram, or something else, then Twitter is a horrible waste of time.

Before you start any campaign I strongly recommend creating a buyer profile. That way you'll know exactly who your customers are, their likes and dislikes, where they hang out, etc. with that and you'll know exactly where to start you're campaign.