Putting Together a Campaign

A dream becomes a goal when action is taken toward its achievement.

“We should do a campaign” is one of the most common sentences said in small business, and one of the least likely to turn into anything. It is a dream sentence. It has no who, no what, no when, and no way of knowing whether it worked. I want to turn it into a goal sentence, and that takes six questions. Answer all six honestly and you have a campaign. Skip any one of them and you have an expense.

Who is involved?

Start with the people, because a campaign is never just the person who dreamed it up. Who is on the marketing side, even if that is you at the kitchen table at night? Who are the salespeople who will pick up the phone or sit at the estimate? Who designs the flyer, the ad, the landing page? Who produces the work once it is sold, and can they handle more of it? Who signs off? Who sits at the front office and hears the first question from a confused customer? Who handles the technical side if a form breaks?

In a very small business, several of those roles are the same person, and that is fine. What is not fine is leaving a role blank. I have watched a beautiful spring campaign fall apart because nobody had told the two people who answered the phone what was being promoted. The customers knew more about the offer than the staff did.

What are you promoting?

One thing. A campaign that promotes “all our services” promotes nothing, because a person sees it and cannot tell what to do. Pick the one service, one dish, one product, one event. You can run another campaign for the next thing next month. The discipline of choosing is most of the work.

What is the message, and who is it for?

Once you know the thing, write the message as you would say it to one person. Skip the slogan and write a sentence you would actually say across a counter. “If your air conditioner is more than fifteen years old, this is the month to look at it before the heat hits.” That is a message. “Quality service at affordable prices” is wallpaper.

Then check the message against the person. Who exactly are you going after with it? If the honest answer is “anybody,” go back to your avatar and start again. A message aimed at nobody in particular lands on nobody in particular.

Is it consistent, and is everyone pushing the same thing?

This is where campaigns quietly die. The flyer says one price, the website says another, the person on the phone has not heard of it, and the tech on the truck offers something different because that is what he likes to sell. Each of those people thought they were helping. Together they told the customer that this business does not know what it is doing.

Consistency means the same offer, the same words, the same look, in every place the customer might touch it, for the whole run of the campaign. Everyone pushing the same thing means the internal campaign happened before the external one. A ten-minute conversation with the team, a printed sheet by the phone, the offer written on the whiteboard in the shop. Simple, unglamorous, and skipped constantly.

What results are you looking for?

Before it starts, write down what a win looks like. A number of calls, a number of booked jobs, a number of tables filled, a number of new email addresses. Then write down how you will know. Which phone number, which form, which coupon code, which question you will ask every caller. If you cannot say how you will measure it, you will judge the campaign by feel afterwards, and feel always sides with whoever was most excited about it.

Ask also what result would tell you to stop early, and what result would tell you to double the budget. Deciding those thresholds before the campaign runs takes the emotion out of the middle of it.

Before you spend a dollar

Take one campaign you have been meaning to run and answer the six questions in writing on a single page: who is involved and in what role, what one thing you are promoting, what the message is in one spoken sentence, who it is for, how you will keep everyone consistent, and what result counts as a win and how you will count it. If the page has a blank on it, the campaign is not ready, and now you know exactly what is missing.

The planning page takes an afternoon and costs nothing. The campaign itself costs whatever the tools you chose cost, from a free social push to a few thousand dollars of paid media. The planning is the cheap part, and it decides whether the expensive part works.