You cannot run a business without learning how to run a digital marketing campaign. It's extremely competitive, can be time-consuming, but it's one of the very few resultative ways to promote your brand or services/products that you offer.
It's crucial that you know how to use different platforms and tools. Some effort is required to create an effective campaign that will attract the attention of potential clients. And when you are done with establishing a campaign, you need to analyze the results and make sure your efforts and expenses are rewarded in the end.
If you like the idea of creating not just a successful campaign but a results-focused one, but you have no idea where to start, check out this article. It has some useful tips that will help you to figure out how to start working on your campaign, how to make it effective and resultative.
1. What Are Your Goals?
Whether you are going to start an affiliate marketing or run your own e-commerce store, the first thing you need to do is to define your goal. This step might sound unnecessary since your goal is obvious - to gain more audience to increase the revenue. Well, it’s not that simple and you have to make your goals more clear.
The first and most important goal is to increase brand awareness. It’s especially important if you are only starting to promote your own goods or service. Increasing brand awareness means to make your brand recognizable.
For example, when a customer is thinking about buying a new phone, he doesn’t search various brand names on Google, he is already considering purchasing an iPhone, or a new Samsung phone, etc. And the customer won’t even think about other less known models simply because he doesn't even know they exist. So if you want to be compatible, it’s essential to set a goal to increase awareness of your brand.
Another important task is to increase followers on social media. Today, no successful business ignores social networks since they are a source of customers. Billions of people around the world log in each day to check out news, posts, etc. It’s a great place to start engaging potential customers and to distribute information about your products, services, or brand overall.
Getting conversion is also a worthy goal. There is a huge difference between having visitors on your website and getting conversions. Visitors of the website may just click on the link and leave, or read some information and leave. But conversions mean that a certain number of people take some important actions, for example, leave a comment, send an inquiry or feedback via your "contact us" page. Your marketing campaign should consider making it easy for the audience to start conversions and target them who are interested in what you offer.
Just as getting conversions, you need to focus on the lead generation process. That way you gain potential buyers who are expressing interest in your brand, products, or services. Focusing on each of these goals is essential and will allow you to gain repeat customers.
2. Defining Your Target Audience
Without defining your target audience you will simply focus on unnecessary targets and overspend. Defining target audience means to find out your competitors who offer products or services they are already interested in.
If you have just developed your online store or blog site, you also have an easy way to define your target audience - analyze your closest competitors. It’s extremely easy to do with modern tools. You may check out who your competitors are in a local area, and then you can use analytics to check out who is visiting the websites of your competitors. You can use various tools such as SEMRush to check out your competitors and who are visiting their websites. That way you will get a better understanding of what audience you should appeal to on social media and other sources.
But note one important thing when analyzing competitors’ audience - target their audience and people who they are missing out on. For example, your competitor might have a good digital campaign, but they missed a niche market and they are not targeting some potential customers who may be interested in their services. Your task is to find the flaws in the competitor’s campaign and find out who they miss targeting.
3. Develop Perfect Customers’ Personas
Developing a persona is not a must, but it certainly helps to target the correct audience. If you describe a perfect customer of your brand, you get a better understanding of who to target. You should consider the annual income of a customer, his interests, age, gender, education or occupation, likes, and fears, etc.
For example, you have a local bakery store/cafe. You can create a persona of a male, female, or a gender-neutral customer, who is 30 years old, has a job related to technology. This customer prefers saving money to buy something substantial, like a house or a better car in the future, but their budget allows them some additional expenses on delicious croissants, bagels, etc. This customer prefers finding interesting local spots where they can purchase delicious bakery products.
Creating a persona will take time and you need to be patient. You can include gender, age, preferences, online behavior, etc., of your potential clients. Thus, it will be easier for you to create targeted ads and get new customers while preserving loyal existing ones.
4. Blogging and SEO Optimization
A lot of companies ignore this method and they are very wrong. Writing great quality articles related to your brand brings more traffic to your website. It’s crucial to work on the content of your blog, to refresh it, and to use SEO optimization. If readers find the content you post useful, your website gets new visits and it gets better ranks in Google search. In fact, when your blog becomes more popular, it will become a great platform for your marketing campaign.
A good digital marketing campaign without SEO optimization won’t be good. It’s important to make keyword research considering your location and the ways your potential customers seek products. You can check out the competitors’ websites and analyze the keywords that they use. But just as in the case of finding a target audience, consider the mistakes of your competitor and use keywords that your clients use to find products.
You can use tools such as Jaaxy, Mangools, Long Tail Pro, etc. that aid in finding keywords related to your products. For example, if you have an online software store, then the main keyword would be “software” or the names of software. But the word "software" would be too common, too competitive and therefore you need to find a long-tail keyword which is less competitive. By using tools, you can find out what are the most common but the least competitive search requests used by your potential clients. For example, “buy cheap antivirus software”, “buy inexpensive antivirus for Mac”, etc. It will take some brainstorming and using your logic to create a list of keywords and then to write texts or ads, but it will be worth it.
