Marketing is everything in business and in today’s volatile economy, it’s even more important that you maximize the return on investment for every marketing dollar you invest. However, Marketing is an area that very few business owners and entrepreneurs are actually good at. The fact of the matter is that most business owners are doers, not planners and effective marketing demands a significant amount of planning.
Today I’m going to share with you a very simple 3-step framework that will help you create more effective marketing campaigns. It’s called the O-S-T Marketing Campaign Framework.
Three steps to Creating an Effective Marketing Campaign: O-S-T
1. Objective – Why you are doing it?
T. Harv Eker says it best, “The reason why people don’t get what they want is because they don’t know what they want!” I believe your business and your marketing operates the same exact way. You must have an clear idea of what you are looking to accomplish before you start doing anything else.
What is your objective for your marketing campaign? What is your outcome? What are you looking to accomplish? What does success look like?
When you have a clear desired outcome then you have a better understanding of why you are marketing and what you are working towards. This step sets the stage to design a strategy that achieves your objective.
2. Strategy – What you are doing?
Unfortunately this is the step that business owners and entrepreneurs don’t spend enough time on, or even skip entirely. Strategy is everything in marketing. Too often, business owners find themselves in a pinch and need to generate new business (objective) and they slap together a flyer and send it out (Tactic). This, my friends, is what I call “Hope Marketing”. They send out a flyer, sit, wait, and hope that people come in their door to spend money. There is nothing strategic about this.
In order to create an effective marketing campaign, you should develop several different ways that you can accomplish your objective. The best strategic ideas surface after you think you’ve run out of ideas. Not only that, but when you create several different strategies, and something doesn’t go as originally planned, you have a back-up strategies already created.
3. Tactics – How you are doing it?
As I mentioned in the Strategy section, Tactics are where they typical business owner and entrepreneur are inclined to go right away. They do this because they are doers and enjoy getting things done. Sitting back and planning feels like a waste of time to them. However, by jumping straight into tactics, they end up wasting even more time and more money than they would if they actually planned.
When a business owner jumps into tactics too soon, they end up operating their business from a place of reaction because there is no intention behind their ‘do-ing’. Tactics always come after you have developed a rock-solid strategy for your campaign.
What are tactics though? Tactics are the projects and tasks that need to be completed in order to execute the strategy that you’ve created.
The power of the O-S-T Marketing Campaign Framework
When you’re Strategy is aligned with your Objective and your Tactics are aligned with your Strategy, you create an alignment within your marketing campaign that drastically increases the effectiveness of your campaign.
The alignment of projects and tasks required to implement the strategy that you created, specifically, to achieve your objective, is a formula for success for any marketing campaign, in any industry.
Taking it one step further
One thing to think about in the development of any of your marketing campaigns is: How does this fit into my overall marketing strategy. The key to establishing an effective marketing plan is developing a well thought out strategy that incorporates many different campaigns.
All of your marketing campaigns should be working together to achieve the big-picture desired results, goals, and objectives of the entire company.
For more information on creating a rock-solid Strategic Marketing Plan, check out my blog post: Introduction to the Strategic Marketing Compass
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