5 Steps to Set Up Effective Digital Marketing Campaigns

What is a Digital Marketing Campaign?

A digital marketing campaign is a marketing effort for the digital or online channels of your brand or company. This can help to boost and drive engagement, conversion, revenue, or whatever you set your ultimate goal as.

Ever come across a promotional email from a brand that you have just purchased from last month? Or that Facebook advertisement that keeps reappearing from your feed?  Even if it is a product that you just Googled, all of these are examples of digital marketing campaigns.

Though they are subtle, it is still significant enough to influence our buying choices. This underscores the importance of how to effectively create a digital marketing campaign.

Understanding an effective digital marketing campaign

Setting up and running a digital marketing campaign is more than just creating and pushing out simple advertisements and content online, in the hope that it will attract attention and conversions.

A digital marketing campaign requires a strategic planning stage, otherwise called a digital marketing strategy. It requires you to empathise with the target audience to have a deeper understanding of their needs and wants. Apart from that, it is also important to acquire knowledge of how each tactic and element of the campaign can eventually affect the overall result.

It is a continuous process even after the strategic plan is built through the cycle of implementation and evaluation. Without a proper setup and plan for your digital marketing campaign, you can easily lose these precious analytical data that are generated live.

Step 1: Develop a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy

A digital marketing strategy is like a master plan that helps to achieve your ultimate objective. This master plan will require clear marketing objectives, key performance indicators (KPI), as well as metrics. While crafting these, you should keep in mind your S.M.A.R.T checklist to ensure its effectiveness.

You can read more on how to define your objectives and KPIs using the S.M.A.R.T checklist for your digital marketing strategy.

With this foundation properly laid out, we can then proceed to focus on understanding your customers, competitors, and the digital landscape that you are in.

A crucial factor in launching a successful campaign is to develop buyer personas that are based on their values, behaviours, and characteristics to help target your audience accurately.

Develop Buyer Personas

Buyer Personas are fictional characters that represent your target audiences. These personas give you a deeper understanding of your target audience, which will be useful for you to create personalised content that is more relatable and effective.

Good buyer personas should include information like:

• Background information
• Demographics (Age, Income, Occupation, etc.)
• Interest
• Goals
• Challenges

Take note that your buyer personas should be more than just demographics such as age and gender. It should include deeper insights such as buying behaviours, motivation, challenges, and preferred information sources such as Google Search. Altogether, this will constitute a better understanding of buyers’ needs and wants.

You can gain a more comprehensive understanding of buyer personas by downloading our e-book:

https://www.equinetacademy.com/resource/how-to-develop-buyer-personas-ebook/

In conjunction with the understanding of how buyer persona works, it is also essential to understand that buyers generally go through the 4 stages of a buying cycle in making purchases.

Buying Journey

Awareness

The awareness stage is where your audience realises the problem they are facing. At this stage, the content created should answer or solve basic queries. For instance, your “How to …” content, or a tutorial video.

Consideration

After identifying their problem, your audience will start researching solutions to help themselves. This is where they will inquire for more information. For instance, contents such as case studies.

Decision

At this stage, consumers are already close to purchasing your product. However, they might be choosing between your competitors and you. This is a crucial stage, thus the content you push out should ultimately help you close the deal. Ideally, it should showcase the unique value propositions (UVP) of a product or service whereby these are values that make it uniquely different from your competitors.

Delight

Your satisfied customers have already established trust in your brand due to their experience after purchasing your product. In order for them to repurchase from you, contents need to be updated such as having newsletters on new product launches.

Identifying their buying journey and touchpoints will help you have a better understanding of the different personas as well as determine the various channels’ efficacy when it comes to reaching out to them. It also allows you to craft more relevant content, depending on the stage they are in.

Research on Competitors and Trends

Due to the ever-changing industry, it is crucial to constantly research your competitors and current industry trends to keep up to date. Consequently, it will help to build a firm foundation considering all aspects of a digital marketing campaign.

Keep in mind that you should drive campaigns that are relevant, relatable, and most importantly memorable to your targeted audience. A good campaign will eventually drive high engagement with meaningful conversations, and eventually, help you to achieve your campaign objectives.

An example of this would be the  “Just Do It” campaign by Nike. A simple campaign that is memorable as it provides motivation and inspiration for people to achieve their aspirations.

After developing your digital marketing strategy, it is also important to consider how much budget to set aside for your digital marketing campaign.

Step 2: Understand your Budget

Planning budgets can be challenging for first-timers, especially when one is new to digital marketing campaigns. To understand your budget, you will have to build a forecast to understand your goals. Here are some Kickstarter questions to ask yourself:

• How much do you need to drive?
• Are there past results that you can base your forecast on?
• Do you know the cost per conversion or cost per lead for your brand?

