Several clients have asked me recently to help them with their business development by planning a marketing campaign. As specialists in their own businesses but non-specialists in marketing, they wanted best-practice help with how to get most “bang for their buck” as out US friends may say. So in this column I want to share my best practice 6 steps for a successful campaign covering: Market, Message, Medium, Money, Measure, Men.

1. Market – define as clearly as possible the profile of your key customers e.g. for a business: what market sector are they in, what turnover, location, staff numbers; for consumers: what age, gender, location, buying or emotional need they have etc.

2. Message – what is the main thrust that you want to convey to your target customers? E.g. your USP, benefits of your business to customers, your news, offers etc. Most probably this will differ depending on the profile of your customers, so you could have several different campaigns with different messages running at the same time.

3. Medium – what’s the best way to reach your target customers? For businesses it may be by phone, email, letter, PR, LinkedIn, Twitter; for consumers it could be flyers, letters, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. Often a combination of these ways is needed. Remember the famous saying: 50% of advertising is a waste of money, but you don’t know which 50%! I find many businesses plump for just one medium, say advertising or radio but then you’re putting all your eggs in one basket and this may not be right for you. Please spread your risk, until you are clearer what works best for you.

4. Money – now you need to consider how much will your plans cost – or with a limited budget, what activities are going to be most cost-effective for your business? Remember the bang and the buck?

5. Measure – what results do you want to achieve with all this activity? Decide on some targets e.g. how many Tweets do you want to make each day/week, how many emails sent or PR articles published? And what sales targets are you looking for? Then consider, are your targets realistic and achievable? Marketing isn’t like Maths: if you do x and y you will get z, because you have competitors who are doing things like x and y too and you’ve no control over them & their business. But we do know that the more focussed activity we do, the more likely we are to reach our targets.

6. Men – Now you’ve settled on a costed plan you have to consider: who will do this work? Many firms have cut back staff to the bone in the recession and don’t have spare and/or skilled staff to carry out this work, so you may find you have to train staff or recruit new, which is great news for the bigger economy. And I’m regularly asked to coach & train new staff in best marketing techniques.

So now you’ve got your costed plan and agreed who’s doing what, then it’s down to implementing the plan and monitoring the results you get so you can tweak as needed.

And above all remember: if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Good Luck.

Jeanne Kelly, Director of Business Development Assist, has over 35 years’ experience in business across retail, manufacturing, SMEs and startups, helping companies increase profits and sales. Email: Jeanne@businessdevelopmentassist.co.uk