Today’s blog post is related to the video you’ll find below. But in a nutshell we’re talking about why your six week advertising campaign, or six week marketing campaign, isn’t getting the type of results that you’re looking for.
Have you ever thrown up a campaign really quickly hoping to generate a few more sales, like a lot of sales, because you’re trying to pack everything into a short space of time and then you end up spending more than what you actually made? Well, I’m going to talk about why that’s happening and what are some things that you should be doing instead. Continue reading or watch the video below.
The Genesis of the 6 Week Campagin
We see a lot of it happening where, Thanksgiving is coming up, you’re going to throw up a campaign or Christmas is around the corner so you’re going to throw up a campaign. Easter, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, Back to School! So we tend to see a lot of people do campaigns around seasons or special holidays and events.
Now, one of the biggest reasons shorter campaigns don’t work for some businesses is because that’s all they’re doing. A little boost of campaigns here, there and everywhere. What that says to your audience is that you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re just sending out a whole bunch of information to me and you just want me to buy.
What Makes a 6 Week Campaign Work
I’ve seen for myself clients who are able to consistently have their inbound marketing going all the time, 24/7, 365 days, do better with these short campaigns. Why is that? Because their audience knows who they are, their audience sees them every day, whether that be in social posts, whether it be in email marketing, whether it be in advertising blog post, or anything like that. So the audience is aware of who they are so that when they turn on an ad campaign that’s clearly promotional in nature, to get them to buy something, the audience is already in a mode of trusting this person and says, “Yes I’ll buy what you’re offering!”
Boosting promotions do not allow three things that are need for effective campaigns.
- There’s not enough time to prepare
- There’s not enough time to collect data to see if you’re doing the right thing and if you should tweak something
- It’s too short a time for anybody to get to know you.
What To Do To Make The Campaign Work
So what should you do instead? Well, I kind of hinted at the solution right there where the clients who actually benefit from shorter term campaigns. Now, the reality is your campaign should last a little longer, but it works in tandem with your inbound marketing, your long-term marketing.
You’ve got to have a long-term strategy and that’s what you need to have in place for any short-term, boost strategy to ever kick off and ever have the kind of results that you want to see.
So the first thing is you must have some sort of inbound strategy. Now I recommend you still run ads, but you run ads at smaller budgets for content.
So if you do videos every week or every day, if you write blog posts, make sure that your audience is seeing this content. This is where you have the ability to fine tune your audience. So if you’re seeing a lot of likes, a lot of click throughs, a lot of leads being generated from this, that’s where you’re going to start building the audience.
So, start thinking about what is the type of content that you’re going to be putting out every day or every week that’s going to allow you to generate leads or at least get people to come to a place where they could put in their name and email address.
Ensuring You Have The Time To Prepare
Most people say they don’t have time to plan out campaigns, but as the old adage goes…
If you Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail.
When you’re thinking about a campaign, the biggest piece of preparation is getting your KPI’s, and I spoke about this earlier. You want to make sure that you have a clear understanding of what your customer journey is and what are the KPI’s that matter to you.
A “like”, “retweet” or “follow” does not matter, if you are running campaigns that are short, because short campaigns imply that you want to get sales. So if you don’t have enough time to map out that customer journey to see what you will yield by their steps in the process then you will have idea what needs to be adjusted.
At the end of your campaign you want to be able to say, “Okay, I spent $100 in advertising over here and I got 50 leads, I got 4 sales”.
In summary
Why your six week campaign isn’t working fundamentally is because you’re not doing all the other support things, and if you continue to do shorter-term campaigns, what you’re going to find is that you’re spending a lot of advertising dollars and not knowing whether it’s effective or not.
The only way you will know is if you’re able to sit down with a consultant or an agency and actually map this out. Now, as you get better with the process, then what you will find is you’re able to run other underlying campaigns, and then every once in a while drop in a short-term campaign that’s meant solely to generate sales.
I hope this training has helped shine a light on why your six week campaigns aren’t performing the way you’d like them to.
It’s very important that you think strategically about all of these things.
So if you’ve got any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments below. Got more questions and need advise on which direction to take with your advertising campaigns schedule a strategy session today.