Before I started my own business, I worked for a number of different larger companies - all of which followed a formality of putting together campaign and strategy documents on a regular basis. Now that I’m my own business, however, I’m a lot more fluid and things can be much easier when it comes to decision making. Although you don’t need to follow the long process that I used to, I want to take the opportunity to talk to you about campaign planning in today’s podcast episode. We’re going to be looking at putting together a campaign plan, how you can structure your campaigns and how to execute them successfully. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST

• One of the first things you need to do is understand your objectives for the year. What is it you want to achieve? What are your targets? Once you know this, you can think about campaigns that will allow you to reach your goals.
• It’s also important to think about your target audience in the early stages of your planning. If you don’t know who you want as your customer, you’re really going to struggle.
• Write down ALL of your ideas, no matter how crazy they are. Write down as many as you can.
• Once you have written down all of your ideas, pick three or four for each objective.
• Take a look at your calendar and see what may impact when you do your campaigns. Split your year in quarters and put a couple of campaigns into quarters.
• If your campaign involves social media, you need to think about whether or not you need artwork. This can take some time and if you’re not planning in advance, you may find you’re unable to create what you need.
• On that note, if you need someone to help you with something, you need to work out when the latest date is you need to let them know by.
• Whilst planning, you also need to think about your expected outcomes. Make sure you’re realistic, yet optimistic.

THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…

Depending on your objectives and the stage you’re at in your business, you may want to limit the number of campaigns you’re doing each quarter. Make sure you’re not doing more than you can manage.

HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISS

• #1 Understand Your Objectives for the Year – 07:05
• #2 Who Are Your Target Audience? – 08:08
• #3 Start Brainstorming – 08:30
• #4 Work Out Which Ideas Are Best – 09:50
• #5 Look at Your Calendar – 11:30
• #6 Deep Dive into Your Campaigns and Start Planning Them in Detail– 13:46

Transcript below

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. And honestly, I have so excited that I can now say what on 101 that just seems like so much work and I am so honestly, I'm so proud that I've managed to be consistent all this time because actually I'm not very good at consistency in terms of like, I don't know when I try and start something new and new year's resolutions, obviously we're not far from the new year and I've been pretty bad at them over the years I have to say. And I'm just so pleased that actually I love doing this so, so much and I get such lovely feedback from people and people. It's a Monday today actually when I'm recording this. So the podcast has just gone out for today and I've already had a couple of DM's already of people messaging me and tagging me in and I love it and it really spurs me on to create more good podcasts, bring on more good guests.

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Also, I am going to take this moment to have a little cheeky request that if you haven't done a review on iTunes then I would really, really appreciate it. Like I said, I love doing the podcast and I love hearing from you guys. So if you would happily go along to iTunes and give me a lovely five star review and write something, that would just be amazing. So thank you. I feel like this is public service announcements or something. I'm trying to think. Is there anything else I need to say but I don't think so. So we will crack on with today's episode. So I hope you enjoyed last week's episode. I really do. I'm, this is really odd. I'm recording episode 101 before we've recorded episode 100 so I'm recording this thing. I hope you enjoyed it and I have no idea what it's going to be like cause I haven't yet done it, but I'm really excited about the prospect of it so I really hope you enjoyed it. I can't wait to hear your feedback from that.

So yeah, if you haven't listened to it, go back and listen to it. It is a bit different for me, but I think you'll like it. Hopefully. Like I said, I have no idea. I haven't done it yet. It's really weird. It's like I'm in some funny time warp thing where things are done in the wrong order. In fact, if you're in the UK, do you watch Dr. Who? I love Dr. Who. It's a bit of a sad admission. I don't know. You might think it's sad. You might not. My husband thinks I'm particularly sad, but it's a little bit like Dr. Who in the sense of the timelines are all out of sync and it's a bit like that when I'm doing the podcast cause I'm talking to you about things that haven't yet been done. Very strange.

Anyway, I'll stop talking about Dr. Who and get on with today's episode. So you may know by now, obviously I've been in marketing a long, long time, but 15ish years at this point and I've worked for some big companies and worked with huge marketing budgets and some big marketing teams and big marketing agencies. And obviously when I worked at those places I was going to say I had to do things properly. Like I don't do them properly now. And I do. But when you're working with bigger companies, they do like the formality of putting together a big massive strategy documents or a huge campaign plan or the more formal stuff. Whereas now I would say I'm managing smaller business stuff and my own staff, I'm a lot more fluid. And actually what's lovely about working with smaller companies as opposed to, I used to work for Land Rover, so massive, massive company is that you had a million people that you had to speak to.

