Developing customer acquisition strategies is one of the most highly involved processes in marketing – at least it should be. To execute great campaigns, you must work through several phases of preparation before a single landing page goes live. You start with your customer’s goals and objectives, undertake a thorough research period, and brainstorm a wealth of diverse ideas. Once you’ve exhausted all of those steps, it’s time to plan.

The planning phase is really where the rubber meets the road. You’ve analyzed the data and translated it into valuable insights. Now it’s time to bring together your best marketing minds and plan your potential strategies. All of your different channels – paid search, display, affiliate, content, social, and SEO – should collaborate on a cohesive, cross-channel blueprint for meeting objectives.

Take the following 3 steps to guide your planning process:

1. Cull the best ideas.

Gather everyone involved with the project, and hold a massive brainstorming session. Sometimes, my company pulls in people who aren’t even on a particular assignment for a fresh take on the information. Once you have a wide range of ideas on the board, ask for everyone’s top three picks. This focuses the group and helps you identify the best concepts. Come up with a short list (fewer than 10) of your strongest ideas, and decide which are most actionable.

You’ll find that some are simply outside the scope of your resources at the moment, so you can disregard them. Others might be brilliant ideas for a later phase, so park those and return to them later. You always want a few ideas for various phases in the parking lot in case an idea gets shot down later on.

2. Measure ideas against resource constraints.

Once you’ve organized your top ideas, evaluate whether they’re realistic on the given timeline and budget. If you have four months but a campaign will take three months to launch, you have just a month to track its performance. That’s cutting it too close.

Even if time is on your side, you still must ensure you’ll have sufficient resources. Perhaps one of your ideas requires a lot of technical integration, but the team you’re working for is preparing for a site re-launch. There’s no way they can spare additional tech resources, so you cross off that idea.

Create a grid to compare your ideas based on their expected impacts and the amount of effort it will take to execute them. Rank the expected impacts as high, medium, or low, and do the same for effort. An idea that requires low effort and offers high impact should go to the top of the list. High-effort, low-impact concepts get cut every time.

3. Prepare to execute.

Choose the best, most actionable ideas, and think through how they can be executed if they’re approved. Consider what kind of messaging you’ll use. Plan what you’ll offer to consumers and when. What kind of creatives will you need? Create a roadmap for how you’ll execute. You might make a Gantt chart to lay out which aspects will be tackled during which weeks and to identify what will work and what won’t.

The planning period is an exciting opportunity to collaborate with your teammates and explore unique ideas. As you bring the creative and logistical elements together to see what’s possible, your campaigns begin to take shape. It’s another layer in the nuanced strategy process, and it paves the way for the remaining phases to unfold.

This is Part 3 of a three-part series.
Part 1: 3 Customer Acquisition Research Strategies You Should Be Using Now
Part 2: Turn Research Data into Relevant Customer Acquisition Insights