1. Begin with the end in mind
You can’t get where you’re going unless you know where you want to end up. So by identifying these goals, you can really structure your marketing campaign to help you achieve them. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to generate more leads, do you want to make more sales, are you trying to increase customer satisfaction or engagement with a certain department? Whatever you define as your goals, that’s how you can structure your marketing campaign. You want more leads, that’s where your focus should be. You want more sales; you need to focus there. If you have more than one top priority, you have zero top priorities. So narrow in, focus in on exactly what you’re trying to accomplish and that’s where you’re going to see success. This is also a great opportunity to do a SWOT analysis on your business. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Identify what those are and find out if there’s a way that this new marketing campaign is able to help you overcome those. Do you have a strength that you really want to promote? What shopify theme is that? Is there a weakness that you as a business can help to work past? Is there a threat to your business that you need to focus on and what opportunities do you have to really generate some success?
2. Set your timeframe
There’s nothing worse than sitting down and planning out what you want your marketing strategy to be and then never actually initializing or launching it. By setting a timeframe, a start date, a drop dead date, you’re able to hold yourself to that calendar. Now keep in mind, there is an opportunity for failure here. You never want to rush yourself to the point to producing mediocre results, mediocre creative or rushing through the design and development of your website or ad copy. So keep in mind, you want to have a little bit of wiggle room so that when you are developing this campaign, if you need to delay for whatever reason, you do have the opportunity to do so. Don’t rush through this. By identifying when you want to launch, you hold yourself to that, but give yourself some wiggle room so that just in case things you don’t have control over, you’re still able to adapt to. By doing this you’re able to ensure that you create a great campaign, you launch it when you need to, but you’ve also got a little bit of room just in case.
3. Identify your milestones
In case of a dropshipping business a notable milestone would be stopping customers asking questions like: “is dropshipping legal?” or “is dropshipping dead? Running a marketing campaign is not easy so you want to make sure that you’ve set these milestones and even micro milestones so that you can identify success as you achieve it. What kind of goals do you have? Can you set a milestone for making your first sale? You can set a milestone for the initial launch really. You can set a milestone for the first time that the marketing campaign becomes profitable. Or another milestone could be the first time that the campaign pays for itself with money left over. These are all different ways to identify if you’re on the right track. Just launching a marketing campaign in the very beginning does not equal immediate success so by setting these milestones you can help encourage yourself and encourage the people around you to see where your growth is coming from and focus in on that.
4. Identify your budget
You always want to make sure you’re in control of your financials. So by identifying how much money you want to spend on individual campaigns or on the campaign as a whole, that allows you to focus your energies where they really need to be. If your funds are earmarked for certain campaigns and you find that other campaigns are doing better, you can always readjust. But identifying the amount of money that you want to spend, the amount of investment that you’re placing in these marketing campaigns really will help you sleep better at night. You need to ensure that any money that you’re spending is being spent wisely. Small business owners really need to keep track of where their finances are going so it’s not something that you can just put out there and waste and spend willy nilly. But by identifying the amount that you want to spend and how much that spend should result in a return on investment will help you understand where you’re getting the best results and to be able to focus that budget on what makes the most sense.
5. Choose your channels
You have to choose the channels that you’re going to run your marketing campaign on, ie one product shopify store. And there are hundreds out there. So focus in on what your actual goals are. Are you going to be selling products? Well maybe you want to be on Google Shopping. Or have a shopping feed connected with Facebook. Are you trying to generate more leads and you can focus on intent based search or inbound search. Well in that case maybe you want to have a campaign running on Google Adwords. Are you producing DIY information, do it yourself or a lot great content, copy, images? Well Pinterest or Instagram may be a great opportunity for you. There’s a lot of different ways that you can run a campaign so you have to identify the channels that your consumers are using. Even more so, identify where in the sales funnel they are when they’re using those campaigns. Oftentimes you can use these different channels to identify the right kind of customer at the right kind of time. And because we’ve already decided what our budget is, you know where you can flex and where you can move funds to achieve the best result. By understanding where you want to go, you can create the path to get there. By focusing on the correct marketing channels, you’re able to reduce any extraneous spend or superfluous spend that you want to avoid. So keep your budget in mind, choose your channels wisely and then optimize.
