Kickstarting a Successful Digital Marketing Campaign By James Tredwell on May 4, 2020 Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. They log on the internet because they need something, and they will voice that need out, but who is listening? Most websites are too caught up in how good and awesome their products or services are, without keeping in mind that any product or service they deliver must meet people’s needs. If a visitor to your site is bombarded with information and campaigns whose apparent purpose is to cold sell, they will walk away and never return. People know when they are being marketed to. People also know if you intend to genuinely provide solutions to their queries through free and valuable content that relates to your business. If you use the latter approach, you reach larger audiences more effectively and build trust. You get the opportunity to showcase your product or services that can add value to people’s lives through the right digital marketing campaigns. A digital marketing campaign is an online marketing effort put forward by a company to push engagement, traffic, conversions, or revenue. The campaign ties in with the primary goals of the organization and include one or more digital channels in the process. Digital marketing is becoming a growing favorite among marketers because it is much cheaper than traditional marketing, sometimes with even better results. For instance, email marketing has a 4,400% ROI on average, where welcome emails have an average open rate of 82%. Clearly, email marketing is still one of the best and most reliable channels of online marketing. It’s also easy to go global with digital marketing, where the potential to become viral is high. Results are more measurable than traditional marketing because of analytic tools that are available for digital marketers to use. It levels the playing field for big brands and startups, as online presence and brand awareness can be achieved even with the simplest of digital marketing strategies. Here are steps you can follow to create a successful digital marketing strategy: Determine Your Goals Begin with the end in sight. Success spells P-R-E-P-A-R-A-T-I-O-N. Preparation time is never wasted time. You cannot launch a successful digital marketing campaign without first identifying your goals for the campaign. Is it for the increase in leads, sales, or engagement? Is it to launch a particular promo? Whatever goal you set should be the focus of your campaign. Do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) on your business and identify if this particular marketing campaign can help you highlight strengths, work past weakness, opportunities to maximize for success, and any threat that needs to be addressed. Define Your Target Market and Consumer Avatar What market are you targeting with your campaign? If you have a website and run analytics regularly, you most likely have already identified the kinds of people who frequent your site and who shop from you. If you are a startup business owner or your website just launched, you will need to do some research. Check out your competition to see whom they are targeting, but don’t let your marketing strategy be stealing sheep from their pen. You can research and see a niche market to target that other competitors might be missing. A successful digital marketing campaign has a well-defined audience you have carefully crafted recognized in your digital marketing plan. Develop your ideal client avatar. Creating a buyer persona for your brand and describing this person in detail (age, gender, occupation, annual income, likes and dislikes, family situation, and the like) helps you fine-tune details of your campaign. Determine Your Timetable You need to time your campaigns better by setting a time-frame. Planning without action is futile. Don’t be caught up in the planning stage, waiting until everything is perfect without ever getting into implementation. Some are fantastic planners but do poorly in execution. If this is you, then you need to surround yourself with people in the team that can help you carry out determined plans. Give your team some space for failure or redo’s before the launch date you set. It’s inevitable in any strategy because plans that looked good on paper sometimes would need some adjustments during implementation. You also do not want to rush everything to meet a deadline. A digital marketing campaign with mediocre content and creatives will have lack-luster results. You will waste time and resources on campaigns that are poorly-run. So don’t lock yourself into unreasonable time frames that will reduce your campaign’s success. Determine Milestones Running a marketing campaign is not a walk in the park, so you need to identify milestones and micro-milestones, so the team sees exactly where the campaign is, what needs to be done and get encouraged with every accomplishment of targets along the way. It keeps the team in a singular focus and unified pace. A sample of milestones you can set are the following Sales milestones: first sale, mid-term sales report, year-end quota or campaign target sales Profitability milestones: set milestones when the campaign reaches break-even point, to ROI, to when the campaign can pay for itself (overhead expenses, human resources, and the like) Engagement milestone: target leads generated through the campaign, subscribers or followers gained, social shares, or what percent of