The most important part of any marketing campaign is getting to know your customer. Just because we’re using social media here, doesn’t mean the rules stop applying.

The better you know your customer, the better your campaign will perform. No surprise there. Effective customer identification means your advertising budget is spent as wisely as possible, chasing only those who would benefit from your service.

Together, we’ll research the demographics, psychographics, and behavioral habits of your customers, to give us an in depth idea of who they are, what they want, are where they can be found.

Usually, we’ll create a customer avatar to work with. This is a cartoon or photographic image of your “ideal customer”. While this is something of a novel activity, it’s great for ensuring the whole marketing campaign remains focused for its duration.

If there’s one area of the marketing process that trips up most businesses, it’s this one.

It’s not that most aren’t targeting their campaigns, it’s just that they’re not doing it effectively enough. The tools offered by social media aren’t up to the job. They don’t allow you to hone in on your buyer with precision, meaning you waste valuable dollars of your advertising budget that you don’t need to.

The way we target customers is different.

We’ll start by analyzing segments of the market to get a feel for the most profitable advertising locations. Once we’ve found the segments we believe will make you money, we’ll cross reference them against data found on the web, in media kits, even on Amazon.

This multi-tiered approach virtually guarantees you won’t be wasting cash by advertising to the wrong people.

Compare our method of targeting to the undifferentiated hit-and-hope marketing carried out by a large number of social media marketers, and you can see why our version of this process is superior.

For many, this is the most enjoyable part of the social media marketing process. Rather than crunch numbers and analyze data, they instead get to be creative.

While visual ad building can be enjoyable, it’s not an activity to be taken lightly. Here’s why: 71% of social media marketers use visual ads as part of their campaigns. That means – if you haven’t worked it out already – that your ad won’t get much time to make an impact.

That’s why we focus on developing a marketing message with you, then creating an ad that conveys this message in the clearest, most concise way possible.

It’s estimated 90% of the information received by the brain is visual. You don’t need telling how critical it is to get your ad just right.

While the visual side of the campaign is usually something many people enjoy, the writing side isn’t. Why? Because it means writing, deleting, writing, deleting – hundreds of times, until the ad is perfect.

The famous copywriter Joe Sugarman would spend two weeks writing a headline alone. Can you imagine how many scrunched up bits of paper he’d have in his waste-paper bin after that?

While your ad copy is unlikely to be long or worthy of a literary prize, it again needs to be clear and concise. You need to tell your potential customer everything she needs to know in that small allocated space, which isn’t easy.

At this point in the campaign, we co-ordinate with trained copywriters, whose expertise is to encourage clicks through.

A powerful headline and enticing ad copy will be the perfect accompaniment to your visual ad. Together, the text and images will lead customers through to your sales funnel, which will create the perfect buying environment to encourage sales, as you’ll see next.

Your sales funnel is what a customer will enter into every time one of your ads is clicked.

A sales funnel, in case you’re not aware of the term, is the so-called ideal process a customer will go through when dealing with your business. Your desire is to get them to go from a prospect, to somebody interested in what you offer, to somebody who buys from you – all in as short a space of time as possible.

How you go about that will be unique to your product or service. Your sales funnel needs to be created to match to your consumers’ buying habits. This sales funnel needs a definite purpose and needs to be clear of distraction. It needs to guide a buyer through the purchasing process and remove as many objections as possible. If it doesn’t do this, you’re be leaking money.

The benefit of investing in a well-designed sales funnel is you lose far fewer customers in the long run. You’ll be giving yourself the very best chance of turning an ad click into a sale, meaning your money goes far, far further.

The art of a successful ad campaign is in the testing.

According to Claude Hopkins, an influential advertising guru in the 1920s, advertising should be treated as a scientific process. How do we do that? Testing, testing, and more testing.

Using a variety of analytical tools, we’ll be able to judge the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign, and tweak it when required. We’ll also be able to tell you the strengths and weaknesses of the market you’re in, and advise you to increase or decrease spending in particular areas. (More on that in the next stage.)

This really is a crucial step, one that many overlook or underestimate. Without testing, your ad campaign is pretty much based on guess work.

The final stage of our seven-step process is reporting. No – not to the press, to you, of course.

We’ll report our analytical findings and give you our opinion on the health and success of your campaign.

We’ll report what’s working and what’s not, just to make sure you’re ahead of any curves developing.

But mostly, this stage is a chance for us to enjoy the fruits of our labor. This is the part of the campaign where we all pat each other on the backs for a job well done. It’s the part of the process that really provides you with a tangible reward for committing fully to the goal of social media domination.