It is important to be realistic with your goals. Start by breaking down the previous year’s results as a benchmark and then determine the average revenue per customer you want to achieve for the campaign.

To calculate the average order value (AOV), divide the total revenue by the number of orders during a given period. AOV calculates the average dollar spent when a buyer places an order with you.

For instance, a product has an AOV of $100 per customer, and you have set a goal to achieve $1 Million by the end of the year. Based on this information, you will be able to derive that you need at least 10,000 conversions to reach your goal. (Goal of $1 Million divided by AOV of $100 per customer)

With this knowledge, businesses will be able to gauge the number of visitors needed to visit the website and the amount to invest in the various digital channels to achieve the desired web traffic.

Be Conscious of the Market

During the early months of the pandemic, there was a rapid increase in companies jumping on the bandwagon of digital channels. According to research, this strict lockdown period caused digital channels to account for almost 80% of budgets for most companies in 2020.

Ever since then, digital channels are only getting more competitive, which emphasises the importance of understanding how much is enough to put aside for your digital marketing campaigns to stay in the competition.

Step 3: Reference User Journey to Develop a Media Plan

A media plan is a detailed plan that maps out all the key digital channels, budgets, predicted results, and timelines based on the digital marketing strategy that you have created in Step 1. This process helps you focus on your strategy, budget, target audience, types of content as well as how you plan to publish it and make it come to life.

While understanding your customer is key to building a successful campaign, it is also important to maintain consistency while running your campaign, be equipped with knowledge on analysing your campaign, and how to optimise various tools. A media plan will help you tie these factors together.

Example of a media plan that maps out the key elements

Buyer User Journey

The first step to building your media plan is mapping out your buyer user journey, which will help you to implement a digital campaign launch structure.

Understanding the appropriate types of content and tactics that are promoted at different stages will help to contribute to the effectiveness of your campaign.

Example of a buyer user journey with tactics and content types

To have ideas on content-generation, do read our blog post on 120 types of digital content for your next content marketing campaign

Digital Media Mix

Your buyer user journey map will help in determining your digital media mix. A digital media mix should have a combination of all your business digital channels, used to meet your marketing objectives. It helps to tie all channels together, creating a more seamless experience for your audience.

Digital channels are a form of digital platforms that we can utilise to engage visitors and customers. Some examples are:

• Display/Video Advertising
• Paid Search
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing

To be successful in finding the right digital mix for the various digital channels, one has to develop an understanding of the uniqueness of each channel’s targeting capabilities and the knowledge of different personas. Another component of launching a successful online advertisement is to ensure that the buyer user journey is in alignment with the purpose of having a specific advertisement on their feed.

It is crucial to understand the capability of each digital channel to effectively set up a digital campaign. This will give you a much more accurate result as you jump on the same platforms as your target segments. For example, if you would like to target the customers by their job title, you can choose to target more professional channels like LinkedIn instead of Facebook.

Being Omni-channel

A digital campaign consists of more than just running a single advertisement on Facebook. With your media structure, it will help you understand how the different channels can come together to help you work towards your goal.

For instance, a digital marketing campaign should consist of a variety of digital channels like social, digital advertising, email newsletter, and the list goes on. Choose the channels that make sense for your brand and target audience.

Having a Content Marketing Strategy

Nearly 40% of marketers agreed that content marketing plays a very big role when it comes to their overall marketing strategy (HubSpot, 2020).

Personalisation is one factor to take note of when crafting your content marketing strategy. Craft your message in a way that is the most relevant for your target audience to cater to their ever-changing needs and wants. This should be applied at each stage and each different channel accordingly.

The amount of time and budget you spend on each stage varies. For instance, if you are in the B2B industry, you will tend to spend more time and budget in the consideration and decision stage as a high-value product usually takes a longer decision-making time due to the longer sales cycle.

However, If you are in a B2C industry, you might spend more budget and activities in the awareness stage if the strategy is to drive more volume as compared to the price point of each conversion.

For your convenience, there is a free media plan template to help you get started.

Step 4: Determine your tracking mechanism

This is the last step before the implementation of your campaign. It is also the most crucial step. Having a tracking mechanism helps to discover the loopholes in your campaigns. It helps to measure the effectiveness of your tactics and suggests room for improvement.

It also measures and understands the Return of Investment (ROI) of your marketing expenses on this campaign, which will then suggest the next digital marketing plan and steps you should take.

