Marketing campaigns could be one of the most successful Marketing Campaign Essentials both for big and small businesses. In today’s tech landscape, a solid digital marketing strategy has become the CMO’s new bread and butter;
Your business’s success depends on the right type of strategy, and the right type of strategy can, in turn, lead to higher sales, new customers, and long-term growth.
Typically, a marketing campaign is a planned sequence of activities and processes which promote an individual product, service, or resources.
The most successful marketing campaigns incorporate a range of sophisticated tools, but they are underpinned by comprehensive planning and research.
Here are 10 tips to optimize your digital marketing strategy:
1. Align Marketing Campaign Goals
The first step in succeeding with your next marketing campaign is to ensure the goals you set for the individual campaign are fully aligned and in keeping with the department as a whole.
Your over-arching marketing plan should cover all of your business activities, and while each campaign needs to be unique, it needs to keep your central plan and its goals in mind.
2. Create A Timeline And Action Plan
Write down what exactly you’re going to do and when. It doesn’t have to be elaborate but writing it down will greatly increase the chances that you follow through and give you records to use when you go to evaluate the success of your marketing campaign.
3. Due Diligence
You must understand your audience to achieve success, and you need to know when they are most accessible.
Your marketing campaigns should be built upon a culture of testing, and this will give you the most precise image of who your customer is and what they want.
Businesses need to learn what is resonating most in their sector through continual adaptation and analysis.
4. Campaign Strategy
Not all social media and marketing channels are suitable for every campaign so before you go diving into anything, plan out those most effective for the style of the campaign in question.
What are you looking to communicate? What is the most effective way of achieving this? Look through all the possible channels and tie them back to the aim of the campaign.
If for example, one particular channel doesn’t work with your goals, you aren’t obliged to use it and can find other more suitable options to fit into your multi-channel strategy.
Don’t forget the importance of tracking demographics and tailoring content.
5. Channel-Centric Planning
Once you have selected your individual channels, you need to plan on a channel by channel basis to ensure the right results. What do you need to communicate?
When do you plan to do it? What channels will you utilize? Whether looking at direct mail, social media, or email marketing, there is significant planning required.
Even a single email marketing campaign requires real commitment and more than merely pushing for sales, with specific preparation and knowledge put into the content for the emails themselves in addition to testing for the best results.
6. Map Out Your Timeline
None of the above points will work without planning and measuring. Creating a robust timeline is essential but you also have to be ready for flexibility should your insights find you need to make instant changes or move direction.
Tweaks and fine-tuning needs to take place throughout the campaign and while the launch may be your “big moment” the work doesn’t stop there. You need to continually develop and hone your campaign to suit the needs of your audience.
7. Determine How You Will Measure Success
What metrics are you going to use? How will you tell if your marketing campaign has succeeded or not?
Obviously, if you have a marketing objective such as “Sales of face beauty marks will increase 50% in three months” the metric you’re going to use to measure the success of your marketing campaign is the number of sales made over the three month period.
But the number of sales may not be an appropriate metric at all if your marketing objective is to increase the awareness of your brand or to improve your website’s search engine page ranking.
For tracking online marketing efforts, you can use Google Analytics.
Don’t forget to establish or note a baseline for whatever metric you’ve chosen; you’ll need it to measure your progress.
8. Use Technology To Best Understand Your Strengths
Take what was popular last year, and use it to make this year even better. Twitter Analytics makes it easy to track what your followers have enjoyed.
Follow this analysis to publish more engaging content, and gain more authority, loyalty, and exposure in your niche.
But your 2017 marketing campaign strategy doesn’t just include online marketing. So how do you track the efficacy of your offline efforts?
Kissmetrics, using URLs and coupon codes, tracks traffic to your site, so you can see what came of all those flyers or brochures you had printed.
9. Define Success
What do you expect from your marketing campaign? Before you even begin any of the work on your campaign you need to set out and define your goals.
Identifying your key performance indicators and measurable metrics is essential. Looking at different metrics to measure is critical, and you should balance the direct metrics such as sales and landing page traffic with indirect ones such as social shares, overall website traffic and share of voice for mentions of your campaign online.
10. Measure Your Results
When the campaign is over, it’s time to see how successful it was. Go back to your marketing objective, measure what you’ve chosen to measure to determine the campaign’s success and see how it’s done.
Suppose that the marketing objective for your bike seats marketing campaign was to increase sales of bike seats 25% over four months.
It would be a simple matter after the fact to compare May, June, July, August, and September sales figures and do the math.
Source: NativeAdvertisingInstitute, CampaignCreators
