I saw a quote on Facebook sometime ago and it goes something like this An undertaking can fail because a deciding factor was overlooked during preparation and execution, but no undertaking could succeed if all deciding factors are not catered for during the preparation and execution stage.
I certainly don’t remember the actual author of that statement, but it has stayed with me since then.
The truth value of that quote I would argue, applies to almost every dealings that we go through in every facet of life which is why it has been some sort of watchword for me before I go through with anything I do.
When it comes to marketing campaigns for any cause, I would say that this statement holds true 100%.
While a marketing campaign could produce undesirable results due to an oversight of certain factors that influences the result, a campaign could not be successful if all of the factors are not carefully considered, laid out and used as a threshold for creating the marketing strategy.
Some factors are more significant than others and depending on the circumstance some factors cannot just be overlooked while planning a marketing campaign.
Every single campaign is unique in its own way, since campaigns are usually started out with specific and distinct results in mind. One cannot expect each campaign not to have distinct deciding factors that will influence the result for those campaigns.
However, no matter how unique a marketing campaign may be in its cause, goals and resulting effects, there are still some constant deciding factors that are common to all campaigns, distinction regardless.
More often than not, these common factors are the harbingers of the uncommon factors. For example, the type of target audience that was defined for a campaign will determine the advertising medium that will be used to reach out to that audience.
For the remainder of this post, I will highlight three factors that must be considered from the very beginning in order to ensure the success of a campaign.

Target Audience

You shouldn’t market baby products to bachelors, doing that will likely lead to low sales if you even make any sales at all.
The reason for my above statement is obvious, bachelors have no use for baby products and marketing your products to them is simply a waste of effort and resources.
You need to have a target audience before starting a marketing campaign, that’s the most important thing. Even more important is that you need to make sure that you have the right target audience, one that won’t result in a loss for you as the marketer/business owner.
How do you figure out your target audience, well the answer to that question is pretty straight-forward, create an audience persona.
Audience persona is simply a description of what your right target audience looks like, and you can get the answer to that by asking yourself a few simple questions like

• Which group/groups of people who would benefit most by using whatever is going to be promoted in the campaign
• What is the one activity that is common to people in the groups you found
• Which location or media is common to people in these group/groups that will help be able to locate them with the most ease
  These few questions and other questions of this nature would help you determine the right people to sell to and the right people not to sell to.
  Having the right target audience for your product would eliminate futility of effort for you as the marketer

Identify the buying power for your target audience

It is imperative that you find a target audience, what is even more imperative is to make sure that your target audience has the financial capability to afford to pay for your product.
It would be a disaster if you promote a service that costs millions of dollars as onetime fee to minimum wage workers. Chances are slim that someone who earns less than a hundred thousand dollars yearly will be able to afford a high ticket service/product, except they are not being forthcoming about their earnings.
Knowing your target audience can afford to pay for your service will save you a lot of energy and resources during the marketing campaign

Ensuring that your service/product/cause is top notch

You cannot be selling a system/solution to people and expect them to just accept what you say without questioning the authenticity of your claims.
Nobody wants to buy disaster, no one wants to back bullshit. It is only natural for people to want to know if your claims are true or not.
The one way you can make things easy for yourself before putting yourself through the fire of being critiqued and questioned, you need to first of all make sure that what you are trying to sell is not nonsense.
You need to work on your product and perfect all its edges before spreading awareness about it. One way you can know if your product is good and ready for the market is by asking yourself a question.
The question goes thus,
“if I were to be a buyer and a stranger that I don’t know advertises this product to me, would I be willing to buy?”
If your answer to that question is yes then you can confidently say your product is ready for marketing.

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