Our Thoughts

Research and Strategy are what is on the brain today. Refer to our parent company’s blog, The Plum Tree Group, for my post on the importance of research and strategy for any successful (interactive) marketing campaign.

Hence, keeping your eyes on the bottom-line prize.

Those two aspects got me thinking about the other vital components of a successful campaign, also of such utmost importance, functioning almost like a human’s vital organs: Acting together in harmony, and can only be effective if all are working correctly in unison.

[Editor's note: This is a stronger reference to public relations plans, incorporated with marketing. So you won't see the basic 4 P's of Marketing here, especially because we're talking about online interactive marketing and PR.]

Let’s jump ahead, figuratively, and put on our campaign-planner hats. We’ve spent hours researching our client (or, if this is an internal campaign, our own company): We completed the S.W.O.T. analysis (identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), identified P.E.S.T. factors (political, economical, social and technological), and are ready to start with campaign deliverables, in the following order:

What is the problem or opportunity at hand? (Situation Analysis)
What is the campaign goal? (General and overarching)
What is the target market? Who is your primary audience?
What is/are the key message (or messages) that you wish to exude through this campaign?
What are your measurable and specific objectives?
What is your overarching strategy for this campaign? (Think: Vital Organ!)
What tactics will you use to achieve your strategies and goals?

Now, this has taken substantial outside research and strategy just to get to this point of the campaign-planning process. But we can not forget three more important pieces to the puzzle:

What is your campaign timeline?
And, even more importantly, what is your budget? (The oil that makes the machine go ’round, no?)
And lastly, but just as importantly, how will you measure your above efforts?

All of these components warrant significant thought and individual posts on their own, because if one step is missed, the campaign will crumble.

Tune back soon for more interactive marketing insight and conversation.

Tags: campaign plan, interactive marketing, online public relations, ROI, strategy development

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Online Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.