Innovative ideas work only if there is a plan in place. In order to grow your brand and your industry it is important your planning focuses largely online, since digital campaigns provide valuable data, feedback and results that can help you stay agile, thinking ahead, and reactive in an increasingly volatile market space. Here are some general guidelines on how to create a digital marketing campaign that has a real impact on your bottom line.
Establish Your Mission
Define your overall business and marketing objectives. Your digital marketing mission needs to fit into your grand plan and business strategy. What are the goals you want to achieve through your digital marketing efforts? This is your mission.
Analyse Your Past & Learn From Mistakes
You shouldn’t go into the planning phase with your eyes closed. Do your homework. Analyse your digital marketing strategies, your past successes, and your failures in order to focus on setting reasonable KIPs. Set a time period you would like to look at, it is often best to make it the same length of time as the campaign you are planning. Establish if you are going to analyse a 12 months period, the previous year, a quarter, or any given month in the past year. This data is all priceless.
Know Who You Are Talking To
Determine your target market, personas, and audience. You need to put your audience at the heart of your marketing strategy and campaigns. Once you’ve identified personas, focus on their emotional needs and strive to satisfy specific desires. Develop accurate personas by considering demographics and consumer market research.
Ask yourself what the problems are that you can help your target persona solve. Establish the emotional desires, goals, likes, dislikes, and what resonates with your target persona. When you have your target persona down it is the best time to identify your influencers.
Know Your Budget
It is crucial that you define your digital marketing budget based on your strategy. Establish your paid, unpaid, and earned digital media. Allocate a reasonable portion of your budget to the specific digital channel you want to use. If needed, be prepared to make changes while your campaign is running and rolling out. Should a particular element of your paid marketing underperform, revisit your strategy and budget, then reallocate that budget to the channel or channels that are bringing you the results you need.
Establish Your Channels
Determine which of the digital marketing channels you are going to use and which are most suitable to reach your desired target audience. Clearly establish what the digital channels you choose to use are trying to achieve, and the overall benefits of using each of them. Ensure you have at least one KPI attached to each of your digital channels.
Plan To Be Flexible
Off the bat, no plan is perfect. Not every prediction is going to be spot on. And, although you have taken all the steps in the right direction by putting together a plan that is based on measurable data, results, insights, and analytics, you won’t know exactly how consumers will react, behave, and respond to your campaigns. It is essential that you monitor progress of all your campaigns and continually measure your performance, so that you can you can be flexible enough to adapt and change your marketing plan as and when need be.
Use a Digital Marketing Calendar
Take the time to highlight the key campaigns in your strategy, see which digital elements work well together, and allocate timeframes. Google calendars and spreadsheets are a great way to create timelines, share accurate production schedules, distribute information quickly, and effectively back up documents and data. Google docs allows you to share planning and scheduling with your team and make edits if necessary.
Read The Data & Measure Results
Read past reporting, analytics, insights, data, and statistics, when strategising, changing, and planning campaigns. Keep a record and create reports during and following each campaign. Create a measurement and monitoring plan aligned with your KPIs. Add required information as you need it and make changes when it is in the best interest of the brand and bottom line. Measure the success of your individual digital marketing elements, identify what is not working and what requires change. Create clearly defined KPIs.
Your Creative is Everything
Your creative is your brand voice, and it is vital that you are always on top form. Content being king is that marketing phrase that just always rings true. What you say, how you say it, and who you say it to forms an important part of how you market your brand, it’s a vital step in the process of creating powerful digital campaigns. Quality digital content is both affordable and when managed properly it’s completely priceless.
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So Interactive is a leading digital agency based in Johannesburg. Get in touch to create powerful digital campaigns that push your brand forward.