You had to, everything had to be long and arduous and detailed because it wasn't just you making the decision. And honestly any campaign took forever, not only to discuss, to put together, to plan, to organise, to get all the elements together, but also then to actually go and go ahead and get it approved. So not only if you've never worked with a big marketing department, we would have obviously, you know, people way above me. So I might have to get it past global marketing or retail marketing cause I was corporate marketing. Then once I'd done that, I might have to check the product stuff with the product people, then I'd have to send it to legal and legal wants throughout an entire campaign because they didn't like the headline. And it was just so frustrating. So there was so many hoops that we had to go through and these long arduous like I these massive documents, these big processes that we'd put together in order to show everybody what we were going to be doing, what we expected to get from it and all that sort of thing.

However, I want to talk to you today about some campaign planning. Now I'm not going to go into the long and arduous process of what I used to do, but sometimes it's good to do that more formal side of planning and actually this year I am doing this as I'm recording, this is the sixth of Jan, so like I said, it's a bit early in the year for me. So I'm actually doing my campaign planning now. I should have probably done it towards the end of last year. But anyway, I was really focused on personal and business goals rather than the actual campaigns that were going to help me get those goals. So what I want to talk to you about today is putting together that campaign planning so you know what you're going to be doing going forward in the year and then how you can structure each one of those campaigns in order to them and to execute them successfully.

Because I don't know about you, but sometimes you have really good intentions and think, Oh yeah, I could do this. And then you leave everything to the last minute or not even that. You underestimate what's going to be in that campaign or what you need to do and therefore you start rushing some of those last things. And I, I am guilty of that. I'll happily admit it and I should know better because obviously I do this a lot, but I think we need to sit down and plan a bit. And although sometimes in the bigger companies, I'm not saying this as Land Rover obviously, but they could waste a lot of time and we still have meetings for meeting sakes and forms for forms sakes. And I'm not saying to do that at all, but I am saying a little bit of planning will actually go a long way in terms of helping you with your campaigns for this year.

#1 Understand Your Objectives for the Year

So I'm going to talk you through what kind of what I used to do but in a much more simpler and less arduous process in order for you to then follow along and start planning your campaigns for this year if you haven't already done so. Okay? So the first thing you need to do is you need to understand your objectives for the year. So what is it that you actually want to achieve this year? What are the objectives for your business? And they might be around various different things. So it might be around, I want to, there's inevitably a financial goal for the year for the business. I want to grow it by X amount percent. I want to increase it to X amount of customers. I want to put my prices up, I want to do a get more people on my email list. I want more people signed up for my lead magnet.

Whatever your objective is for the business, I want you to write them down first because if you don't know what you're trying to actually get, then how on earth can you create a campaign to try and get that thing? So you need to understand what are my business objectives for the year and I'm not necessarily talking to crazy, amazing goals that we've talked about before. I'm just talking about what is, what do I really genuinely want to get from my business this year?

#2 Who Are Your Target Audience?

The other thing I want you to plan at this point, or I want you to write down is who is your target audience? Now I go on about this all the time. You're probably sick of hearing it, but obviously again, you need to know that because if you don't know what you want or who you want to sell that to or who you want as your customer, then you're really going to struggle.

So those two things kind of are given that you've already got them in your head, but obviously they're the two things that you're going to start with. What do I want and who am I targeting?

#3 Start Brainstorming

Okay, so once you've done that, the next thing I do is I literally brainstorm as many different ideas as possible and I will scribble them down on a piece of paper and I write down every crazy, amazing, different, boring, interesting idea that comes out in my head. So it's things like, well, I do a competition. Will I do a flash sale? Am I going to launch any new products? Do I do a launch? Am I doing live masterclasses? Shall I do a sales campaign? Shall I do something along the podcast? Shall I? And again, if one of my objectives is to increase podcast downloads, which is, and by now you'll know that we did a little competition to win some stuff at the beginning of the year.

And that campaign was purely focused around getting people to listen to the podcast and promoting the podcast. So again, try and write down as many different ideas as you can. Think of as many different campaigns that you can do. Like I said, can you focus on a particular area of the business? Can you focus on a particular product? Should you introduce a new product? Are you going to reopen your cart, close your cart, up your prices, all these different things. So try and write down as many different campaign ideas as possible and then literally Google campaign ideas or marketing ideas. And let's just see what's in there. If you're struggling for ideas to come up with.

#4 Work Out Which Ideas Are Best

So once you've written down loads of different ideas, you want start now thinking, okay, which one would be good for which, which would be realistic. What would I like to do?

Because one of those campaign ideas might be, I want to do an event, well I might not be ready this year to do an event. So that's a great idea, but it might need to shelve til next year or it might be that I don't have any new products to launch this year. So it might be that gets shelved as well. So go through those ideas. And ideally what I want you to do is kind of pick, I would say between three and four for each objective. So let's say you've got an objective to build your email list. Let's say you got an objective to build your sales and an objective for me to get more people to listen to the podcast. So those might be my three objectives that I've got for the year. And really I want at least three or four ideas for each of those objectives.

