What do you think of when you hear the word "marketing"? Television commercials? Billboards or magazine ads? Obnoxious advertising created and calculated to get in your mind and stay there? If you include the Internet in your definition, do you only think of banner ads and pop-ups or pop-behinds? These are all part of a marketing campaign (hopefully without the obnoxious part) but none of them, alone, are sufficient to reach the largest possible portion of your target market. The most efficient and effective way to reach your potential clients, whether online or off, is to use a complete and unified marketing campaign.
As you spread your message (or product or service) to the world at large, you need to deliver a strong, clear, and powerful message. The following ten points are aspects of a marketing campaign that are necessary to do just that.
1) Branding
Branding can include everything from logo development to corporate image definition, to audience targeting. Your brand is your company, and it's important to manage it well and keep it in front of your customers.
2) Design
It doesn't matter if you're looking for print design, web design, or a business identity package, the right design firm can help you present an image that is classy, professional, and memorable. They always say you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and in today's fast-paced world the time for that first chance has gotten significantly smaller. A great design will help you catch their attention and keep it.
3) Development
In the online market it's not always about a fancy-schmancy website. Sometimes you need to offer something more. Client-server applications, web applications, and databases are all useful elements in today's business world, and you may need to include them in your marketing campaign.
4) Internet Marketing
The Internet has opened the doors to countless potential customers. An Internet marketing campaign can help you reach them by employing PPC, SEO, conversion rate optimization, and even email campaigns.
5) Multimedia
There's more than one way to reach your clients these days. And a presentation that uses more than just words is a lot more likely to draw them in. Audio, video, animation, and interactivity are all valid ways to present yourself to them.
6) Public Relations
PR is a useful way to spread the word about your company or product. You can express your corporate image in a positive way without ?selling them? on your offering. PR can include press releases, events, sponsorships, publicity, and more.
7) Project Management
You can plan and strategize all you want, but until you implement and follow through with your marketing campaign, it's all for nothing. You need good project management to see it through. Project management starts with a needs analysis and specifications planning and follows through to resource allocation and progress oversight and reporting.
8) Research and Analysis
Generalities and theories can't really help your marketing campaign. Your strategy needs to be based on strong research and analysis in order to discover your target market's behavior and begin tapping into markets that you might otherwise be missing.
9) Web Management
A strong Internet presence is a must for a successful marketing campaign, but it has to be done right. Web architecture, analytics and tracking, content creation, management and optimization are all necessary components of strong web management.
10) Unification
The best way to maintain a strong marketing campaign is to bring all these elements together into a single strategy or use a single marketing company. If you find yourself outsourcing your marketing needs to ten different companies, your brand and your image can start to spread too thin. Your PR firm might want to go one direction and your Internet marketing company might have completely different ideas. But if you can take care of all these elements under a single roof, your marketing compaign will have the greatest chance for success.
Andy Eliason is a writer at Main10, an Internet marketing and development company. You can check out their website for a complete list of their services and more information about starting a powerful marketing campaign.
