It’s everywhere.
When you open up Instagram or whatever ubiquitous social media platform that you spend your free time on, you’ll find it plastered all over your screen. No matter how hard you try to get away, it will always find you.
The digital marketing campaign.
It can seem like you’re never able to get away from ads that are trying to sell you something or promote a new brand online. If you’ve ever been flagged down by one of those pushy salespeople at a mall kiosk, you’ll recognize that feeling of helplessness: Try as you might, the salespeople will always catch you and forcibly get you to sample their off-brand lotions. But if you’re a company owner or digital marketer, a cleverly executed digital marketing campaign that doesn’t overstay its welcome can stick with you for a long time — or in the best cases, even be welcomed.
Sure, a lot of digital marketing campaigns are slightly intrusive and can frustrate potential customers, but they can bring results. That’s why having a strong digital marketing team is such an important tool in this day and age. Building your internet presence starts with a fantastic digital marketing campaign. How else is someone going to be able to buy your product or your services when you’re competing with thousands of other similar companies?
Let’s dive into how you can best plan your digital marketing campaign, and how you can start one that is hopefully more invigorating than that of a mall kiosk.
The Building Blocks of a Digital Marketing Campaign
First things first: What is a digital marketing campaign?
A digital marketing campaign is just like a traditional marketing campaign where you use ads and other efforts to drive engagement and traffic to your company. However, in the digital age, running an outbound marketing ad in a magazine or on television may not cut it anymore. You have to go to where the most potential customers are — online.
Digital marketers are often tasked with the difficult goal of getting their brand’s message across to potential customers and converting their attention into website traffic and revenue. Whether it’s for your brand new tech startup or for your decades-old family business, a strong digital marketing campaign can make your brand stand out above the rest. Since there are so many different ways to tackle a digital marketing campaign, there’s no right or wrong way to put one together.
Mix and match a few of the following methods to fit your company’s brand the best and branch out from there.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is integral to digital marketing.
Although social media users are typically younger, all types of people these days are spending more and more time on platforms like Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter. In fact, Deloitte found that 55% of Gen Z and 66% of Millennials said that ads on social media are influential to their purchasing habits. If these are your target audiences, a well-timed post could translate to increased engagement with your brand.
However, placing an ad on Instagram, for example, isn’t as simple as pairing your company slogan with a stock photo and hoping that orders will follow. When you’re on social media, it’s wise to learn and speak the platform’s language. This means that slang, quippy one-liners and punny captions are more likely to draw the attention of potential customers rather than sales-speak. Depending on how strict your brand image is, loosening up might be a good way to draw in more customers. After all, people go on social media to relax and have fun, not to be pitched to.
Take, for example, Nike’s Instagram account. Even though they’re a world renowned activewear brand, their posts are encouraging, inspiring and cater to their audience. They’re not afraid to use terms like “squad goals,” throw emojis in their captions and post interesting content unrelated to their activewear entirely. Wildly influential and a fun feed to scroll through, Nike has perfected their social media marketing by making it fun and memorable.
The Importance of Customer Interaction
Customer interaction can also be a great tool to use to attract more engagement. Social media is just like the name suggests: a social medium. If you’re simply starting the conversation but not continuing it with your followers, will your potential customer truly be engaged?
Having a team of employees who can work on responding to inquiries can make your company seem more transparent and helpful as well. It all comes down to customer experience. Would you rather buy from a nameless conglomerate or one that you can interact with?
One of the most famous examples of an extremely interactive social media group is the team behind Wendy’s famous social media channels. On platforms like Twitter and Instagram, the Wendy’s team have roasted their customer base, shrugged off questions, and even made fun of other brand names as well. Despite all this, they’re still getting a massive amount of attention from the public. While insulting your followers might not be the most sound strategy right out the gate, it speaks to the profound power of social media interactions. If brand awareness is Wendy’s goal, it’s definitely working. We’re discussing them, aren’t we?
If you’re worried about aggravating your potential customers, don’t be. The same Deloitte study referenced also found that Gen Z and Millennials had a “net positive ‘likeability score,’” which means that they generally found ads and interactions on these platforms were more memorable than annoying.
Say goodbye to your mall kiosk business plan and say hello to Instagram.
Influencer Marketing
One of the newer trends to catch on in recent years is the concept of influencer marketing. If you’ve spent some time on YouTube or Instagram, you may have seen internet personalities stop in the middle of their video and pitch you a product. Reach out to these personalities if you believe that their audiences will have crossover interest in your brand. Chances are, influencer marketing might be able to help you tap into the exact consumer base you’re targeting.
Search Engine Optimization
Knowing how to do proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your brand is one of the most powerful skills that you can possess in your digital marketing toolkit. Here’s how it works.
Search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo are often the gatekeepers of information. Due to their advanced algorithms, they are able to analyze billions of web pages and bring you the most relevant ones. How does Google know which webpages are the most relevant to bring you? No one really knows but Google themselves, but it’s inferred that these algorithms scan webpages for related keywords to your query and ranks them based on relevance. For instance, a cursory search for “how to iron a shirt” will usually bring you websites with many mentions of “shirt,” “iron,” and “shirt ironing.”
