What to include in a marketing campaign?

[Kat Young]

I am doing a marketing campaign in a class for an actual company. It is a local eye care company and they have given us a $20,000 budget to work with. Now, apart from the usual radio, television, and print advertising we need to really come up with other good strategies in our creative brief. We are in a town of about 35,000 to 40,000 people. Besides coming up with advertising to include in the budget we also will be doing social media and things along these lines. I want to get some fresh ideas and was going to see if you all had any ideas or strategies or links that could help me. Thank you!

[MrGoodFriend]

For a local place, you really need to have a Facebook business page, Yahoo! Local for Business, Google Plus for Business, a location on Google Maps and more. Get Yelp listings, Foursquare, Mapquest, Superpages, Insiderpages, CitySearch.

These will give your local business lots of online marketing authority without spending any $$.

[robert m]

There's lots of inspiring stuff out there so I will recommend one area you do need to include that you haven't mentioned - You need some form of tracking and monitoring mechanism - otherwise how will you know which bit of your advertising is working. It also means you can provide feedback to your customer who at the start may well be interested in how creative and slick your advertising is but at then end will be wanting to look at results and what you have achieved with their $20K

[Jason M]

Great answers so far. Claiming the local listings is by far the most important so people can find the business on search engines. Tracking is important because you can't manage what you don't measure. I know http://www.ekrum.com provides a call tracking solution that can be customized. They can give you a unique phone number for your print, TV, radio, and web advertising. You can see which advertising streams generate the most callers and analyze your bang for your buck. You can then cancel poorly performing marketing and use that money and shift it to successful marketing.

I have helped track hundreds of campaigns and I can tell you that online seems to be the best ROI. Another interesting case - a dentist put up a $65 sandwich sign in front of his office and now sells about 7-8 laser whitening sessions per month from it (at about $300 each). That has been one of the best simple things I have tracked.