Free Marketing Fundamentals

  1. There are no right answers. Context is everything. Anyone who tells you that you MUST use the latest technique (which they’re usually selling) is lying. Anything can be helpful, and anything can be unhelpful.
  2. That’s why the key to competing and succeeding today is in strategy. Get the fundamentals right, and your campaigns will run more easily, cheaply, and smoothly.
  3. In “Open Source Marketing” (OSM), we take time to think about the strategy and to design campaigns before investing anything in execution.
  4. We don’t just take the situation as we find it, but strive to think creatively about how we could improve the fundamentals of a business proposition before going to market.
  5. Campaign delivery does not have to be a massive up-front investment (of time or money). The old model of web design is dead. OSM aims to apply lean principles of testing assumptions, fast iterations, and continual improvement, wherever appropriate.
  6. Once a campaign is running, there may be opportunities to optimize it. Sometimes, optimization (particularly of ads and/or conversion funnels) can make the difference between making a loss or making a profit. However, it is not always justified. (There are no right answers, remember.)

Campaign Design & Delivery

One of the most common mistakes marketers and business owners make is to dive into executing marketing activity without having a comprehensive campaign plan in place.

Campaign design is the second critical phase of the Open-Source Marketing system. Its goal is to have a complete campaign that provides a thorough process for creating happy customers.

We do this through a series of six Campaign Steps.

The Six Campaign Steps

  1. Outreach: Generally raising awareness of the brand and its offers.
  2. Targeting: Directly identifying our target prospects and getting our message to them.
  3. Capture: Where possible, obtain the prospect’s contact details, so that we can continue to market to them directly.
  4. Nurture: Fully communicate the benefits of our proposition, and try to resolve any objections, until the prospect is ready to buy.
  5. Close: Make the “sale” (which is not always a financial transaction).
  6. Continuity: Once we have a new customer, what else can we do to keep them happy?

You are advised to work through the Six Campaign Steps in turn, and follow the advice so that you craft your complete marketing campaign design.

Techniques

There is a bewildering array of techniques (by which we mean channels, tools, platforms, and methods) available to today’s marketer.

While marketing “gurus” and specialists in particular techniques will happily sing the praises of their current favorite tool, please never forget this rule.

No technique is right for every campaign! It always depends on your context.

And, unfortunately, there is little information available to help you decide which of these are right for your scenario and goals.

So Open-Source Marketing aims to help guide your options by providing free advice from our large team of marketing experts.

Campaign Delivery

Having a sensible and true strategy in place, together with a comprehensive campaign design will make your campaign delivery far easier.

Knowing your strategy means you are clear about where your brand and offerings sit in the market, and why your target market should care. You will have uncovered the compelling benefits of your offer, and have a good idea that you will be able to reach an audience that has a tangible problem that you can solve.

In carefully crafting your campaign design, you will have ensured you have put measures in place to reach, engage, nurture, and close your target prospects, selected the most appropriate channels and tools, and you will also have considered how to create the maximum value for each new customer.

Now you know what you want to achieve, and what you’re going to do to get there, you are ready to go to market!

In the Campaign Delivery section, the Open-Source Marketing expert team provides you with our best advice on how to use each of the techniques (tools, channels, platforms, methods etc.) in the marketer’s toolkit.

Via TechnoRealism, LLC (Gary Palmer Jr.) & the Open Source Marketing Project (Ben Hunt) / CC BY-SA 4.0