Setting Up a Tracking Mechanism

Understanding your metrics and knowing the campaign’s priorities are crucial components of setting an effective tracking mechanism. Though there are a multitude of metrics to optimise for your campaign, it is important to focus on certain key metrics depending on your objectives and KPI. Some common metrics are:

Metrics related to media channels
Click-through rate (CTR)	A measurement of the percentage of clicks over total impressions on your digital content or advertisement. A higher click-through rate represents a higher interest or relevancy to the users.
Cost per click (CPC)	The price you pay to the digital advertising platforms for each digital content or advertisement someone clicks on.
Metrics related to website
Pageviews (PV)	This refers to the number of pages viewed within the website during a stipulated time frame.
Bounce rate	This refers to the percentage of sessions to the website that did not move forward to another page, over the total number of sessions.
Users/Visitors	The number of visitors who visit your website. The returning visits of the same visitor will still be considered the same user.
Metrics related to actions on the website
Conversion	An action is defined by the business owner or marketer. A conversion can mean a lead or sales transaction, or even a specific page or interaction like a click on the video play button.
Conversion rate	The percentage of conversions over sessions.
Cost per conversion	The amount you need to spend or have spent for a conversion. It’s calculated based on the total conversions over media advertising spent.

For Tracking Website’s Performance

To evaluate and optimise your website’s performance, you can consider using Google Analytics. Though there are other platforms such as Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics is still more popularly used as it is a  free platform that is user-friendly, and yet comprehensive enough for most brands and campaigns to utilise.

For Tracking Conversions from Advertisements

Set up a tracking code naming convention. This will help in differentiating the results from different channels, tactics, placements, and content. Set this up before you launch any campaign to prevent losing any precious real-time data.

This tracking code is equivalent to an identification card that helps Google Analytics to understand the details of each website visitor. Details such as campaign name, source, medium, or even additional information like size or placement of the banner.

Step 5: Implement your Campaign

There are a few things to take note of before you launch the campaign that you planned meticulously for. Make sure that all parties that are involved in this campaign are on the same page. This includes your team members, your media, and your creative agency.

Everyone should be clear of their role, their purpose, their impact, as well as their individual KPI in this campaign. All of these factors contribute to a smooth campaign launch.

For example, your creative agency should have a clear understanding of how many banners they have to create and the specifications for each of them. They should also understand the appropriate digital channel to advertise and the results it strives to achieve. For instance, 1 million impressions on Facebook with a target click-through rate of 5%.

Evaluating your Success

Evaluation should be an ongoing process, and not done at the end of the campaign. Analyse your results with the forecasted numbers and targets in your media plan and suggest steps to move forward.

Let’s analyse the Facebook advertising below.

Case study for evaluating the success

Was the goal of attaining a cost per click (CPC) of $1.5 achieved? What could be done better or areas to be tweaked in terms of targeting or content to drive the results you anticipated?

Continuous Optimisation Process

Optimise your campaign with various (AB) tests after the evaluation process. AB tests simply mean running different tests to find out which gives you a better result in terms of conversion rates. These AB tests will help you figure out the most effective method to use for your campaign. It’s all a cycle, keep evaluating, monitoring, analysing, and optimising to improve.

Gain more insights about AB testing to help you out with the optimisation process.

Check out the successful digital marketing campaigns carried out by other companies: https://www.equinetacademy.com/resources/digital-marketing-case-studies/

Quick Recap

There is no perfect campaign for anyone to follow, each campaign is unique as it should be developed based on your objectives.

Before you build any marketing campaigns, have a clear understanding of the strategic message you want to portray. Know your objectives, the tactics to drive your KPIs, as well as the respective channels you want to be on.

Having audience empathy by having an in-depth understanding of the target audience (buyer persona). Understand your competitors, and where you stand in the digital landscape.

Take time to plan and map out a step-by-step outline of the campaign. It should include details like which channels to invest in, and what content (content marketing strategy) to push out at which stage (buyer journey). Remember to run your AB tests before you build your campaigns.

Develop your tracking mechanism for evaluation purposes. Build them before you launch your campaign to prevent any lost real-time data.

Keep in mind that digital marketing is all about optimisation. It is a repetitive cycle of planning, evaluating, and optimising, to constantly change and learn as you go. Ultimately, a digital marketing campaign helps to drive results towards your objectives.

Keen to Learn More?

We also hold a Certified Digital Marketing Strategist (CDMS) V2 Programme, which covers the following seven modules:

• Digital Marketing Essentials
• Digital Advertising
• Social Media Marketing
• Digital Content Marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Email Marketing
• Digital Marketing Analytics (Google Analytics)

Upon completing these modules, you’ll be awarded the Certified Digital Marketing Strategist (CDMS) v2 Certificate.