The Four Stages of Campaign Development: Guest Contributor, Cate Cinti
#TheGroundFloor is excited to welcome Cate Cinti as a guest contributor!
Cate is the newest member to the Andrew Exler Marketing team, working with us as a Digital Marketing & Social Media Intern. She is a rising Senior at the University of Pittsburgh, majoring in marketing with a focus in digital media. She became interested in marketing while taking graphic design courses in high school, and went on to pursue this in her college career. In this internship, she works directly with me to oversee the creation of social media content and analyzing engagement across platforms. Our clients already love working with Cate!
As a college student, there are plenty of things I carry with me from the classroom into the real world. Some of these are strange facts that have gotten stuck in my head from those mandatory freshman-year classes. Others, though, have proven useful during my marketing internship here with Andrew Exler Marketing. As a junior, I’ve experienced six semesters of classes, many of which were marketing-related, but I’m still new to this field. I’ve learned a lot, but one thing that has prepared me the most and is something I refer back to frequently is the four stages of campaign development.
These four stages may seem intuitive to some, but they’ve proved invaluable to me as a college student just beginning my marketing journey. I hope that by breaking them into their crucial elements, I can create an overview and make them easier to visualize!
Step 1: Set Your Goals
Setting a goal gives your campaign a direction. You can choose one goal or many, depending on what you want for your business. There are various goals you can choose, and they can be separated into three categories:
Awareness and Consideration - This includes goals that build consciousness around your business, such as building brand awareness, increasing website traffic, and boosting SEO.
Attitude and Engagement - Goals that fall under this category involve the feelings of your customers. This includes improving customer satisfaction or loyalty, educating customers, and understanding their needs.
Advocacy - This last category covers goals such as encouraging more user-generated content (UGC), increasing positive testimonials or referrals, and facilitating content sharing on social media.
For myself, breaking the goals into categories helps to frame the similarities and differences between them. Your campaign can focus on one category or many!
Step 2: Choose Your Media
Now that you’ve chosen the goals for your campaign, you need to decide how to launch and promote it. There are three main types of media:
Paid Media - This is just what it sounds like: media that you pay for. This can include boosting posts on social media, paid advertising from influencers, etc.
Owned Media – This media belongs to you, such as the posts you make on your socials and any promotional content on your website.
Earned Media – This sort of media is gained from customers. Likes, shares, reviews, and comments are just a few examples.
There are no right or wrong choices when it comes to media. What matters most is that you choose an outlet that suits your goals.
Step 3: Take Action
This is the stage where you align your chosen media with your established goals. For example, if you’re using paid media to build brand awareness, think about investing in search ads and social media brand ambassadors. Rather use owned media? Focus on how to spread the word through your website and socials. You can encourage your audience to share your posts and optimize the functionality and content of your website to boost your rankings on Google.
This stage is difficult, as determining the best course of action can be tricky. I find that the four stages outline makes this decision easier to visualize, as it forces you to consider your goals and chosen media when choosing your course of action. If it’s difficult to decide on what to do, you may need to switch up your media to better align with your goal.
Step 4: Monitor Your Results
The variables you use to monitor the success of your campaign will depend on your goals. For instance, if your goal is to improve customer satisfaction, you can use positive reviews as your metric. What to boost SEO instead? Look at the clickthrough rate of your search ads and your average number of website visitors. At the end of the day, all that matters is that the metrics you use align with the goal you are trying to measure.
This overview is quite broad, and the topics may seem obvious. However, the four stages of campaign planning are a section of my notes that I’ve gone back to over and over again during my internship. Seeing how the pieces fit together is helpful when sorting out any campaign. I can’t speak much beyond my own experiences, but it feels as though the industry is changing faster and faster. Just in my three years of university, the shifting trends and technological developments have changed the content of my marketing courses. This made me nervous when beginning my internship. Was I up-to-date enough? How would I keep up with these changes? The best advice I can give is to keep your ear to the ground and let yourself grow at your own pace. Change will come as it pleases; give yourself the space to adapt and don’t get discouraged if it knocks you down. And sometimes, a re-introduction to the basics is the best way to address new things.
I wish you all the best on your marketing journey!
- Cate
Thank you, Cate, for being a guest contributor for #TheGroundFloor! If you’d like to connect with her, you can reach her on LinkedIn.
I am always looking to welcome guest contributors to the blog! If you are interested in writing or have a specific topic you’d like discussed, please contact me!
- Andrew