So for instance, the competition I did for the podcast, then I might do an advertising campaign for the podcast and then I also might do a, I don't know, something a bit different. Well the hundred episode is a, is a good one as well cause there's a lot of talk around that. So, so what can I do around those different times in order to help promote that? So two or three, three or four ideas for each of those objectives, that's what I would try and end up with. And I liked it at the moment. You literally just have a campaign idea. So let me, I'm going to use an idea of a flash sale. So at this point. So my flash sale would be for my objective to get more people in the Academy. So okay, that's my campaign idea. I'm going to do that.

#5 Look at Your Calendar

That's one of my three or four ideas for getting more people into the Academy. So then the next thing you need to do is go and look at your calendar and I want you to see what's going on this year that may impact when you do these campaigns. So for instance, for me, obviously I wanted to see when I hit episode a hundred you might have an anniversary and you might do an anniversary sale, you might have something else that has some kind of impact if you are seasonal. So I know a few people that listen, they have products that will sell more up to Christmas. So do they do something in the quiet periods or do they do something in the busy periods? So want you to kind of have a look at when you might have to fit these campaigns in based on what else happens in the year.

Then what I want you to do is split the year into quarters and look at putting a couple of campaigns in each quarter. Now this might be too much for me. I'm okay at this stage. Now you might want, and I've got three main objectives, but you might want to do one or two campaigns a quarter, but I can probably get away with doing about three I think now, because I've done it quite a few times, or they're saying that, you know, it's still a lot of work, so we'll need to see. But I want you to try and write down and go, okay, so in quarter one I'm going to do a competition for the podcast. This is obviously me and I'm going to do a flash sale for the Academy and I'm going to do a new lead magnet to get people on the email list. So those might be my three things that I'm doing in quarter one.

Then quarter two, I might do a live masterclass in order for the Academy. I might do a, I don't know, something for the podcast, but you get my drift. So every quarter I'm putting down what campaign I'm going to do for it. Now you pretty much at this point, ignore quarter two, three and four just because I want you to focus on this first quarter. Now if you can do quarter one, quarter two, great, you've got like half a year all set up, you vaguely know what you're gonna be doing all year, but you've got half a year where you're actually going to go and planning. Now, once I know roughly when and what I'm doing, and you might sort of in your head be deciding, okay, well this will probably take two weeks. So this two weeks of work, well then I'll do this in the next two weeks.

#6 Deep Dive into Your Campaigns and Start Planning Them in Detail

So you might have already got some dates in for it, but you definitely know what quarter it's going to be in. Then what you're going to do is you're going to start deep diving into each of these campaigns and start planning them that, you know, as I was going through this, I was thinking to myself, I should actually put this on a form and do a form for you. So that's what I've done. I wasn't gonna change my mind and I haven't done it yet, but I'll have it done by the time this podcast is gonna get live. So head over to the show notes teresaheathwearing.com/101 and you will find the link to this campaign form where I have already filled in and I've put gaps for you to write in. I haven't already done it cause I haven't done it yet.

Like I said, I'm in this weird time thing anyway. I will have it done by the time you go and hear this, but I'll put down spaces so that you can literally just build this in almost kind of what I would have done when I was working for somebody else in the marketing department. So basically all these things I'm going to talk you through now are going to be on this. So do go and grab that like I said teresaheathwareing.com/101.

Okay, so the first thing you're going to do is you're going to write down which objective this is relating to. So you know overall, right this the objective for this. This is why I'm doing this campaign. The next thing you're going to do is you're going to fill in any targeting details. So for instance, let's say, although my Academy can actually serve anybody with a business and anybody in marketing, let's say that I found actually loads of photographers really want to join the Academy.

I might do this particular campaign just to photographers. I'm not going to, but I'm just saying that might be why I put in some more targeting details. So rather than the overarching targeting, I might choose to put a campaign more succinctly to a certain audience. Then I want you to put the dates, so start and finish dates. How long is the campaign going to be? And then obviously that's when you can plan it in your diary. And I've got a wall planner and I would write it on the wall planner. And then I want you to just put a little bit of a text, kind of, there's a text box where you can just sort of brainstorm a little bit about what is this campaign. So if I'm going along my flash sale idea, so this is where I'm going to write down, that it's going to be a flash sale for the Academy.

The price is going to be whatever the flash sale price is going to be. Is it going to be just for one month, is it going to be recurring, is it going to be a dollar for a month, is it going to be half price for a month, 5% off? What is the actual deal going to be? And just write a few notes and anything else that you might need to know almost as if someone said to you, tell me about this campaign. That's where you want to write that bit down. Just so that you remember it in your head because I might think of something today and then two weeks later I think, Oh yeah, I need to do that and think, Oh I can't remember cause I have a terrible memory. So write down bits there that you need. Then you're going to think about how you're going to market this.

So what route to market are you going to use? So if I was going to...