Choosing to run a digital marketing campaign can certainly deliver significant results for your business, particularly in generating awareness and leads, but its not just about running a few ads on Facebook or Google and hoping for the best.
A lot of businesses are throwing money away by not planning and measuring their campaigns properly and are quick to dismiss these campaigns as unsuccessful. It goes without saying that a lot of careful planning and research should go into your pre-campaign activities, but equally as important is the need to measure performance from the get go and the learning you take away from the experience.
Below is a 6 step framework to take into account when setting up your next digital marketing campaign.
Step 1 – Define Your Why!
Before engaging in any digital marketing activity, it is crucial to understand why you are doing it and what you want to achieve from it. Define the objective of your campaign and create a strategy to make it happen. Do you wish to attract new customers? Increase your sales? Or maybe you want to focus on customer retention?
Once you have your overall campaign objective, you should then establish individual goals or KPIs to determine the direction of your campaign. These goals should be in alignment with your business objectives. Keep them simple, measurable and time bound to enable you to gauge the success of your campaign. You may want to set targets like the % you want to increase your customer base by or the total budget spend for the month/year.
Step 2 – Understand Your Market
It pays to do your research to gauge the potential market size and demographics of your target market. Invest a little bit of time in the early stages and you will save yourself a lot of time in the long run. Grow to learn who exactly your target market is and understand their buyer decision process. Find out where they hang out online, how they shop, the type of content they find interesting, who they follow online. Most importantly, you want to understand their fears, frustrations and desires so you can tailor your products or services to overcome them to deliver their desired outcome. Online forums are great for finding out this information.
Now focus your attention on the competition. Observe what is working for them, are they using paid or organic content? Which methods are attracting the highest levels of engagement?
Step 3 – Select Your Digital Marketing Tools
You have done your research, now you can make an informed decision about which marketing tools to use. There are a number of different tools you can choose form, each with different areas of strength that can deliver significant results for your business. If you are on a tight budget, you may wish to go with organic methods only or a combination of both paid advertising and organic content. Some of the more popular digital marketing tools include:
- Email Marketing – today this remains the most important and effective form of online marketing for Return on Investment.
- Content Marketing – writing a blog is a great way to show your knowledge on a certain topic. Video is also a powerful tool with the potential of going viral.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – optimise your website and landing pages by using clear “calls to action” and good, quality content to rank better on search engines.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) – platforms include Google Adwords, Facebook and Bing. In a nutshell, Google Adwords can open you up to a huge amount of traffic, it is user friendly and when targeting correctly, you can reach top ad positions quickly. It can be expensive, however, if you don’t manage and set limits and can be tricky to set up. Facebook has excellent targeting potential thanks to the vast amount of information held on all users (that’s 2.2 billion active users each month). Although you may experience a lower click through rate than Google Adwords, it is the cheaper option but remember to keep your content fresh. Bing also offer lower cost and good customer support for smaller businesses but a lower amount of traffic volume.
Step 4 – Consider your Customer Experience
Now that you are attracting the interest of your audience, you should take the time to understand their personal experience as they interact with your business. How would you rate this experience? You can attempt to make it as satisfying as possible by:
- ensuring the copy in your ad/blog/post is compelling, clear and correct (as in spelling and grammar).
- making sure your landing pages (where your customers are directed to once they click on your ad) have a clear purpose and are legible.
- Making the end goal attainable for the customer within 2 to 3 clicks of landing on your page?
Furthermore, appeal to the emotions of your target audience by delivering unique and relevant content to them that you believe will encourage them to interact with your business.
Step 5 – Assessing Your Campaign
A good indication of success will come from a tightly managed and controlled set of metrics. Know which metrics you need to pay attention to.
- Check your Keywords, Click Through Rate (CTR) and Cost Per Click (CPC). If a keyword is just costing you money and not achieving results, remove it. Monitor the CTR and check from one ad to another as this will affect your budget.
- Analytics – checks your visitor statistics in Analytics to check whether your audience is growing and to find out where they are coming from.
- Rate of Conversion – your end goal is typically making that conversion or sale. Conversions should be defined by you and based on your business so it may be that you capture an email address, get a new subscriber or sell a product/service. Although conversion rates may not be high, know that anything below 2% is not worth your effort and consider abandoning the campaign.
There are a number of tools that can help you measure your results:
- Google Analytics – you can find a wealth of information here including the keywords that are working for you, where your traffic is coming from and the most visited areas of your site.
- Facebook Insights – like Adwords, you can find all the information you need in relation to the performance of your paid or organic posts.
- Spyfu – this is a great tool which will provide you with both PPC and Organic performance, top keywords and competitor shared keywords.
Step 6 – Learning from your Data
Your first digital marketing campaign may or may not be the success you anticipated it to be but you are now equipped with some invaluable data to help drive future campaign success. Use this material to understand the demographics of those who engaged with your website and social media profiles and re-market to this “warm” audience. Determine what type of content your audience reacted to best – blogs, Facebook posts or paid advertising, and focus your attention on these.
As you continue to market your business online, remember to learn from your results. Your success will be based on trial and errors over several campaigns and the learning you take from these to influence your future actions. By focusing and identifying and meeting the needs of your customers, your marketing efforts are much more likely to succeed.
If you would like help creating and implementing your own digital marketing campaign, just get in touch and schedule a call to chat over your ideas or drop me an email at hello@www.d4digitalconsulting.com.
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