It’s a fair question; what’s better? One big, or many small campaigns?
If you run a business targeting a specific audience that can be located nationwide, what is the best way to target them? The wide approach to hit as many people as possible and follow up the ones that are interested, or try and go with local, smaller ranging campaigns that will hit the right people but
yield less results.
In an ideal world, doing both would be fantastic, but as we all know, none of us have unlimited budgets, so that isn’t always possible.
The truth is that your potential customers will all be different people, and will respond to people in different ways.
We mentioned recently on a podcast about how you could support a local leafleting campaign with a brand awareness social ads campaign for a few weeks, then cold call the people in a local area that were your target knowing that for the last 2 weeks they have seen your business everywhere. This would work, but only in a local area for a short period of time, and would require effort each time.
Larger campaigns work, and have the potential of bringing the largest returns. However, and that is a big however, if you are putting all your eggs in that one basket, it is a risk. Marketing doesn’t need to be risky strategies, although nothing is ever certain.
Our strategies for example, focus on a nationwide paid ads campaign across the major social media platforms. But we also locally exhibit at different business shows, with 17 booked over the next few months. We also attend very localised networking meetings with other business owners, as well as organising some of those meetings ourselves.
The key is our campaigns all support each other.
Regardless of where we get leads, there is a follow up nurturing campaign that is set through our automation system. On the front end, these all look different to the user depending on where they came from, however in the back end they are all very similar. Whether we get a business card on the street or a user fills in a form online, it will mimic itself.
When we run exhibitions, we will target the attendees with emails and paid ads before we arrive so we are already ahead of competition, so our local campaigns are bolstered by our wider ads campaigns.
The most important part here: planning
If you paid money to exhibit at a business conference near you, you wouldn’t just turn up with no marketing material and wing it. You would make sure you got the most for your money, by getting banners printed, freebies ready and you would look the part on the day.
That is the level of effort for one, 5 hour event, so you need to think about how you can support your wider campaigns. Just running nationwide ads isn’t enough, having a website that is optimised, process that is quick, follow up campaigns, future nurturing campaigns and lead capture strategies is pretty much essential in 2022.
And as your competition gets better at it, you might risk being left behind…