This is the last part of a three part series on creating a marketing campaign. Part one covered Defining your Marketing Goals, Objectives and Tactics. In the second part of the series, we covered Creating Your Marketing Calendar. Today we are going to talk about tracking, monitoring and measuring your marketing activities.

Tracking, Monitoring and Measuring your Marketing Activities

I am going to discuss how I will handle tracking, monitoring and measuring my marketing campaign. If you read the first post, you will recall that my goal is to begin selling informational marketing products. My plan is to increase blog readers and subscribers targeting people who need marketing help and are willing to handle the marketing themselves with guidance.

Here is a recap of the tactics I plan to use:

• Create a calendar of blog articles and post to my blog a minimum of three times a week.
• Write guest blog posts that my target audience reads
• Answer questions on LinkedIn and yahoo, and other sites where my audience is asking marketing questions
• Create a free product offer for people who sign up for my newsletter
• Create a press release publicizing my free product offer
• Submit articles to trade magazines that my target audience reads
• Use social networking sites to market my articles

My plan is to spend three months working to increase my readership base while I work on creating my informational products.

Where Do I Begin?

I will begin with looking at my starting point. At this point, I have 40 RSS subscribers, 75 email subscribers and roughly 2000 visitors a month to my blog. My goal is to increase each by 10% each month for a year.

What I will Track:

• I will use Google analytics to track my daily traffic to determine which types of posts draw the most readers.
• How many tweets each post receives and which are the most popular
• Guest post placed on other blogs. I will track comments and the increase in web traffic to my blog from each article. I will also track what type of articles received the most readers.
• Track submissions to trade magazines. The type of articles rejected and accepted and my increase in readers from the magazines articles produced.
• Track the open rates of my newsletter and what articles receive the most clicked.

What I will Monitor:

• Monitor blogs that my target audience reads to provide comments, answer questions and offer guest articles
• Monitor networking sites to offer advice to members posting marketing questions
• Use Google analytics to monitor where my website traffic is coming from
• Monitor my traffic patterns to find out what keywords readers who are using search engines use to find my site
• Monitor the increase in web traffic after issuing my press release for my free product offer
• My progress on creating my informational products

What I will Measure:

• The increase in my RSS subscribers, Email subscribers and overall increase in blog readership.
• I will compare each month to determine if I am meeting my 10% increase.

If I am looking for an 10% increase across the board, then at the end of month one I should have at lease: 44 RSS subscribers, 83 email subscribers and 2200 blog visitors. Month two: 49 RSS subscribers, 91 email subscribers and 2420 blog visitors.  Month three: 54 RSS subscibers, 100 email subscribers and 2662 blog visitors.

After monitoring for three months, I will look at which activities are helping me meet my goals of increases readership. I will focus heavenly on the activities and decrease or eliminate the activities that are not working.

Once my first set of informational products is releases I will begin tracking, monitoring and measuring my monthly sells. I will begin looking into offering the most popular products in a variety of forms for purchase. I will also begin looking into ways of marketing my products offline.

This process should not take any more than a couple of hours a week. By focusing on one marketing goal at a time, it allows for the creating of a simple and easy to implement marketing campaign. You can use your marketing calendar to help you or create a simple spreadsheet in excel to help track, monitor and measure your campaign success.

Have you created a marketing campaign?

How do you track, monitor and measure the effectiveness of your campaign?

Image provided by: Flickr Freely Licensed

In the first article we determined are marketing goals, objectives and tactics. In this article, we are going to create our marketing calendar.

If you read the first article, you know that my marketing goal is to sell informational marketing products. My strategy is to increase my blog readership and I listed ways I will go about increasing my blog readership. Ideally, the increase in my blog readership causes an increase in my newsletter subscribers.

In my past posts, I talked about determining who your ideal clients are and creating an ideal client profiles. If you have not done this already, please take the time to do so, it will help you understand and target your ideal prospects.

Creating Your Marketing Calendar

I am going to create my marketing calendar using the tactics that I decided I would use to increase my blog readership.

Here is a recap of the tactics I plan to use:

• Create a calendar of blog articles and post to my blog a minimum of three times a week.
• Write guest blog posts that my target audience reads
• Answer questions on LinkedIn and yahoo, and other sites where my audience is asking marketing questions
• Create a free product offer for people who sign up for my newsletter
• Create a press release publicizing my free product offer
• Submit articles to trade magazines that my target audience reads
• Use social networking sites to market my articles

I will break my one-year marketing calendar down into months and then weeks. I will begin my creating an editorial calendar for my blog. I use a blogging schedule provided by Charlie at Productive Flourishing. He did a great job of creating a document that is free and easy to use, so why reinvent the wheel.

I will research and read blogs that I believe my ideal prospects are reading and add comments when relevant. I will also send an email to the blog owner requesting to write a guest post for their blog. If the owner agrees to allow me to write a guest post, I will follow my post and respond to comments from readers.

I will spend one hour each morning answering questions on sites such as, LinkedIn and Yahoo.

I will create free informational products to offer to my readers when they sign up for my newsletter. I will create a new product quarterly, depending on how well a product is pulling prospects. If the product is, enticing readers to sign up I will continue to use the product as long as it is effective.

