Digital marketing is constantly evolving, making it difficult for marketers to decide on the best way you distinguish their business when planning digital marketing campaigns. What channels will work the best? Should the tone be funny or serious? Should it be a video or a carousel post?
The questions are nearly endless, but the answers can often be simple—only if you know where to look. While how you should approach a digital marketing plan will vary based on your business goals, there are a few things that to bear in mind that will help keep you on the path to success.
If you are involved in planning a digital marketing campaign, here are four steps that will keep you on track.
1. Define Your Goals
Many of you might wonder why this glaringly obvious advice makes the first step. The reason is that, though many marketers define their goals at the very beginning, there are a few others who are eager to jump into the campaign that they forget the planning part.
When defining your goals, you will have to consider various choices. For instance, will you measure your success based on your conversion rate? Or, are you aiming for a higher spot in the search results rankings? You might even be pursuing both goals. The exact goals you pursue will help you measure your success in reaching them.
Your goals will depend primarily on your business objectives. Only you will know what it is that you want to achieve for your business in the long run. Nevertheless, the following goals are worth considering, even if they are not your campaign’s primary focus.
- Brand Awareness – One of the simplest ways to measure brand awareness is by leveraging Google Trends to see how many people are searching for your business.
- Social Media Followers – Another simple but very telling metric for determining the current interest in your business is your follower base on social media channels. However, it is sometimes not worth tracking the number of followers you have as many users don’t unfollow a page they lose interest in.
- SEO – Various factors affect your business’s SEO score—backlinks, keywords, etc. Improving your SEO score is typically a part of most digital marketing campaigns, and it is a clear indicator of how well your campaign is performing.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Before running a digital marketing campaign, you should know precisely who you are trying to market and sell your products/ services to. It will help you use your resources more efficiently and get the best results.
Regardless of your budget, understanding the demographics you are trying to reach will help you create your marketing materials to appeal to them. This is more efficient than simply throwing everything you have at the wall to see what sticks.
Begin by figuring out who your current customers are. Even if your current customer demographics aren’t precisely the same as the demographic you want to reach with your marketing, it will likely give you an idea of the audience you must target. While trying to reach new audiences and expanding your reach with your latest marketing campaign, you should also plan not to alienate your existing customers.
3. Be Realistic About Your Budget
Another crucial step when planning an excellent digital marketing campaign is setting a realistic budget. Your budget will often be the primary restriction you face with what you can do with your campaign. It will also impact how you use and allocate your resources.
But, the good news is that digital marketing is far cheaper than traditional marketing. Hence, the same resources you use in conventional marketing will go further when you use them in the digital space.
4. Tap Into Social Media
The most powerful marketing platform in the world, the success or failure of your digital marketing campaign, will partly depend on how well you utilize social media. Alongside serving as a very important marketing platform, social media can also support your digital marketing campaign in various aspects. For instance, SEO and social media marketing go hand in hand. Websites like SBR that have outstanding organic traffic efficiently leverage social media to get valuable insights and data that help them further improve their SEO score.
Always make sure your brand message is consistent across all your marketing components. It will ensure the greatest synergy between all the channels. If you use utilize social media to the fullest, they will provide you with valuable insights and data you would otherwise have to pay for.
Final Thoughts
An efficient digital marketing strategy is a vital part of every business’s success. Though digital marketing tends to be cheaper than traditional marketing, it is also a powerful tool. The only caveat is that you should take a thoughtful approach to digital marketing when planning a campaign.