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Define Your Goals

Before you build your campaign, think about your goals. Goals need to relate to measurable, attainable, and time-bound achievements. Of course, you want more sales! But that’s not the type of goal you need to set. Try something akin to this (just as an example): Decreasing your CPA by 10% by the end of June 2016.

Establish Your Target Audience

Learn about your audience and figure out what resonates with them. You can use Facebook insights to discover not only who “likes” your page, but who your posts reach and who actually engages with you. You can also analyze specific posts and see which ones elicit a better response.

If you find you’re getting a lot of engagement from certain types of posts or copywriting formulas, you can use the same formulas in your marketing campaign. Remember that SelfAdvertiser.com allows you to target any country and any device, so you have a very wide range option.

Create a Dedicated Landing Page

You need a dedicated landing page for every marketing campaign. The landing page provides customers with an excellent, seamless experience.

You can choose many different copywriting ideas and concepts for landing pages, but essential, your landing page should have these four aspects:

• Unique selling proposition: What sets you apart from your competitors.
• Benefits to your audience: What advantages your offering provides.
• Social proof: Testimonials and statistics that demonstrate your product is popular and widely used.
• Call to action: What you want visitors to the landing page to do – click, purchase, read…

To find the best format for your landing page, you can consider A/B testing and explore a few different strategies. SelfAdvertiser provides excellent, up-to-date data analysis, so this process is made easy. If you can’t do A/B testing, at the very least you can keep track of your bounce rate and check your analytics, which shows whether your page is making people stick.

Often, your analytics are built right into your self-service platform. If you’re confused about what your marketing metrics mean, check out this guide:

Plan a Budget

Developing a solid budget is an important part of creating a plan of action that is realistic. Without a budget, you can accidentally overspend on marketing expenses. Your budget should include your daily expenses and your total costs.

To develop a solid budget, first, get organized about your current financial situation. If you’re basing your decisions on estimates, it’s impossible to create a budget that works. Study your revenue information so that you know how much you make on a monthly basis and the variations that exist. Figure out the minimum amount of money your company makes each month; any amount over that minimum is extra that cannot be added to the budget because it is not reliable and can change.

Once you determine your total reliable revenue, subtract expenses, and you’ll know how much money you have available. Some of it can go into marketing, and some of it should be put aside for other areas of business growth.

Launch Your Campaign

It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for! Once your campaign has been launched, make sure to follow every parameter and category of targeting. Make sure you choose any device (smartphone, tablet, or desktop) and any country around the globe, to maximize your results.

Announce the Campaign

While you’re creating content, you should be making a plan for distribution and promo. Make sure to announce the campaign on social media, in your company blog, through a mailing list, and in other relevant forums. Many entrepreneurs jump in without thinking and end up wrecking a campaign before it ever has a chance to get off the ground. The distribution and promotion of the campaign matter significantly.

Track Your Performance and Bounce Rate

You can keep an eye on analytics using different metrics. Most important are:

• Number of Comments – It can look like people are engaging with your ads, even if they aren’t. Studies show that there is ‘effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading.’ This also applies to ‘likes’ but does not apply to comments. If people are commenting on your ad, you’ve struck a chord. Success!
• Marketing Qualified Leads – A marketing qualified lead is a user that has expressed interest in your product and then converted into a lead. This lead/user fits the qualifications predetermined by your marketing campaign. A successful campaign will have many qualified leads. Whether or not these leads result in sales is not assured. In fact, you may have run a successful campaign but to the wrong demographic.

This metric is useful when paired with:

• Conversion Rate – Possibly the most important metric, the conversion rate is the number of leads that translate into sales. If you’re not converting leads you’re simply wasting your time!
• Net Promoter Score – A Net Promoter Score or NPS is a metric that lets you know if your customers would recommend your brand to friends and family. If this number is trending upwards your campaign is generating positive word of mouth and is an indicator of a successful marketing campaign
• Bounce Rate – If you got someone to click all the way to your site, but then they leave, it’s called a ‘bounce’. Your bounce rate is a great way to see what works on a landing page!

Convert Leads into Sales

If you’ve launched a campaign with the goal of generating leads, it’s important to work on converting leads into sales. Here are a few tips on converting leads:

• Use an incentive: Everybody loves freebies! Offering a time-sensitive deal or free item can dramatically improve conversions.
• Create an FAQ page: Often, customers have unresolved questions that prevent sales. An FAQ page can help answer questions and build credibility.
• Ask a follow-up question: If you ask a question, often leads will answer you. “It’s been over a week since I’ve heard from you. Have you had time to go over the materials?” It’s a great, non-abrasive way to apply pressure.
• Set a time limit: If a lead doesn’t reply for 30 days, consider sending a “final communication email.” This encourages a lead to follow up if he or she has questions, and at the same time, it lets leads know that this will be your last communication. If the leads don’t reply, you’re saving yourself some valuable time.

Analyze your results

Determine whether the results you defined before starting your campaign have been fulfilled.  You can get a sense of whether your strategy is moving in the right direction by exploring the following:

• Check how much traffic is being referred to your website from the various social channels.
• Assess the value of each piece of content by monitoring unique page views, time on page and total pages viewed.
• Determine the share of voice, the number of conversations about your company vs. that of your competitors.

Debrief, and do it again!

Now it’s time to start this entire process all over again. Debrief, and ask yourself some of the following questions:

• What worked well?
• What did not work? What assumptions did we make?
• What were the biggest risks that we took?
• How could we prepare for “surprise factors” next time?