Recently I shared a free training in my FB group (The Brand Building Entrepreneur) about the 3-phased process to building an immersive marketing campaign.  Today, I’m backing things up to give you the breakdown of the prep work you need to do before diving into building an effective marketing campaign.

Consider this article like your personal cheat sheet and mini workbook to prep before diving into content creation for any intentional marketing effort.  

7 SECRETS UNVEILED

These are the essentials you must know FIRST to create an effective marketing campaign:

01 - THE WHAT

First, you need to know what you’re promoting.  There are 2 main reasons to create a marketing campaign: 1) you’re releasing a new offer or re-launching an existing offer or 2) you want to increase awareness for your business and what you stand for in a brand marketing campaign.

To illustrate the difference between an Offer Marketing Campaign and a Brand Marketing Campaign let’s take Honda as an example:

• Offer Marketing Campaign: Promoting their best-selling car, the Honda CRV

• Brand Marketing Campaign: Promoting “Helpful Honda,” the value they want customers to think of when they think of Honda & the experience they want to be known for

That doesn’t mean you can’t create marketing campaigns for multiple offers and also develop a brand marketing campaign, you simply will need to time them differently throughout the year so you give each it’s day in the sun.  Identifying the focus of your marketing efforts in each quarter is a great way to plan out your year of business.  It gives you an idea of when you’ll have incoming revenue, the estimated amount from your launch, and what you’ll need to budget (whether it’s time, efforts, resources or money) for your marketing campaign.

My recommendation is to first choose your signature offer and do this marketing campaign pre-work for that one.  You can always come back to this article and walk yourself through the steps again for a smaller offer or your brand marketing campaign.

PREP-WORK: Choose which offer you’ll be creating a marketing campaign for.

02 - THE WHO

Getting clear on who your offer is for is imperative in order for your marketing messages to cut through and resonate.  This step seems obvious but it’s smart to articulate this per offer because your ideal client may vary based on where they are on your client journey, offering different products / services for clients at different stages or seasons in how you help them.

Be sure to not get stuck only on demographics (the outward descriptors of your ideal client such as age, gender, education, salary, location, etc), but to dive deeper into their psychographics (their internal ambitions).  It’s understanding their motivation that becomes the key to creating an immersive, captivating campaign.

PREP-WORK: Write down who your ideal client is for this specific offer and what their motivations are that would create desire for your product/service.

03 - THE WHEN

Plant your flag in the ground and choose a launch / release date for your offer.  You’ll decide when in your marketing campaign to reveal that date, but you need to first decide when you’re launching it so you can reverse engineer how long your marketing runway needs to be and when to begin with your Pre-Awareness Window to start laying the groundwork and generating awareness and interest with your audience.

PREP-WORK: Choose your launch date! Mark it on the calendar.

04 - THE LANDSCAPE

Here’s the truth, your audience isn’t just waiting for you to start your marketing campaign that leads up to the release / launch / doors open to your product or service.  Your ideal clients are distracted with a million and one different things and it’s going to be your job to capture their attention.

This step goes hand in hand with Step 3 because you want to take a look at the environment and competition that surrounds your launch date.

Competitive Landscape

Check out when your competitors are launching their offers.  By competitors I mean anyone who offers something similar to you or who offers something complimentary to what you do, but is targeting the same audience.

For instance, on a bigger scale if Amy Porterfield is looking at the landscape and sees that her peer and mentor, Marie Forleo, is launching B-School in February, that’s great information as she’ll want to avoid launching in that same window.  Instead, she can now find a launch date to own for her signature course, Digital Course Academy.

Environmental Landscape

There’s so much noise in the world that you’re always competing for your audience’s attention with everything else going on in their lives.  You can’t pick the perfect launch date that works for every single person, however, you can be aware of the bigger distractions that regularly come up including things like:

• Holidays

• Black Friday

• Summertime (less time on devices, more time outside)

• Events like Super Bowl,Olympics, World Series, etc

You get the picture!  I mention these as noisy times to potentially avoid, but sometimes for your specific type of offer or campaign, there could be a great pop culture event or holiday to leverage and help your launch, too.  It simply depends on what you’re selling and how engaged your audience will be.  Think   the month of February and Valentine’s Day for a love coach launching her new course…or Black Friday and Small Business Saturday for releasing the newest scent in your organic homemade candle line (just in time to get on all those gift guide lists for holiday shoppers wanting to “shop small”).

PREP-WORK: Identify what’s competing for your audience’s attention in your window - what would be a threat to your own campaign (then, move your date) and what you can leverage to help your launch. 