Writing relevant blog posts or landing pages that are optimized for search engines are wildly important in order to make your site leap to the top of the search results.
Email Marketing
Like the name suggests, email marketing makes use of emails as a direct line of contact with the customer, sending promos, blog posts and brand information to the customer.
Nearly everyone uses an email, and email marketing is a great way to promote long form content and remind newsletter subscribers of your services.
Digital Advertising
Every blank space on a relevant web page is a prime location for an ad to build your brand. As technology advances, smart ads can help you target the websites that your consumer base frequents as well. When properly done, digital advertising can remind customers about your brand, highlighting your services which can sometimes lead to clicks.
Content Marketing
If you’ve been around marketing strategists, you may have heard the popular Bill Gates-coined adage, “Content is king.” There’s a reason why this saying has become such a ubiquitous saying, especially in the digital age.
High quality content in the form of videos, photos and other media types are some of the most popular ways to capture an audience’s attention. Great, well-produced content can be hard to come by, but they’re highly effective.
What Roles Can Data Play in a Digital Marketing Campaign?
Let’s say that you’ve chosen a few types of digital content to implement in your marketing campaign. Once you’ve been producing content for a period of time, you should periodically check a few key statistics in your campaign to check its effectiveness.
Some key metrics include:
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is an important metric that determines how many visitors completed a desired goal on your website.
Let’s assume that you start a digital marketing campaign in the hopes of getting people to download your company’s latest product PDF. To get your conversion rate, you would divide the number of people who downloaded it by the total number of people who visited your site. If 100 people visited the site and 70 of them downloaded the PDF, your campaign’s conversion rate of 70% was probably well worth the work you put into it.
A low conversion rate, on the other hand, is probably a sign that your approach needs to be changed.
Impressions
The total amount of times that your content is loaded on a page and displayed is known as your impressions. The more impressions, the better.
Click-Through Rate
A click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of impressions that lead to clicks. Simply having a high impression rate might not always be enough — translating them into clicks can be difficult to achieve.
Incorporating Data and Analytics Into Your Campaign
Use this combination of statistics to gauge if your social media strategy needs an upgrade or a new approach. Having high impressions but a low click-through and conversion rate, for example, means that you might want to rethink your digital marketing strategy. In those cases, it’s more worth it to start a data-driven marketing campaign rather than trying to guess what your customers want to see.
What Is a Data-Driven Marketing Campaign?
A data-driven marketing campaign uses the statistics that you found earlier to refine your approach to digital marketing. By using consumer data and looking at their behavior on websites, your marketing strategy can be more precise and achieve a higher conversion rate.
Use a data-driven marketing campaign to optimize your content. If you find that your target audience uses Facebook over Twitter, shift your attention to Facebook. If you find that you have a spike in impressions later in the evening, schedule your social media posts later in the evening. Data about your target audience is a valuable asset — don’t let it go to waste.
Putting It All Together
Let’s pretend that you run a small coffee shop that sells single roasted, small-batch coffee. Your goal is to get as many people as possible to purchase your product.
Together with your marketing strategist, you come up with a digital marketing plan that involves your business posting on Instagram and Pinterest while concurrently running ads on Facebook. Another part of your plan is to start a SEO blog about small-batch coffee to help your website rank better on Google.
After a few months or so of posting on these platforms, you’re finally able to take a look at the numbers. As it turns out, your blog posts are extremely popular and have a high conversion rate. On the other hand, your Pinterest posts aren’t p-interesting enough, generating an extremely low conversion rate and a small amount of impressions overall. Instagram, however, has a high engagement and click-through rate. Once you’ve analyzed the data and regrouped with your marketing strategist, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
This time around, you’ll pour less resources into the Pinterest board, shifting your primary social media to Instagram instead. To target more people on Instagram, you’ve hired a photographer to take high quality pictures of your coffee beans to post. You write more blog posts that are focused on the benefits of drinking small-batch coffee, drawing more consumers to your company site. Your Facebook ads continue running.
Congratulations! You have just run your first digital and data-driven marketing campaigns.
Always Improving: Keep Tracking Metrics and Looking for Positive Changes in Your Marketing Campaigns
When you first start your digital marketing campaign, it can always be a little stressful if you don’t immediately see the results that you want. That’s okay — building up a successful brand name always takes time. Use the tools that you’re given and any valuable statistics that you obtain to grow and dictate the direction that your digital marketing campaign is taking.
Drop any plans that aren’t working, switch it up and eventually you’ll be able to find your audience. Very rarely does a company find its groove online the first time around. With the right amount of time and patience, your company will be conquering the digital realm in no time.
Who knows? Perhaps you’ll also be roasting your customers on social media in a few years as well.
Need Some Direction? Brafton Can Help.
There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for success when it comes to digital marketing, but Brafton can help you discover what works best for your company a lot quicker.
For more information about digital marketing strategies and the services that Brafton offers, contact us today.
