Are you interested in creating a digital marketing campaign for your business but don’t know where to begin? Are you tasked with creating a marketing plan for your business but have never developed one before?
Well you’ve come to the right place. There is a lot that goes into any marketing campaign but there a few elements that are absolutely essential. Here is a brief overview of the most crucial aspects of a successful digital marketing campaign:
Purpose
The first thing to do when creating a campaign is to know why you’re creating the campaign in the first place. There could be several reasons: such as, you’re trying to introduce a new product into the market, you’re addressing a customer’s pain point, or you want to remedy a problem for your own business.
Whatever the reason, you have to identify it. It sounds obvious but it’s important to note that you can only start making a marketing campaign once you know what you’re trying to accomplish. Begin with the end in mind, as they say. Here are some examples of reasons to create a marketing campaign:
- Addressing a customer’s pain point.
Here’s a question: Why did you decide to go into business? Mostly likely you noticed a problem, or pain point that people were experiencing and discovered a way to fix it. Once you’ve identified your customers pain points, you can choose one to market to specifically. An example would be that you’re a real estate agency looking to sell homes. Your customer is interested in buying a new home but struggles with selling their current home. To alleviate this pain point and to draw that customer towards your business, you would create a marketing campaign that focuses on helping that person sell that house through blog posts, content offers, and tips on social media. Learn more about personas and pain points by reading our breakdown of persona development. - Remedying a problem for your business or your client’s business.
For example, say your business doesn’t have the best reviews online, resulting in a decrease in monthly sales. To counteract this problem, a marketing campaign could focus on incentivizing customers to write positive reviews online. - Introducing a New Product.
Similar to addressing a customer’s pain point, if your business wants to introduce a new product, you have to figure out how the product addresses your customer’s pain points as well as theorize how your ideal customers are going interact with the new product. Once you’ve established the connections between product and pain point, you can create a marketing campaign that talks about those connections extensively.
Once you’ve determined the overall purpose of your marketing campaign, it’s time to get more detailed.
Goals
You may be thinking: “Goals? I thought I just figured that out!” Not quite.
The difference between your marketing campaign’s purpose and your marketing goals is that the purpose is the reason why you’re making the campaign in the first place while your marketing goals help you measure its effectiveness.
So, if the purpose of your marketing campaign is to improve your business’s online reviews, a reasonable goal would be to increase your ratings on Facebook or Yelp to at least 4 stars by a certain date. You want your goals to be S.M.A.R.T, meaning specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely. As a general rule, every campaign should have more than 1 goal but never more than 5. By using this rule, your marketing campaign stays within a reasonable scope of feasibility. If you need help defining goals for your marketing campaign check out our blog post that covers goals exclusively.
Keywords
With your campaign’s purpose defined and goals set, it’s now time to add the next piece of your marketing campaign’s foundation: Keywords.
Keywords are words or phrases that describe your product or service that you choose to help get your marketing content into the top of 10 results for any search engine. Put simply, keywords help people find your content.
To start, a business should have a bank of about 300 keywords that relate to important topics based on the company's industry and services. For a specific marketing campaign, you only want to focus on a few of those keywords (8-12) so you can create targeted content that speaks to your persona’s pain point/s. When deciding which keywords to use, look for keywords that have a high search volume and a low ranking difficulty score. Following this rule of thumb will help attract leads and will make it easier for your content to show up first in search results.
How do you find out a specific keyword’s search volume or ranking difficulty score? There are a few websites for that. One popular website for such keyword research is Spyfu.com. Spyfu allows you to see a keyword’s monthly search volume both locally and globally, the ranking difficulty, the cost-per-click for paid advertising and similar keywords that other businesses are using. It is immensely useful at the beginning of researching keywords.
Content
Since you’ve established the logic behind your campaign, it’s time to get creative.
At this stage of campaign planning you have to start creating content based on your campaign strategy. Content for digital marketing campaigns come in many forms such as, blogs, ebooks, videos, podcasts, etc. You want your content to move your business forward, provide helpful resources to your audience and position your business as an industry thought leader. It’s imperative that the content that you create links back to the keywords you chose for the campaign as well as the purpose. A good place to start would be creating a spreadsheet with all your keywords in one column and then creating multiple content ideas with that keyword in the title in a parallel column.
By using a spreadsheet and matching your keywords to content offers, you can use keywords to plan your content strategy and potentially drive a good amount of organic search traffic to your website.
As seen in the dog training example, you want each piece of content to relate and unify under a common theme. Strategizing your content helps keep the traffic moving through your website and increases the likelihood of someone converting on your website into a lead.
By creating different types of content that relate to one another, the visitor can easily move from one piece of content to the next and become more familiar with your website and business. Creating thematic content with keywords can take some time but the payoff is usually worth it if executed correctly. After you’ve created your content, there is another critical item to consider.
Promotion
You have to put your content where people can see it. Two key places where people can find your content are social media and email.
If you’re lucky, you already have a large email subscriber base and can send your content directly to your potential customers. If not, you’ll have to start list building, which you can learn about here. If you don’t have any social media accounts, it would be helpful to pick a few if you think your ideal customer uses them and then start posting your content on each social media channel. Be careful though - you never want to spam anyone either by email or through social media. Be sure to follow social media’s best practices before posting away.
Promoting your content will help you increase traffic, engagement and sales so it’s necessary to plan how you’re going to promote your content once it’s created.
To start promoting, email your content out in a newsletter or to your subscribers if you have them. Post about your most recent content offer once on your social media platforms when it's first published and then bring it back every so often to keep traffic moving towards it. After a while you’ll be able to accumulate a content and offer library that you can email and post about interchangeably, which will make scheduling your emails and social posts much easier.
And there you have it, the five essentials to any digital marketing campaign. Let us know if you have questions about a campaign you're building. We'd love to lend a hand!