To build your brand awareness and grow your audience, you need digital marketing. Compared to the past, online businesses today are booming like never before, and the competition is fierce. So, properly setting up a digital marketing campaign can help you stand out from the crowd.
While digital marketing may sound simple, implementing it can be challenging. There are, after all, hundreds of techniques and platforms to choose from.
It takes time, preparation, and patience to run a successful digital marketing campaign. And when it comes to reaching the right people at the right time, there is a lot of noise to contend with. Hence, it’s important to plan every step carefully.
Before we get into how to create your first successful marketing campaign, let’s have a look at the basics of digital marketing campaigns:
What Is a Digital Marketing Campaign?
Digital marketing campaigns are organized efforts to target potential customers to increase conversion or build loyalty among existing customers.
There are various types of digital marketing campaigns, such as narrow campaigns (e.g., social media marketing or blogging) or broad campaigns (e.g., search engine marketing , social media marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and more), and one type may work with one brand but not for another.
Before starting a campaign, it’s important to know your marketing budget, timeline, target audience, customer base, and which online marketing channels will most effectively reach your target market.
Components of Digital Marketing Campaigns
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Digital Marketing campaigns need a solid foundation to be successful.
The primary elements of a marketing campaign are the non-negotiable elements. Among these are setting goals, defining KPIs with which success can be clearly defined, setting a budget, allocating resources appropriately, and launching, monitoring, measuring, and iterating the campaign according to the system in place.
The secondary elements of a campaign are ― audience engagement, email marketing, content marketing , social media campaigns, and native advertising ― as well as choosing the location in which it will appear. Depending on an organization’s needs, these components may change.
How To Create Your First Marketing Campaign
Here are some steps to build your first successful digital marketing campaign.
Set the goal
Defining your goal is the first step in developing a marketing campaign since you will determine your strategy based on it. Establishing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) goals is the key to putting the entire marketing team on the same page.
When setting marketing goals, consider the following questions:
- What are your organization’s goals?
- What role can digital marketing play in achieving that goal?
- How do you plan to measure success?
Digital marketing campaigns can accomplish countless goals, but it’s best to focus on one for the best results. Your marketing strategy will become inconsistent and unfocused if you attempt to achieve too many goals with one campaign.
Identify your budget and audience
Decide what your budget is before you start. Why? Because this will be your main constraint in distributing your resources to achieve marketing objectives.
When it comes to digital marketing, budget is especially important if you plan to run social media or PPC campaigns, so plan your budget appropriately to meet your targets efficiently.
There are three common methods for determining marketing budgets:
- Establish a budget based on tasks
- Make sure your budget matches that of your competitors based on an estimate
- Incentives based on sales
Small businesses can spend between 2 and 20 percent of projected sales on marketing. However, depending on your industry, business size, and stage, how much you allocate to marketing will vary. If you’re a young company, you’re likely to need a higher percentage of revenue to succeed.
To predict which services, products, and messages will resonate with your target audience, you should first identify and understand them. By performing UX (user experience) research, you can learn more about your target audience, identify the platforms where they are more active, and discover those who are already engaged with your brand.
Message Creation
It is the creation of your message that makes the campaign unique. Tailoring your product or service message to your target audience is important. Your response rate will be higher if you know more about them. A problem they have that needs to be fixed and an unmet need are the two factors you should consider when creating your message.
There are three things you need to address in your message. To elicit an emotional response from your audience, you need to appeal to their emotions. Identify their problems and unmet needs and empathize with them. Make them feel understood by showing them you care. In doing so, you will build trust with your audience and engage them to continue reading.
Additionally, you should emphasize the benefits your service or product can provide. In this regard, you must demonstrate to them how your product or service will solve their problems and benefit them in the long run.
The third thing you can do is provide credibility to your message. Whether it’s customer testimonials, endorsements from leading industry figures or research, testimonials can prove your products’ quality. In addition, you can include success stories and case studies. Your audience will more likely believe in your product or service if you have credibility. It also justifies making the purchase.
Define KPIs
KPIs (key performance indicators) help brands analyze their online marketing campaign’s performance. When it comes to measuring the success of your campaigns, you can use KPIs.
For example, revenue growth is a KPI if a marketing campaign aims at increasing sales. However, if the goal is to increase brand awareness ― referrals, website traffic, or engagement through social media can be KPIs.
A few types of KPIs are:
- CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost
- CTR – Click-through Rate
- CR – Conversion Rate
- LTV – Customer Lifetime Value
- ROI – Return on Investment
Schedule resources
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Allocating your resources is the next step once you have defined your goals, determined your budget and audience, and decided what outcomes you want. Schedule resources involve:
- competitors analysis
- keyword research
- setting up digital strategy
- targeting the right digital channels
- understanding the online marketing tools, you have access to
- selecting how you want to market to your target audiences, such as via email marketing campaigns, social media marketing campaigns, content marketing campaigns, search engine marketing campaigns, and referral marketing campaigns
Launch & monitor
It’s important to run test campaigns before you spend your entire budget on advertising or paid media. When you run a test campaign, you’ll start with a small budget and refine it based on feedback and data collected. After a test run, launch your campaign and keep track of its progress to know if it will succeed. You can expect to have enough data if you let your paid advertising run for one month, even if it’s just $1-10 per day. Pay attention to
- where people access your content (mobile vs. PC)
- how content travels across various social media platforms
- identify the social media channels that are best suited to your message
- the ratio between organic traffic and sponsored traffic
- and the difference between engagement levels between existing and new prospects.
Measure and evaluate
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A digital marketing campaign can be evaluated by determining how and where users interact with it. By tracking audience engagement in real-time and analyzing the data, you can identify whether a particular action resulted from campaigns or organic traffic.
When a company experiences growth on its website, it may attribute the growth to recent changes made to it. However, the data may indicate referral traffic, enhanced searches following an event, or even accounts that appear to be spam. Marketing teams cannot improve audience engagement until they understand its root cause.
Keep iterating and improving!
Once a campaign launches, a digital marketing job isn’t finished. A successful digital marketing campaign relies on continuous improvements based on data. Be open to iterating your approach, whether it be across different social media platforms or online platforms, adapting to a new audience, or modifying your content. Learning from previous mistakes and being responsive are key attributes of successful digital marketing campaigns.
Wrapping up
When launching your first campaign, investing in your marketing skills is the most important thing you can do. Every business’s digital marketing campaign will look different. It is important to develop a plan that fits your business model based on your audience, resources, and product offerings. Because digital marketing is trend-driven and results-driven, it is easier to customize it to meet your goals. You will benefit from adjusting your plan based on the data. You’ll surely see traffic and sales increase if you keep evaluating and innovating.