Observe digital marketing as a huge, well-oiled machine, containing thousands of miniature cogs and moving parts. They all need to work perfectly to achieve the desired results. Moreover, even if everything is working right, you won’t be able to see the results of your campaigns overnight.
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How to Structure a Digital Campaign Plan?
It requires you to invest lots of time, effort, and dedication to reap the fruits of your hard work. That’s exactly why you need to back your digital marketing efforts up with a detailed campaign plan that will guide you and help you make the right choices.
If you still don’t have a digital marketing strategy, here are a few simple tips and tricks to use.
1. Define your Goals
For starters, you need to understand what results you want to achieve when creating a digital campaign. Do you want to boost brand awareness, increase the number of followers, generate more leads, or maximize conversions? By defining your goals early on, you will be able to choose the right marketing tactics and tools. Precisely because of that, ensure your marketing goals are SMART– specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
2. Choose the Right Metrics and Tools
Metrics tell you whether your marketing tactics are helping you achieve the goals you’ve set. No matter if you’re investing in SEO, social media marketing, or email marketing, there is a myriad of metrics that may confuse you.
Avoid vanity metrics and focus on KPIs that will inform you about your progress. For example, tracking social likes and shares, without paying attention to engagement, conversions, and traffic from these channels would be ridiculous.
Similarly, you cannot measure organic traffic for your SEO campaigns in a vacuum. You will need to compare it to your time on page, bounce rates, leads, and engagement rates to understand whether your traffic converts.
3. Equip yourself with the Right Tools and Measure Results
It’s important to start measuring your campaign performance early on so you can identify its key strengths and weaknesses and update it in real-time. That’s where you need to start creating digital marketing reports.
There are many automated reporting tools that may help you. Digital marketing reporting software integrates with the majority of popular SEO, PPC, email marketing, and social media marketing tools. With it, you can combine the widgets from multiple tools, measure only those KPIs you care about, and filter out all irrelevant data.
Above all, you will be able to create responsive, simple and customized digital marketing dashboards that will help you track all important metrics on a single screen and share access with the rest of your team, clients, or employers.
4. Understand your Target Market and Build Buyer Personas
When creating a digital marketing campaign, you need to know who you’re addressing. Ask yourself what audience segments you’re targeting and start collecting data. Create online surveys, make social media polls, use social media listening, interview customers, research competitors – anything that may help you learn more about your audiences.
Based on the real data you collect, create buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. Sure, the type of information you will gather and include in buyer personas depends on your business’ niche and type.
Customer data is often divided into demographic information (their location, age, income, job title, marriage status) and psychographic data (their unique goals, interests, values, challenges, and priorities).
5. Audit and Update Owned Digital Media
Owned media channels are those you own, such as your website, blog, email marketing, social media accounts, and so forth.
These channels are the basis of your brand and customer relationships. The content you share on these channels builds trust with your audiences, engages them, and converts them into leads and sales. Now, here are a few simple steps to take when auditing owned content:
6. Audit and Update Earned Media
Earned media refers to the brand promotion you earned through word-of-mouth. These could be links from other websites and blogs, your PR work, customer reviews, user-generated content, social media mentions, etc. You can earn media by creating top-notch content people will share and link to organically. You can also build links, encourage customer reviews, creating hashtags, etc.
When auditing earned media, focus on where your backlinks, traffic, leads come from. Your goal is to make a list of the most effective channels that help you achieve the goals you’ve set. This is also an opportunity to discover new brand promotion opportunities. This can be easily done by tracking your metrics in Google Analytics.
7. Audit and Update Paid Media
Just like its mere name says, paid media is basically any channel that requires you to spend money to use it. For example, these could be Google Ads, native advertising, paid social media posts, retargeting marketing campaigns, and so forth.
Similar to organic media, paid media needs to be strategized right to deliver the desired results. Otherwise, you may end up spending lots of money and yet, you may not see the results you expected. The idea is to understand what practices and channels worked for you and invest more in them, while eliminating those tactics that don’t work for you.
How to Structure a Digital Campaign Plan?: Conclusion
Digital marketing often behaves like a road full of potholes you will need to predict, identify, and avoid. This is where having a strong digital marketing strategy. It all starts with understanding your target markets and setting realistic goals that will dictate the tactics you will use and the metrics you will measure to keep track of your performance.
What are the most important parts of your digital campaign plan?
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