Every month I will query trade magazines on articles I believe will be of interest to their readers.

I will submit each blog post to social networking sites to increase my exposure.

Let’s begin creating our marketing calendars:

Let’s say I plan to begin implementing my marketing campaign in August.

I continue doing these activities every month and add others if the need arises.

This is a very simple way to create a marketing calendar. The calendar allows you to know what activities you should be partaking in each day, week and month.

Have you created a marketing calendar?

Do you have any suggestions?

Image provided by: Flickr Freely Licensed

Next post: Tracking, monitoring and measuring your marketing activities.

You know you need to market your business but you just don’t know where in the hell to begin. You have read dozens of books and articles on creating a marketing plan and all they did was overwhelm you and make you tired. You know there has to be an easier way to do this, but how?

I feel your pain. I have experienced this myself and have heard it from countless others. Do I really need to create a SWOT analysis? If I don’t create a 30 page-marketing document, does it mean my marketing will not be successful?

Of course not. Your marketing plan can be a simple as one page or as detailed as 30 pages. What’s important is that you create a plan that works for you and that you are willing to implement and enjoy the process of marketing your business.

Yes, I said it. Marketing can be enjoyable as long as you stick to doing the things that you enjoy.

So where in the hell do you begin?

Before you begin marketing your business, you need to understand what you are trying to achieve, whom you are trying to reach and how you will reach them.

We are going to look at three areas of your marketing plan to begin with.

Marketing Goals, Strategy and Tactics.

Step One:

Determine what your ultimate marketing goal is at this time.

Let’s use me as an example.

My goal is to create informational products for readers to buy.

Step Two:

Determine the strategy you will use to obtain your marketing goal.

My strategy is to increase readership to my blog. I am looking for readers who are looking for marketing help and are willing to do the marketing for themselves with guidance.

Step Three:

Determine the tactics you will use to meet your objective.

The tactics I will use are:

Create a calendar of blog articles and post to my blog a minimum of three times a week.

Write guest blog posts that my target audience reads

Answer questions on LinkedIn and yahoo, and other sites where my audience is asking marketing questions

Create a free product offer for people who sign up for my newsletter

Create a press release publicizing my free product offer

Submit articles to trade magazines that my target audience reads

Use social networking sites to market my articles

Here are some more examples:

Author:

Goal: To sell their newly released book

Strategy: Gain awareness so that readers will know that my book is available.

Tactics: Create a press release offering a free chapter

Obtain interviews on televisions, radio and blogs

Create a facebook fan page

Create a blog

Write articles on writing blogs

Get book reviews in newspapers and blogs

Financial Planner:

Goal: Add 15 new clients over the next year who are saving for retirement and college for their children

Strategy: Gain awareness for my business among my targeted audience

Tactics: Get quoted in financial newspapers, magazines and blogs that my target audience reads

Create information reports on investing (Stocks, Bonds, etc.)

Create tips sheets on How to choose a financial advisor, Understanding the financial advisor/client relationship, Understanding 529 college savings plans

Send press releases offering free tip sheets and reports

Getting interviewed on television, radio and blogs

Join forums and answer financial questions

Can It really be that easy?

It’s really that damn easy. You now have the beginnings of a marketing plan.

The best thing to do is keep your marketing plan simple and focused. You may want to achieve many things at this time. The best thing to do is to focus on what’s more important and begin there.

Next Post: Creating a Marketing Calendar

Have you created a marketing plan for your business?

If so, are you on target with your marketing goals?

If not, What are you waiting for?

Image provide by:  Mark Smiciklas via Flickr

Darin who wants to promote the exhibit opening of a local up and coming artists. He is beginning planning for months before the exhibit is to open.

He had a limited marketing budget and decided to hire a consultant and to create a plan for to Darren and his small staff to implement.

The art gallery had a home address list of over 350 names and an e-mail address list of over 600 names.

We began by sending a letter and e-mail to his full list removed invalid home and email addresses. The letters mailed to all the homes asked the recipients to sign up for the gallery’s e-Newsletter and offered a specially designed computer background designed by the local artists. Email recipients will also offer to sign up for the newsletter, the e-mail contains a link to send the offer to friends.

The second month the marketing newsletter mailed to subscribers highlighted the green works theme, giving history stories, auction data and hinting at the upcoming event and artists.

The gala theme created centered going green. Gift bag items were selected, ordered, packaged for 150 gift bags.

The third month the newsletter featured the artists exhibited and partial details of the event, and distribution of press releases of the event to the local media.

The forth month the newsletter featured the upcoming events with details. The first 150 guests received a gift bag. Everyone wearing something green could enter into a drawing for a gift created by the featured artists.

68% of the home recipients signed up for the e-newsletter. 82% of the e-mail recipients signed up for the e-newsletter. The newsletter grew 17% from subscribers sending links too friends.

The goal for the event was 150 to 200 people attending the opening night gala. 383 people attended the event with 80% wearing a something green.

29% of attendees purchased artwork at the event, selling over $44,000 in art on the event’s opening night.