Once you know how you want to approach individual customer groups, it should be easier to allocate your marketing budget to individual marketing campaigns.

Before we use start any serious marketing campaign planning, you should look at these areas:

• Target Market – Who are you targeting with this marketing campaign? What type of potential customers?
• Reach of Campaign – How many customers can be reached by your campaign? This depends on the actual type of marketing campaign, eg:

• Brochures – How many brochures will you distribute?
• Print Advertising – What is the circulation of the magazine? How many people will get to read it?
• Radio/TV Ads – What is the listenership or audience of the radio/TV station? How many people will listen to or watch the show?
• Personalized Letters – How many letters will you send?
• Networking Events – How many people will hear your marketing message? How many will you meet?
• Exhibitions – How many people will attend?
• Seminars – How many people will attend?
• Online Marketing – How many visitors will come to your website?

• Expected # Leads – How many potential customers do you expect to contact you after the campaign?
• Expected # Sales – How many customers do you expect to buy from you after the campaign?
• Expected Sales Value – How much sales will the campaign generate?
• Expected Marketing Budget – What is your marketing budget for the campaign? How much will you spend?

Probably the best way of tracking the effectiveness of your brochures would be to ask your customers where they heard about you and when they mention the brochures, you will know where they came from.

You will then have to make a note about where a particular customer heard about you, so that you can track back which ways of advertising brought in most sales.

Do you know how effective is your your marketing? Which is the half of the marketing costs which you spend uselessly? How much of what you spend on marketing is actually effective?

How many sales a given campaign generates? Are the sales team happy with the quality of leads that marketing supplies?

If you don’t know answers to these questions, you don’t know how much revenue you are leaving on the table.

Therefore, you now probably need the following:

• An understanding of what actually worked and what was a waste of money
• A benchmark for success, showing you where you could have got value for money
• An idea of where to focus your future marketing budget to get results and what you should be looking at when creating your next marketing plan

Here is a simple questionnaire, on filling of which, you should have a pretty clear idea on your next brochure marketing campaign:

• Do you think brochures could be an effective way of promoting your your business?
• If yes, are you going to use them this year?
• If so, how many customers need to receive a brochure, before one becomes a lead for you?
• How many leads from brochures do you expect to get this year?
• How many of these leads do you hope to turn into sales?
• What will be the total value of these sales?
• What total profit will you get from this?
• What budget are you willing to spend to generate this profit?
• So how many brochures will you have printed?
• How will you distribute these brochures?
• What will be the cost of distributing these brochures?
• How much can you spend on design of the brochures?
• How will you measure the leads you get from the brochures?
• How will you track which leads turned into sales and what was their value?

Once you know answers to all these questions, you will be in a position to run a very effective brochure marketing campaign.

When approaching a professional graphic designer to design your brochures, you might want to use this outline of the marketing brief:

1. Design Requirements

Describe what type of brochure you actually want to have designed, e.g.:

A 3-fold brochure:

• size DL 99×210mm
• full colour
• both sided

2. Target Audience

Outline who your main target audience is for these particular brochures

3. The Style of the Design
You can ask to match the design with the rest of your marketing collateral (you need to enclose it) – or give examples of a few direct/indirect competitors of yours, or partners.

Content

Front Page

Inside Pages

Back of the brochure

Describe what you want to have on the individual pages. Be very specific, provide full content, and pictures if you can.

Always keep in mind, that graphic design is one of the key elements of your marketing.

You should have a general idea of how many leads you need to generate from individual marketing campaigns, where to get them and how much money you can spend to get these leads next year. However, when setting up a marketing budget, it is crucial that we allocate it to the most profitable customer groups – and that’s what this post is all about.

Look back at your marketing strategy and divide this total number of leads between individual customer groups and ways to approach them. Then assign a monthly budget to the individual customer groups, based on the total value the individual marketing campaigns are meant to generate.

If you want to learn more on how to set your marketing budget, you might want to click here now.

If you want your marketing strategy to prove effective, at the end of the year we need to check whether you stuck with the plan and how well you did with the individual campaigns.

Here is a clear description of what you should measure:

• Campaign Start – When did the campaign start?
• Expected # Leads – How many potential customers do you expect to contact you after the campaign?
• Actual # Leads – How many leads did you actually get so far?
• Expected # Sales – How many customers do you expect to buy from you after the campaign?
• Actual # Sales – How many sales did you actually get so far?
• Expected Sales Value – How much sales will the campaign generate?
• Actual Sales Value – How much sales did the campaign generate so far?
• Expected Budget – What is your budget for the campaign? How much will you spend?
• Actual Budget – How much did you spend so far on the campaign?
• Return on Investment – How much sales did $1 of actual budget generate?

If you manage to measure these indicators regularly, you’ll be able to soon evaluate your marketing strategy, even by comparing the results on a monthly basis.