Also Read: What Is SEO Audit For? Do You Really Need It?
5. User Experience
UX is probably the most important aspect when you're building your website. Mobile responsiveness, for example. You would expect that today all websites get adjusted to the device a user is using, but some business websites still surprise you by not being adjusted to the screen of a mobile device and therefore you'll have difficulties in reading the content. Or the developers didn’t include the page speed changes for mobile devices, etc.
You should always think about the experience of all users visiting your website. It should be positive, users don’t have to wait for ages for the pages to download and show the content, they don’t have to face any difficulties in reading the text, etc.
Also Read: How To Speed Up WordPress Site Loading
6. Consider the Ad Channels to Use
Channels mean social media, forums, Q&A sites, etc. Use various different channels to cover all areas where your potential customers spend time. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, Medium, etc. These sources have groups divided by interests, so you may find a group related to your products or services and advertise there.
Google Ads and email marketing are also very popular channels that can bring new customers in no time. A lot of companies ignore email marketing and that’s their mistake. Sending an email to potential customers is an easy way to get clients and grow your business. You shouldn’t neglect the content on your website, so consider SEO optimization as another advertising channel that will bring potential customers to your website.
The best possible way to grow your business is to use a combination of all mentioned above methods. Each platform has its audience and most likely, your potential customers are using these sites. If you want to get more customers, it’s best to focus on several channels at the same time.
7. Work on Your Accounts on Social Networks
Simply creating official pages on Facebook, Instagram. YouTube channel, etc., is not even half work done. You shouldn’t expect that followers join your page only because your products or services are of good quality. You must work on your accounts, engage your audience, expand your reach, and work on reputation.
Check out the comments of users, try to find time to reply. It shows that you care about customers’ opinions and that way you can build trust. If your customers trust your brand, the reputation of your business will get better.
Another good idea is to engage your potential and current customers by launching giveaways and contests on social media. It will attract more attention to your brand and will keep your existing clients so they choose you over your competitors.
8. Premium Ads and Budget
Of course, there is a cheaper or rather free way to get customers through Facebook or Instagram, but it might take years. It would be easier to combine efforts - to work on getting followers on your official social network page, and to use ads.
Ads are very useful when it comes to increasing your reach. In fact, Facebook even shows the reach of your posts. Plus, ads on social networks target your target audience which is great for business. Instagram, Facebook, and even YouTube have useful ways to advertise your products or services to your target audience.
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Even without asking for professional help, a digital marketing campaign will cost money. It’s important to define your budget, especially if your company is new. You should consider the fact that Facebook or Google advertisement is paid and you need to include these expenses. They usually allow you to create a campaign according to your budget, goals, etc. But you can do it manually by calculating the expenses needed for each service.
The best way to set your marketing campaign is to consider the revenue you want to get each month. For example, you want to gain 20.000 dollars as revenue each month. Let’s say your product is being sold for 200 dollars, so you need 100 sales per month to receive 20.000 as revenue. Now that you know the potential revenue, you can set a reasonable budget per month for your digital marketing campaign.
9. Email Marketing Strategy and Re-Marketing
"The Money Is In The List"... As it was mentioned, email marketing shouldn’t be ignored. First, it’s an efficient way to promote your business. Second, your competitors most likely don’t use this strategy. Companies keep ignoring email marketing, so it would be a great opportunity for you to learn from their mistakes.
Also Read: AWeber vs GetResponse
If you are already working with social networks, just analyze the emails of people who have signed up to receive more feed from you. Then you can use this information to build an efficient email marketing campaign. The least you could do is to set up email automation for the visitors of your website. For example, if a user added something to his cart but didn’t complete the purchase, then remind him about that via email. Or make sure signed up users receive info about discounts, new products, etc.
It’s a crucial method that aids in capturing potential customers who have visited your website but didn’t buy anything. If you set up remarketing correctly, these users will see ads for your products while they visit social networks. It might help them to decide that they want to buy your products.
It’s also wise to set up emails that will be received by your customers who didn’t yet buy anything but are signed up. For example, as it was mentioned in the previous example, these users receive notifications that they have left something in their carts. Or they may receive emails describing products similar to those they have been checking out, etc.
Conclusion
When building an efficient digital marketing strategy it’s wise to combine all the above-mentioned methods. One method leads to another, so it’s crucial to include all of them. For example, if you consider blogging, you can’t omit SEO optimization. If you advertise on Facebook, Instagram, etc., keep managing your accounts and check out what your customers say in comments.
It will take a while to build the strategy, but once you establish it, you will gain positive results for your hard work. And in the future, you will just have to adjust some changes to keep the strategy effective. Digital marketing campaigns are considered to be the cheapest and most effective ways of advertising brands.
Author Bio: Daniel Witman
Daniel Witman is a passionate journalist who has contributed to major media publications. He enjoys writing about eSports and other topics that bother modern men. Currently, he's serving as an editor for dota2-bets.net.
