On marketing blogs everywhere, you hear a lot of lip-flapping about the importance of meticulously planning your marketing campaigns.

But what many don’t address is that marketing campaigns aren’t specific to product launches – if you want to achieve measurable results with your marketing, you need to treat every single one of your marketing activities as a marketing campaign.
For every single project you take on to move the needle for your business, you’ve got to have a master plan: a set of clearly-defined goals, a finite start and end date, and a means of tracking your successes (and failures).

So what extra baggage comes with this “campaign mentality”? What’s the ideal order of operations? What extra resources will you need?

Here’s a step-by-step blueprint for planning and launching your next campaign – with a selection of hand-picked tools to help you through each step.
1. Ideation, research and goal setting

Have a brilliant idea

I’m willing to bet that you’ve got more brilliant ideas floating around than you realize – but are they getting lost in the shuffle?

Organizing your ideas goes a long way in helping to identify the opportunities with the most potential.
Know your audience and what resonates

When validating ideas, always keep your audience top-of-mind.

Ask yourself:

Which part of the marketing funnel are you targeting? What sort of content or campaign will resonate with those prospects?
Which topics are popular with your audience? Which of your campaigns have resonated in the past? Which ones have failed miserably?
What is there a need for? Are the same questions appearing in blog comments, on social channels and with your customer support team?

Always ask yourself how you can deliver as much value as possible to your prospects.

There’s a reason why people say, “The customer is always right” – at the end of the day, if you give them what they want, they’ll thank you with conversions.
Be as specific as possible when setting goals

Once you’ve identified a ripe opportunity, get super specific about what you expect from the marketing campaign.

I’m not talking about simply declaring that you “want more sales.” You want to be as specific as possible so you can measure your success later.

For example, when we launched our Conversion Marketer’s Guide to Landing Page Copywriting, here were the results we estimated:

5,000 downloads
1,000 new leads
100 new trial starts

Ask yourself which key performance indicators matter most to your business and what results you can expect.

If you don’t have previous campaigns to refer to, take your best guess. At the very worst, you’ll be way off and will have more realistic expectations next time.

Continue reading here: http://www.designswaggs.com/5-key-principles-to-design-effective-online-advertisements/