05 - THE GOODS

Make a list of all the ways your offer is unique or will be uber-enticing to your audience.  Get clear on the strengths of your offer as well as the benefits as people always want to know what’s in it for them.  By making a list of what your ideal clients will LOVE MOST about your product / service now in this prep phase, you’ll know what content to bake into your marketing campaign when you start creating it!

If you aren’t clear on what’s special, valuable, or totally drool-worthy about your offer, this is your opportunity to do additional market research and ask your ideal clients.  It’s never a bad idea to go back to doing some good ‘ol market research to understand your target audience even better.  It will inform your marketing campaign and make it more effective.

PREP-WORK: Do some market research and/or make your list of all the things about your offer that your audience will see as you having “the goods” to help them achieve their goals.

06 - THE GUIDELINES

Let’s set some guidelines!  Think of this step as setting some boundaries for your marketing campaign to make it the MOST effective and appealing for your audience.

This has to be so custom to you, your type of business, your offer, etc, but let me give you a Disney example.

When we were prepping the marketing campaign for the first FROZEN movie, we had a discussion about the desire to appeal to both girls and boys, moms and dads.  We didn’t want to position it as a Disney princess movie and only get the girls..so here are some of the guidelines we put in place:

• Never call Anna or Elsa a princess in the marketing

• Approach all marketing as an ensemble comedy adventure

• Focus heavily on the comedy of Olaf the snowman and Sven the reindeer

• Don’t use ANY of the music or musical numbers in the movie in the marketing campaign as we don’t want to reveal it’s a musical before the film releases (we can use music in marketing for the post release push)

Essentially, marketing guidelines are there as some basic rules that allow you to position your message and offer to your audience in the best light possible. As an entrepreneur, if you’re marketing a digital course of some kind, you could decide a guideline is to not show your audience INSIDE the course until you’ve whipped them up into a frenzy of awareness and definite interest and you’re in your Launch Blitz phase.  What could a guideline be for your offer’s marketing campaign?

PRE-WORK: Write down any guidelines you want to put in place for your marketing campaign.  Bonus: these are great to have especially if you have a team of people working with you because everyone will be on the same page.

07 - THE MINDSET

Mindset is part of your pre-work so you don’t self-sabotage before you even get your marketing plans started.  Just as you prep for your marketing campaign, you need to prep yourself as an entrepreneur to be in the right frame of mind and energy level to take on your launch.  Here are 4 mindset hacks to help you:

• FLEXIBILITY - you’re creating a plan, positioning your message, building a marketing campaign, but you want to stay loose, not hold on too tight to making it perfect and being able to adapt to any new information or feedback from your audience during the campaign so you can tweak and evolve your campaign as you go. Remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect, you just want to be relatable to your audience and flex your plans if necessary.

• SIMPLIFY - sometimes we get in our heads about all the things we “should do” in a launch and even using the words “launch” or “marketing campaign” sounds so BIG or official that it can scare you away from simply promoting and selling your offer. My advice? If you find yourself drowning in the should or perfectionism, step back and ask yourself: How can I make this easier? Simplify whenever and whenever you can.

• BELIEF - If you don’t believe in the value of your offer, or that you are capable of manifesting your goals, your audience won’t believe it either. You need to get in the mindset of 100% belief that you are meant to do this, and the right clients will see the value you pay you for what you're offering. Believe in your brand, believe in your offer and believe in yourself. When doubts creep in, use this journal prompt: How will my offer positively impact my audience? Remind yourself of all the benefits your clients will receive if you just let them know about what you’ve got and how you can help!

• ENERGY - Ask yourself regularly, what level of energy do I have access to in this marketing campaign timeframe and how can I adjust my plans to best support myself? When you show up with high vibe energy it’s when you attract the BEST people to your offer. Check in regularly.

PRE-WORK: Adopt a mindset of being flexible, simplifying whenever you can and believing in the work you do to help your audience. Use the journal prompts and check in on your energy levels frequently.

IN SUMMARY

Remember, these are the 7 secrets unveiled that you need to know before crafting your marketing campaign - - - once you know these, you’re ready to tackle your marketing plans.  Up first is choosing whether you’re committed to a Tentpole A-Level marketing campaign (3-phased approach) or if you want to scale that back to a simpler way to market & launch that feels more in alignment with your own energy and the energy of your offer.  Both approaches can be effective.

If you want to catch past or upcoming free trainings from me around building your brand, clarifying your message and promoting your offers, join us in The Brand Building Entrepreneur Facebook group.