20 Aug How to Plan a Digital Marketing Campaign?
A successful business can often depend on what one does and doesn’t do in terms of marketing themselves online. Its important not to confuse a digital marketing plan and a digital marketing campaign. A digital plan refers to the series of actions taken to achieve the overarching marketing goals of the company. Whereas a digital campaign refers to the actions within your plan that moves the company towards its goals.
Before we learn “how”, we need to know “why.” Business owners, if you didn’t know, now you’ll know. The purpose of a digital marketing plan is to improve your working structure. When one has a coherent digital marketing plan, the process of putting your campaigns together can begin. It is essential to put your plan on paper, illustrating your research and clearly articulating your goals and aims for your digital initiatives. Without this, companies will find themselves struggling to grow and the likelihood of innovation decreases.
Listen Up
When putting your plan together, certain points need to be covered to ensure your plan is air-tight. Firstly, you need to set your objective. Once that is finalised, you must ensure that the digital mission that has been put together fits into the grand mission of the company. It is absolutely imperative to know and understand your digital marketing tools such as the main Key Performance Indicators. These are the tools that will help you measure the goals of the company. This information is vital. It will allow for adjustments in the future.
Secondly, you need to know and understand your buyer personas. These personas are your ideal customers/clients. They are generated through research, surveys and interviewing the business’ target audience. One should never make assumptions about their audience. These assumptions are bound to lead you in the wrong direction.
Thirdly, you have to gather the correct type of information. This information will be comprised of qualitative information and quantitative information. Quantitative information refers to the demographic information about your target market. Demographics in terms of where they live, how old they are, the general income they receive and the kind of jobs they have. The qualitative information refers to the psychological information of your audience. Information such as the goals of the market, their challenges, priorities, hobbies and interests. This kind of content will help your company to better understand their market and when you understand your market, communicating with them should be an ideally be a fluid process.
The Good Stuff
Now, to the good stuff – Digital Marketing Campaigns. Just a reminder, digital marketing campaigns refers to the actions taken within your plan that helps one move closer to their goals.
Firstly, you will begin with reviewing past strategies. This will ensure you avoid past mistakes and to capitalise on past successes. Secondly, you have to start with a single measureable goal. The goal will be determined by the root of the most important thing to the campaign. An example of this kind of goal would be creating more traffic on your website. I will be using this goal as a reference to understanding how this plan would come about. Thirdly, you have to formulate campaign objectives. This is what one plans to do to achieve each goal. In terms of increasing the traffic on your website, one could perhaps produce at least 3 pieces of work that would be uploaded onto the website at least once a week. The content should tackle issues or interests related to your target market. This should theoretically increase the number of people visiting your site and how often they do so. A majority of campaigns should have at least 3 to 5 objectives for the campaign to have some sort of impact.
Once your objectives are set then we arrive at the strategy development stage. This is the stage where one deciphers how they are going to achieve their goals. This stage is made up of operational elements that will help you navigate this stage successfully. Operational elements that should be taken into consideration are:
- Approach definition – outlining how and when your digital marketing activities will be carried out.
- Campaign objectives – to help you measure your campaign’s success.
- Key messages – these are the most important messages that you wish to convey to your target audience.
- Channel selection – explaining which digital marketing channels you will use to deliver your key messages to your target audience (e.g. email marketing and pay per click (PPC) marketing).
- Campaign assets – this is the content, mostly text and images, which you will use across your selected marketing channels.
- Marketing measurement – a plan detailing the measurement metrics that you will use to evaluate the success of your campaign.
Listen Up [AGAIN]
Before launching, you have to decide how you plan to measure the success rate of your objectives. At this stage you should have a clear idea of what you intend for your campaign to achieve and how you are going to go about doing it. There are two elements that you must decide on.
- What do you constitute as a success? (These will become your measurement metrics)
- How are you going to measure them? (These are your measurement platforms)
In the case of the former, your metrics will depend on the marketing channels that you select.
If one of your campaign objectives is to increase your social media engagement as well as increasing traffic, your metrics may be likes, shares, followers or retweets. While your measurement platform is likely to be Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics or perhaps HootSuite.
Regardless of your measurement metrics and measurement platforms, make sure that you setup and test them prior to your campaign launch.
Lastly, we arrive at the launch. Be sure to ensure that you remember the hard work you put into creating the campaign does not go to waste. Always keep track of the information that you gather. The more you know, the more effective your next campaign will be. Go forth and prosper young businesses.
