How To Plan Effective Digital Marketing Campaigns

Whether you’re a digital marketer or a small business owner, we all want to help grow and develop a business. One great way of moving a business forward, or increasing a particular aspect of the business (such as building your social media following or increasing your search visibility), is through creating and delivering digital marketing campaigns.

To create successful digital marketing campaigns you need a plan. As with many things in life, having a solid plan allows you to be methodical and focused in your approach. It means you won’t be spending money and time unnecessarily while seeing little to no results. Curating a plan forces you to carefully research and articulate the aims and goals of digital initiatives, define a target audience and select appropriate channels to reach those users or consumers. So, without further ado, here are 5 handy tips to help you get started on your next digital marketing campaign.

5 Steps on How to Plan Effective Digital Marketing Campaigns:

1. Set Goals & Objectives

Before you begin it is crucial to define your goals and set out what you want to achieve for a digital marketing campaign. Ask yourself: what is your ideal outcome or the end result you’d like to achieve?

As a starting point, you can look at your business objectives and see how these could transform into digital goals. Business objectives can range from increasing profit margins, delivering sustainable growth, increasing efficiency, or capturing a bigger market share. If you own a clothing store and you’d like to increase your yearly profit margins, one way to achieve this could be through increasing the sales on particular items that have the biggest profit margin. If you maximise sales of those products, you naturally increase your businesses profit margins.

This business objective can be aligned with your digital goals by visibly promoting those items on your website and through other digital channels. Using high profit margin items as the basis for your digital marketing campaign strategy can help you meet your business objective. To convert this into a digital goal, you could consider working towards increasing the number of conversions for those products, or increasing product and brand awareness.

When you have decided on the main goal for your digital marketing campaign you can then begin to build all the other pieces around it. Typical campaign goals and objectives can include conversions, increasing social media followers, likes and engagement, encouraging responses to emails, brand awareness, increasing visibility and rankings on Google, or gaining sign ups to a newsletter or an event.

2. Define Your Target Audience

What types of people do you want to target? If you have a physical shop, you probably already know and understand your customer base very well as you can see who is (and isn’t) purchasing your products. But, we can also see this digitally. If you have a website and you’re already running analytics, you can build up a good picture of the types of users purchasing your product, where they live, what device they’re using, how old they are, and how they’ve ended up on your website. You can use this data to build up a greater understanding of how to reach and target them effectively in your campaigns. 

Realistically, you cannot target everyone – as much as you may like to! Trying to target everyone is not an effective strategy. But, you can look for gaps in niche areas not targeted by your competitors. A well defined target audience means you can carefully craft your digital marketing campaigns around it. It’s personal, and it’ll be far more likely to get results and have an impact on your business. Hiring a digital marketing agency can be an efficient way to help deliver effective digital marketing campaigns and strategies.

3. Develop Buyer Personas

You can take ‘defining your target audience’ to the next level by creating buyer personas. This is particularly useful tool if you want to humanise the data you’ve collected about your target audience. A buyer persona allows you to create and envisage your ideal consumer and describe that person in detail, from what they do for a living, to how much they earn, to their lifestyle, age, likes and dislikes. Creating a buyer persona is a short summary of your ideal customer, but they can take time, practice and patience to create and get them right. Personas should take into consideration customer demographics, fears, goals and online behaviours.

Buyer personas are useful because they allow businesses to better understand existing and potential customers. It means they can empathise and understand those individuals. Ultimately leading a business to achieve better results when acquiring and retaining customers.

4. Define Budget

For an effective campaign a realistic budget needs to be set from the beginning. It’s important to ask yourself how much you are willing to pay. Or, if you’re working in a department, how much you have been allocated, and are realistically allowed to spend. A budget will serve as a basis for what you can do with your marketing efforts – giving you an overview of where you can split money, time and resources. Creating a budget is a big part of a digital marketing campaign. It can enable you to hire the services and expertise of a digital marketing agency, and/ or run Google or Facebook ads. 

With a set budget, you can be strategic in your targeting and set reasonable goals for your return on investment (ROI). For example, if you would like to run a Facebook ad campaign and make £500 each month, and your product margin is £50, then your campaign will need to generate 5 sales (assuming the individual products are £100) per month for you to make a profit and meet your goal. With this in mind, you can set your budget based on the profit margin you would ideally like to generate.

5. Choose Your Digital Channels

For a digital marketing campaign you’d ideally like to use as many different channels as possible. Sometimes spreading your efforts across all types of digital platforms is the most successful and effective way to drive results. A combination of marketing on various channels can be a strong strategy if done correctly. This can include advertising on social media sites, sending out emails, optimising your website, or using Google to advertise.

However, the different channels you may use does depend on the type of business you are, and who your target audience is. If your target audience doesn’t use Facebook and prefers to spend their time on Instagram, then trying to target them with Facebook ads probably isn’t the best, most effective strategy and channel for your campaign efforts.

When delivering a campaign across multiple digital channels it’s important to vary the content accordingly. While it may be tempting to simply perform the classic ‘copy and paste’ time-saving manoeuvre, it’s not an effective strategy that will drive results across 7 online platforms. Our number one tip is to always adapt the content for the platform – customers who may follow you on several different platforms will appreciate the variety in your campaign efforts. 

Contact

For more information on digital marketing campaigns and strategies, or about any of the services we provide at Active Internet Marketing (UK), you can contact our team on 01604 765 796 or through filling out our online enquiry form.