Creating a digital marketing campaign is an effective way to reach your potential customers where they spend a lot of their time – online. But getting started with your first few campaigns can feel overwhelming. So if you’re new to it, where do you start? There are so many options and possibilities, it’s hard to know where to begin if you’re not an expert. In today’s blog post, we’ll discuss the five essential questions you can use to guide yourself through creating a digital marketing campaign.
The 5-step Guide to Creating a Digital Marketing Campaign
1. Who Do You Want to Reach?
The first step in any digital marketing campaign is deciding on your ideal customers. Who do you want to reach when you launch this campaign? Thinking carefully through the target audience for your product or service you’re looking to sell will set up the foundation for your marketing efforts.
Why is this so critical? Because digital marketing allows you to cast a wide net – sometimes too wide. If you’re spending time and money creating a digital campaign, you don’t want to waste it on people who aren’t going to buy what you’re selling.
A good example of this principle is a yoga clothing company looking to start creating digital marketing campaigns. If they try to reach as many people as possible via pay-per-click search ads and social media campaigns, they may get a lot of viewers on their ads. But if those viewers are not interested in yoga, those views won’t translate to sales. If you understand your ideal customer, you are starting your campaign off on the right foot.
2. What’s the Best Way to Reach Them?
Now that you have your ideal customer in mind, think about where they spend their time and look for solutions to fears or problems. For the yoga clothing company mentioned above, their customers are likely women under age 50, and they probably spend plenty of time on Instagram and Pinterest. That’s a good starting place for thinking about the type of campaign you want to create.
If your prospects are often searching for your product or service on search engines like Google, then a pay-per-click search ad campaign could be a good fit.
If you’re trying to build brand awareness and your ideal customer is young, then social media marketing could be the way to go. You can even get experimental and try out video content on your YouTube channel – YouTube is becoming a popular search engine with younger generations.
3. What Do You Want Them to Do?
Now comes the time to create the content for your digital marketing campaign. Don’t make the common mistake of starting by talking about how great your product or your company is. Instead, focus on what your product will do for your prospects, and the action they need to take to get the benefits.
The length of your content will depend on the type of digital campaign you’re running. But the guidelines for excellent content are the same – be clear, be concise, and be compelling. Consumers have a lot of options in today’s oversaturated marketing world. Why should they pick your company?
And of course, online marketing isn’t just about the words on the screen. Images are vital to your success on many digital platforms, especially in social media marketing. The images you use shouldn’t just be attractive – they should be part of telling the story to your potential customers. They should offer a promise that if the prospect takes the action your campaign is suggesting, their life will be better because you can solve a specific problem of theirs. That’s your marketing message, and it needs to be precise.
4. How Will You Measure Success?
Finally, you should think about how you’ll measure the success of your digital campaign. If you don’t know what your target is, you won’t hit it. And your investment of time and money will go to waste.
What does success look like in digital marketing? It varies depending on your industry and the type of digital campaign you’re running. But the goal should be to bring in leads or to make sales. Just getting plenty of viewers on your social media accounts or visitors to your website isn’t enough to grow your business.
To measure your success, you could look at your conversion rate – how many visitors become customers. That’s an important measure of marketing success, especially for ecommerce businesses. It tells you how effective your marketing is at moving the needle on sales. You could also look at how many leads your marketing efforts are generating, and how many of those leads make it all the way through your sales funnel.
5. What’s Next?
So let’s get to he final piece of your digital marketing campaign. And this would be fitting it into an ongoing digital marketing strategy. Marketing isn’t a one-and-done type of deal – you need to build on your success consistently.
If your PPC campaign was successful, perhaps you can build on that to create organic leads that bring you business over time via content marketing.
Or, if your social media paid campaign was a hit, maybe you can continue fine-tuning your brand awareness efforts and building your social media profile.
Capitalize on the momentum a successful digital marketing campaign brings you. And learn from both your mistakes and your successes. The world of digital marketing also changes quickly – so staying on top of trends and tracking your efforts consistently will make sure you don’t miss growth opportunities.
Coming Up with Your Next Digital Marketing Campaign
You can use these five questions to guide you through the creation of your next digital marketing campaign, whether it’s your first or your fifteenth. When planning a campaign, take a look at what gaps exist in your business – do you need to widen or narrow your customer base, raise your brand profile, or get more sustained leads? Afterwards, you can begin the journey through digital campaign planning.
If you’re not seeing the results you hoped for, it might be time to bring in an expert. Content First Marketing has helped businesses just like yours crack the digital marketing code and see real, measurable growth.
Schedule a free business review here to find out how we help businesses grow. You can use these insights for inspiration, and let us do the marketing for you.
Sources:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-digital-marketing
