The 15 Questions You Must Know the Answer To Before Creating An Effective Marketing Campaign

As an entrepreneur, you must be a good marketer no matter what. You must know how to put together marketing that works, and also know how to effectively implement marketing campaigns that generate a positive return.

While this is no easy task, there are some key questions you must know the answers to for you to effectively put together a powerful marketing campaign that generates new customers and increases profits.

1) Do I want to generate leads, sell something, or do I want to do a combination of both?

Before you plan your campaign, you must first determine what you exactly want from your marketing campaign.

In some cases you may just want to generate leads that will go through a specific process that leads to a sale.

In other cases, you will be marketing specific products and services that you want people to buy once they see your ad. No matter what option you choose, you must know going in what you exactly want to happen before putting your marketing campaign together.

By doing this, it will keep you focused and centered so that the marketing that you create will be effective in serving your goal.

2) What product or service am I focused on selling?

This is pretty obvious, but some entrepreneurs still screw this up. You must know what you are selling, or else buying traffic for the sake of buying traffic without anything to sell would be meaningless.

You must ignore what the major fortune 500 companies are doing, and instead focus on generating a positive return from your marketing activities. Spending money merely for exposure is meaningless, unless you have the size and scale of a massive company to be able to leverage that type of exposure.

In most cases for most entrepreneurs this isn’t the reality starting out, so stick to marketing that works and follows this process.

3) How do I want to sell the product or service to my selected market?

This question involves figuring out how you want to sell the product or service.

Are you going to provide specific packages for your product or service for customers to take advantage of?

Will you be providing a guarantee to buyers to try it out without any risk?

What is the true offer that people will be acting on that will help you increase your sales?

4) What market do I want to sell my product or service to?

After you know what you are selling, you must get very focused about who you want to sell your product or service too. You must be very clear when selecting your market, or else you can waste a ton of money on marketing that doesn’t convert into sales. The more focused you are, the better return you will get on your investment.

5) How can I effectively reach my market taking into account access and cost?

How do you want to reach your market? Do you want to do cost per click advertising, direct mail, or banner advertising?

There are obviously a myriad of other options for you to choose from, so when deciding what media channel you want to choose, think about how the media channel will impact the desired response you will want to generate from your campaign.

The last thing you want to do is reach your market in a way that doesn’t serve your goals, and loses you money.

6) What am I willing to pay per exposure to reach my market via my chosen media channel?

You must know your desired cost to reach your market that you are willing to pay before implementing any marketing campaign.

Be smart about choosing the channel that will work best for your budget, and know going into any meeting or when researching what this cost is so you don’t overpay for media that won’t generate a positive return on your marketing campaign.

7) What do I want to communicate to my market?

You have to think about what you exactly want to communicate to your market about your products and services? This means focusing on the features and benefits of the product, and how they will directly impact the potential customer you are marketing to.

If you aren’t clear in your marketing about why the prospect should care, and/or take action, the chances your marketing campaign will generate a return will be slim to none.

8) What common objections will I have to overcome that I know my market will have when they are exposed to my marketing campaign?

When selling anything, you must know that you will always come up against objections from those you are trying to sell to. Knowing the common objections going in is half the battle to creating an effective marketing campaign.

9) How will I overcome the objections I know my market will have to what I am promoting in the campaign?

In the question above you identified what the common objections are, so now is the time to figure out how you will effectively overcome these objections in the marketing that you create for the effective marketing campaign.

The key is to be specific about where you will overcome them, and how you are going to say what you want to say. Don’t take this step lightly because it can be the difference between a profitable campaign and an unprofitable one.

One of my mentors once taught me something very powerful, “A confused mind always says No.”

10) How do I want to communicate to my market during the campaign?

Once you know many of the answers above, you then have to figure out how you exactly want to communicate to your market during the marketing campaign. Will you be using videos, landing pages, direct mail? What specific way are you going to get your message across to successfully lead to successful results?

11) What is the process I want to take prospects through if they take the next step and positively act to my marketing after clicking to my pages or seeing my advertisement?

Once you have an idea about everything above, now comes the part that marries it altogether. You have to think about the step by step the process you are going to take the traffic through to lead it to a successful conversion/sale.

For example…

Are they going to click on a google adwords ad, drop to a landing page, watch a video and have a buy button to purchase your product?

Or are they going to click on a Facebook ad, go to a capture page, put their information into the box, and then be followed up with autoresponder messages that inform them, while also leading them to purchase your product?

You must know how you are going to monetize the traffic and leads you generate, or else you are going to have a campaign that costs more than you generate in revenue.

Understanding the process you are going to take your leads down, how you will communicate with them at specific touch points, and further knowing how to capitalize on the process from beginning to end takes time to master.

This type of system must be in place to ensure that the media that you buy to send your message to your intended market is something that spits money out on the other end.

There are many different approaches to build your process, but you should always be testing this. As you move forward, you will realize that most things you first try are not going to work as good as you hoped. You just have to keep trying and keep learning along the way.

In other words “fail forward.”

12) What is my expected conversion rate for those exposed to my campaign?

For you to determine how much you can spend for the amount of exposure you want, you must know and take into account what you expect to convert on the entire campaign. Typically you should expect 1-3% conversion rate, but in other cases and in other markets it may be more or less.

Be sure that you don’t mess this part up or else your campaign could turn from a winning campaign to a losing one quickly.

13) What is the average dollar amount for the first purchase?

You must know what the average dollar amount that is spent by the customer to purchase the value that you have created. You should take the value into account as well when planning out how much media you are going to buy, and how much of the media you plan to convert into a sale.

14) What tools will I use to measure and track the results of my campaign?

As many wise entrepreneurs before us have said, “Whatever gets measured gets managed.” If you are not tracking the effectiveness of your marketing, how will you know what to do in the future, if you don’t know what exactly caused the results that you generated from the campaign?

It is essential that you do the best you possibly can to track everything about your campaign that is important, or else there is a higher likelihood that you will lose money on your marketing campaign.

There are many tools out there that help you do this, but the one tool I recommend businesses use is Infusionsoft. To see how you can effectively do this with Infusionsoft via a free webinar Click Here (Affiliate Link) to learn more.

15) What is the average lifetime value of one customer generated during the campaign?

This part of the puzzle is essential because it lets you know what every customer is worth to you. If you don’t know the pre-determined amount of revenue that each customer is going to send you, you won’t be able to figure out exactly how much you should spend to create a new customer in the first place with media that you decide to purchase.

Obviously if you are starting out as a new business, you won’t know this number, but after running a few campaigns you should have a benchmark to start from and improve upon over time.

In some cases you can even lose money on the front end when generating customers knowing that over the lifetime of the customer they will spend more money with you than it took you to attract them to your business.

Summary

Knowing the answers to these key questions will help you create an effective marketing campaign that gets results, and will also help you increase your sales. Be sure to take each one of these questions seriously as you put together future campaigns for yourself, and don’t forget to track everything as you implement new campaigns with the goal of generating new customers and higher revenues!