Digital marketing is truly a phenomenon for the new age. All sorts of businesses and organizations are now finding themselves participating in the digital marketing revolution: from small firms hoping to capitalize on the hyperlocal targeted options of many online marketing modes to corporations looking to cement their position as a market leader, everyone is at it.
Whether it’s a campaign to rise up through Google’s ranks, a plan to create a series of email releases that deliver your brand’s key messages, or simply a social media ad set, there are lots of reasons why digital marketing campaigns need careful planning. From the risk that your budget will be spent inaccurately to the chance that your audience targeting settings will take you down the wrong road, there are lots of reasons to plan, plan, plan. This blog post will share some advice on how to go about doing this in an effective manner.
Decide on Your Goals
The first thing to do when organizing your online marketing campaign is to identify the goals you want to achieve. Often, this will be directly linked to conversion outcomes: perhaps you want a particular number of people to purchase your product, or maybe you want a certain number of people to sign up to your email newsletter in order to retain the contacts and relationships you develop.
For some brands, though, there’s no direct desired output as such other than increased brand awareness. HSBC’s recent “We are not an island” campaign, for example, appears to have been targeted as developing public conversation and brand loyalty for the business rather than achieving any specific product goal. Making a decision like this will mean that your other decisions – such as which platform to use, how much to spend and what specific KPIs to look out for – will in turn be easier to achieve.
Choose Your Platforms
The next big decision to make will be which platform you want to use. On the face of it, this seems simple: internet marketing is dominated by a number of “giants”, including obvious providers such as Facebook and Google – but in practice, there’s much more to the digital marketing world than this. If you run a professional services firm, for example, then the place to go might be LinkedIn. Or if you’re running an e-commerce store, then an Amazon listing optimization service along the lines of the one outlined on this service page could be a better idea. Your best bet is to do some market research into where your potential customers will be, and then use that as a starting point for working out where to meet them.
Assign Responsibility
Digital marketing campaigns are easy to set up and use – and this brings many benefits to even the casual marketer. However, perhaps the primary downside is that it can lead to a false sense of security. Take the example of overspending: when everyone involved in an online marketing campaign knows that the ad – and hence payment – can be turned off at the touch of a button, it’s paradoxically easier to put off checking in on the campaign’s performance.
As a result, human errors such as wrongly targeted content and misplaced budgets can slip through unnoticed. Over time, these can become very costly! That’s why it’s important to assign responsibility for monitoring your ad campaigns to a particular individual in the organization. While this person can use built-in ad management tools on self-service online ad purchasing platforms (such as overall account spending limits), these should not be relied upon. That way, you’ll be able to relax knowing that any problems will be picked up on by a human rather than a computer.
Internet marketing campaigns offer all sorts of promise. Not only are they simple and easy to set up and organize, but they’re also versatile and can support a variety of conversion goals. However, despite their simplicity, they still need to be planned appropriately. If they’re not, then the consequences can be severe: overspending on budgets and setting up an advert that isn’t quite appropriate for its context are just two examples of possible failures. As with all marketing campaigns, these problems can be solved through planning. Deciding on your conversion goals and then choosing your platforms with your strategic aims in mind is a great way to reduce these risks when planning a digital marketing campaign.