market share you want to reach Conversion milestone: leads turned into customers, repeat sales, market dominance, and the like Determine Your Budget You cannot have a spending frenzy when you are running a marketing campaign. You need to identify how much is the budget for a campaign and how you should allocate it among the different needs of the campaign and different stages. You cannot go all out at the beginning and lack the budget to continue your campaign in a month or so. Check also what your competition doing and gain insight from their success, even failures. What strategies is your competition lacking in that you can maybe optimize for your campaign? Determine channels of promotion where you can give minimal budget so you can focus on the most profitable tools or channels that will surely help lead your marketing campaign to success. If your funds are earmarked for specific campaigns, and you find out that other campaigns are doing better, you can readjust. Ensure that you spend every penny wisely for the most ROI for your business. Determine Channels and Platforms to Use You have to choose the channels you will run your marketing campaign on. If you carefully planned, you already know by this stage, what platforms will be best to use. If it’s a sales campaign, then it might work best on Google Shopping or connect a shopping feed to your Facebook. You may have to spend on Facebook or Instagram ads and the like. If your goal leads generation, you can focus on inbound search, like on Google Adboards. If you are a DIY website, you can run campaigns on Pinterest or Instagram. Identify the channels your market niche is exposed to your campaign and where they are in the sales funnel when they use your campaign, which helps you identify the right kind of consumer at the right time. Different channels for digital marketing are as follows: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Email Marketing/Marketing Automation Content Marketing Social Media Marketing Pay Per Click (PPC) Affiliate Marketing Native Advertising Online PR Inbound Marketing A good digital marketing campaign employs maybe two or three at a time, depending on the kind of campaign being run, for optimum success. To help you determine which channel will work for your campaign, Ahrefs provides useful information in the video below: Time for Launch! The campaign launch is the most vital, exciting, and nerve-wracking part of the campaign. If you did your planning right, you would see results pouring in through clicks, likes, shares, conversions, ad interactions, comments, and the like. Monitor these measures and optimize where your campaign is doing well the most. Optimize Your Results Use data and analytics you gather to optimize your campaigns for the best results. Refine details as needed, like budget, keywords, channels, change ads, remove some poorly-performing campaigns, and boost the ones that are bringing success to campaign. Don’t be afraid to stop anything that’s not working, like ads that are not hitting engagements. You can always recreate or revamp those ads, tweaking them where they were weak, and relaunch in the hopes of better results. Here are some ways to analyze and measure your campaign’s performance: Number of organic website visits to your page (Google Analytics) Dwell time on your page (Google Analytics) Open rates and click-throughs for emails (marketing automation software like Marketo) Paid ads click-throughs and referrals (Google Analytics) Prospects or leads generated from each campaign or event Engagements, likes, shares and follows on social media (social analytics tools like Simply Measured, or free analytics from various social media platforms themselves) Whatever way you choose to track your campaign, have enough information available to determine if the campaign is worth the investment or should be tweaked or dropped immediately. Conclusion: Help People, Not Hard Sell Them The heart of every digital marketing campaign you do should be helping people, for it to be a success. Through your marketing campaigns, you can connect with your target market more efficiently, communicate how you can bring value to their life, and eventually convert leads to loyal consumers. Conversion is like feedback in a communication model. Without feedback, the communication process may have failed. If your measurements and data are showing minimal output, it’s best to stand back and ask yourself if you are meeting the needs of the people or ramming your product or service on them hard-selling style. Consumers should be at the core of every campaign. If you serve people’s needs, people will naturally flock to you to come and hear what you say, avail of your service or product organically, and even share the information with others. It’s this level where you want your brand to be. If you reach a trust level like this, it’s cherry on top of every campaign strategy you implement. Keep going at it and do not wane in discovering the best digital marketing strategies that work for your business and your brand today. Author Bio.:- John Ocampos is an Opera Singer by profession and a member of the Philippine Tenors. Ever since, Digital Marketing has always been his forte. He is the Founder of SEO Guru, and the Managing Director of Tech Hacker. John is also the Strategic SEO and Influencer Marketing Manager of Softvire Australia – the leading software eCommerce company in Australia and New Zealand.
