How To Run A Summer Campaign: A Helpful Guide

Contrary to what the Starks have been saying, Summer is coming and you should be thinking about how to prepare your campaign for the season. There are a few basics that absolutely must be included and some extras you can do to give your campaign the edge on competitors.

In order to make this guide as helpful and simple as possible, we’ve broke it down into 9 steps with some (hopefully) helpful information you can easily put into action.

So, let’s begin!

How to run a successful Summer campaign

1. Begin with the end in mind 

Structure your campaign to achieve your goals or you’ll find yourself splitting your focus trying to hit different targets. What is your ultimate goal for this campaign? Leads? Sales? Customer satisfaction? Choose one and focus on that, if you split the focus of your campaign, you’re off to a bad start. Don’t wasted time and resources by veering off track, or you’ll be playing catch up.

2. Create a timeframe

Campaigns have optimum moments to launch in, the best time is to begin just as the wave of interest picks up. Wait too long, and your competitors will ride that wave of public interest, enjoying all the traffic and conversions they can handle! Launch too early and you run the risk of shouting your message to an audience that doesn’t exist yet or isn’t listening. A Summer campaign shouldn’t be launched in February for example, people just won’t be interested.

Be certain on deadlines but be flexible to adapt to situations that come up. Things WILL come up, don’t let yourself get caught out by hoping everything will run smoothly.

3. Decide on goals and benchmarks

Make your goals/milestones clear, to yourself and your team, it will help keep the campaign on track. Are we heading in the right direction? Are we on schedule? It may seem insignificant when one task takes an extra day, totally fine. But if that means you’re unable to meet a vital deadline, launch date for example, then you start to see the importance of having a timeframe and sticking to it.

Use small milestones, this will have dual benefits to you and your campaign. Small, measurable milestones are achieved more frequently which acts a motivator to those involved and also helps keep the project on track.

Examples of campaign benchmarks?

• Launch date.

• First sale.

• When the campaign first pays for itself.

Just a launch isn’t good enough, you need to assess whether the campaign is working. Benchmarking can be a motivating factor, you achieve one of your smaller goals on the way to the primary goal, whether that be sales or leads, as we said earlier. A benchmark in the form of a specific number of conversions or even something as simple as reach or engagement. 

Top Tip: Something we like to do when launching a new campaign is to work backwards from the end goal.

Working backwards from the end goal ensures you’re sticking to the task, everything has to come together to lead us to the final goal. This provides a little more guidance than doing things vice-versa.

4. Which channels will you be on 

Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Hangouts, the list is seemingly endless. Even the largest marketing campaign budgets won’t be enough to cover every single market, so focus on the ones where:

• Your audience are

• Will bring you the greatest ROI

Sometimes being on lots of different social media networks isn’t the best option. Spreading your budget too thin will prevent your campaign from getting adequate exposure. Focusing on the right channels prevents wasteful spending. Maybe €10 a day on Facebook is better for your organisation than €5 on Facebook and €5 on LinkedIn.

Hot Tip for Greater Social Media Exposure

Considering which social media platforms you will be on is pivotal to the success of your campaign. Instagram and Facebook are great ways to get affordable, quality exposure for your brand/product.

Instead of simply setting a budget and posting an ad to blend in with the many others, make it stand out.

Sure, easier said than done, but using dynamic ads you can significantly improve your reach and get the exposure you want from your campaign. Take a look at how Dynamic Ads helped Desigual greatly increase ROAS by 74%.

5. Budget

Prioritize funds to complement your strengths and cover areas you want to improve. A start-up, or small business setting a limit of a sustainable figure each day is smart. It will be much less than large multinationals but can help you gain valuable, sustainable growth. This also gives you the flexibility to add to it if its doign well, or shift the budget to other projects if necessary.

At Adsmurai we help you to optimize your social media ads, but an extremely simple way and the most basic thing you can do yourself is simply spend your budget on the networks that work for you. This is related to our earlier point about analytics (and also the next point about channels!).

6. Who is the audience

Selling B2B is very different to selling B2C. Depending on your organisation, you will find your audience in different places. For example, LinkedIn is more conducive to B2B whereas Facebook is more useful for B2C.

Instagram and Pinterest are designed to be great places to discover new products whether that be clothes, furniture, games etc. Understanding your audience will help you tailor your campaign and your message to consumers.

7. Check analytics/ Optimize campaigns

Check your ego as well as your analytics. You may think you’re above this but we’ve been a little guilty of it at some point. It’s human to want to stick with a project when you’ve already sunk so much time and effort into it.

Whether it be a video you've spent hours on or focusing on CPC rather than CPA, you must check your analytics. Is it working? If so, great. If it isn’t, is it showing any improvements? No? Then change it up. Sometimes you take a shot, you miss and the only thing to do is to learn and move on. Maybe it wasn’t the right time for this project, possibly it wasn’t on the most appropriate channel or maybe the content you and your team produced just wasn’t up to scratch. 

Delve into your analytics to find this out! Did you get a ton of traffic and conversions from some networks and not others? Let’s say you’re bringing in 50 conversions a week from LinkedIn and 5 from Pinterest and you spend approximately 2 hours a day on both networks. Analytics can indicate that you could get a better ROI by spending more time on LinkedIn and sacrificing Pinterest.

Aside from the time you save that can be reallocated to other networks, don’t forget there is the budget! Similarly to time, (using the example above) a €50 a day budget split between two networks would be better spent on the one that is far more productive. Whilst marketing isn’t an exact science, analytics can help you cheat a bit by clueing you in on what works and what doesn’t. It’s up to you to be aware and adjust accordingly.

8. Check results from previous campaigns

Don’t be hesitant to relaunch previously successful campaigns. Your campaigns don’t always have to be earth shattering, if a video did amazingly well last time, try it again.

Be aware that the world changes and what worked before won’t necessarily work in the future, but past results are a good indicator of future success.

9. Launch the campaign and continually assess to adjust where necessary

Being flexible in your campaigns is vital. Maybe A/B testing revealed that one landing page converts better than another, but it’s just not working in the campaign. So what do you do? Can it be improved upon? Can you use a heat mapping tool to see which parts of the page are converting and which aren’t? Optimize!

Support campaigns that are doing well, reallocate budget from things just aren’t working and invest your time and money into ensuring your greatest ROI. Marketing campaigns are not an exact science, assess and reassess to find out what suits your business and your customers to enjoy a successful summer marketing campaign! Get in touch with us at contact@adsmurai.com to find out how to improve your social media ads and watch your sales skyrocket!