1. Start at the end.

What do you want your marketing campaign to achieve? This is the crucial question most businesses miss. By deciding this, you’ll be able to measure success. Without knowing this, how will you know if it worked?

Knowing what you want to achieve up front helps the team bring your marketing campaign together to establish exactly what they are tasked to do. Ambiguity is the death of planning a marketing campaign.

2. Write a short brief.

The brief should be no more than a few pages. The shorter, the better, but not short on the crucial details, which include:

What is the campaign supposed to achieve?

Keep this simple and measurable. Too many things will dilute the plan.

What is the final deadline?

Other deadlines will be worked out later, but things don’t get done without a fixed time and date.

How will you measure success?

Considering the goals you set for the company, what tools will measure success or failure?

3. Set a budget.

Budgets also make it even more important to be clear about what you want your marketing campaign to achieve. Remember, though, that budgets are not just cash. Budgets are also time.

So even if you use your own marketing team and don’t have a budget, your budget can be time-consuming in terms of outbound spending.

4. Create a detailed plan.

Many people prefer pen and paper, and that’s fine too, to begin with, but eventually, you should digitise your plan with spreadsheets or other project management tools.

Primarily we use Google Sheets when planning a marketing campaign, but you can use your weapon of choice. On your sheet, you need to detail every action you must carry out to complete your campaign.

5. Build your team.

Building a team is vital. If you are a team of one, you’ll soon see which parts you can do and which are out of your skill set. You might need a marketing agency, or there might be colleagues that could help you, but you must choose wisely.

6. Allocate jobs and set timelines.

Make sure you allocate sections of the project to the best person available, show them the brief and your planning spreadsheet, get feedback and adjust as needed.

7. Set all the technical details.

Marketing is pretty technical these days. Depending on what you’re planning and what you want your marketing campaign to achieve, there could be some technical details you need to ensure are covered.

For example, it can be setting up your e-commerce store to ensure sales are passed through to Google Analytics.

8. Create a feedback loop.

Deadlines will inevitably move, issues will arise, people will be ill, etc. So, you need to build a feedback loop into your marketing plan.

This is where using a collaborative spreadsheet comes in, and setting those deadlines comes in. Feedback meetings and sheet updates are what will stop you from losing your mind and the campaign.

9. Launch and monitor.

Launching is what you and your team have been building towards, and it is both the best and worst part. Best because it is finally out there, and worst because it is now out of your control.

Real people will react to your marketing campaign, meaning you’ll need to respond to the praise, delight, complaints, and issues. This is also an excellent time to dip back into that feedback loop to resolve problems or opportunities as they come up.

10. Measure, report, and learn for next time.

The marketing campaign you planned is over, so it’s time to look at what happened and see if you hit that goal you set in step 1. Whatever the result of your campaign, you can now go back over your plan and check the measurements you set for yourself, reporting on what went well and what didn’t.

You need to learn from your results before the next time you plan a marketing campaign!