Marketing Blueprint: A step-by-step guide to launching profitable campaigns

So for a while now, I’ve been asked to let the cat out of the bag. To finally reveal BottomLine Marketing’s secrets behind our internet marketing strategy. So I did exactly that with this Marketing Blueprint.

I’ve put our entire Market Research Checklist, Campaign Planning Format, and the step-by-step guide we use to launch a profitable campaign, all into one blog post for you. I know right?!?

I haven’t gone into the nitty gritty on things like the SEO we do in Calgary, because that would take pretty much a whole book, but I’ve given you exactly what we do with most of our internet marketing campaigns.

So let’s dig into to the good stuff….

Market Research is THE ONLY THING that guides your marketing efforts to exactly the right places, so you don’t waste your money. Never launch any kind of marketing campaign without doing the research first, otherwise it’s like throwing mud at a wall, and just hoping you’re hitting the invisible target.

For every one of our clients we follow a specific Research Blueprint BEFORE we even think of building a campaign. We complete a:

• Client Business Analysis
• Pricing Strategy Review
• Target Market Analysis
  • The Demographics
  • The Psychographics
  • In-Depth Avatar Creation
• Digital Marketing Report
• Competitor Analysis
  • Pricing
  • Digital Marketing Report
• Conversion Rate Review
• Online Analytics Review

You wouldn’t believe the amazing information we’ve uncovered with our research! If you want to learn more about it, just check out our blog about how we found $76 000 for a client, and she didn’t have to do any marketing at all to get it!

After we’ve done the market research we outline exactly how to proceed with each client by developing a Campaign Strategy.  For each strategy we define:

• The Challenge

• The Big Idea

• Message Strategy

• Media Selection

• Audience Recommendations

• Measure of Success and Benchmarks

• Complete Overview

Then we develop the Funnel Build for Digital Marketing. We create the customer journey and funnel paths that will be followed from an internet marketing perspective. We love Digital Marketer’s philosophy on funnels and tend to incorporate their methodology into the campaigns we build. Since we’ve gone through media selection in the Campaign Strategy, we already know the platforms we’re going to use to get the best results with their specific target audience, whether it be Adwords, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.

A typically funnel tends to look like this:

• An ad that leads to valuable content in a blog post, case study, etc.
• A retargeting ad to the same audience offering a lead magnet – a free piece of content like a checklist, or infographic that’s valuable to the market in exchange for their email.
• Then upsell through an email drip campaign to a tripwire – a small, low cost offer that is broken off from your core offer.
• And from there, we upsell to the core offer through another email drip campaign or having the client contact them directly for a more personalized touch.

Once we’ve created our funnel, we create a production calendar by starting with the launch date for the campaign, and we work our way backward to ensure we complete all the funnel assets and marketing components well before the deadline for the launch of the marketing campaign.

The next part is one of my absolute favourite things to do – Split Testing! This is where we measure the results and start making small changes to the landing pages to get even better results. I think it’s so interesting to see what happens when you make the smallest of changes. Even just one word can hugely increase the conversion rates on a landing page. We split test everything: images, copy, headlines, background colours, even full funnels to other full funnels to see what a difference we can make. We believe that if you’re not testing and getting better, you’re getting worse…so test, test, TEST!!

After the campaign has been tested and has been producing some results, it’s important to track and Measure the Analytics of  your efforts. Back in the campaign planning process we set benchmarkers that would allow us to specifically measure the campaign’s success. We make sure we are hitting the goals we outlined, and if for any reason we aren’t, we make immediate changes to deliver the results our clients rely on us to bring.

Sometimes scrapping an idea isn’t the only way to make something that isn’t working better. Refining is the way to go!

It’s very important to determine which parts of the funnel are working and which aren’t. So for example, if your conversion on your lead magnet is very high, but the conversion on your tripwire is low, you may only need to change your tripwire offer. Or maybe it’s just the landing page for your tripwire that needs a little work to improve the performance.

We look at other analytics too, and see how we can make those better. A big one is your cost per acquisition (CPA). How much are you spending to acquire a new customer? You want to get your cost as low as possible and there are many ways to go about it. You just have to keep constantly analyzing and making it better!

I would love to hear how you’re doing with this Marketing Blueprint. Drop me a line and let me know!

Happy Marketing!

Lisa Marie