Getting started with a digital marketing campaign can be overwhelming. Where do you even begin? With our years of experience, we have put together a guide to help you put together your very first digital marketing campaign.
ONE – SMART Goal Setting
The very first thing you want to do is decide what you are trying to do. What is it this campaign should accomplish? This goal should follow the SMART acronym: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. By making sure your goal meets these requirements, you are setting a good foundation for the campaign and making your expectations crystal clear from the start.
TWO – Do Your Research
Once you know what you are trying to accomplish, you can start collecting data. You want to get to know the climate where you are selling your product. What are your competitors doing? What are your potential customers asking for? Who is your potential customer? What channels do you have available at a reasonable cost? If you have the answer to these questions, the rest of the campaign starts to fall into place.
THREE – Choose Your Audience
“Everybody” is not the audience you should reach When it comes to digital marketing, specific demographics are best. Then, you can tailor your tactics to their needs and wants. You need to speak directly to them and their pain points, so pick your persona(s) carefully and make sure you keep them in mind as you walk through the rest of the campaign. You may also need to take a step back to step two and dig into further research about your personas specifically. When are they online? Where are they online? What are they doing while they are there?
FOUR – Budget
I know a lot of people who would put this higher on the list, but I think having the first three steps done first makes a stronger campaign. You need decide how much you are willing and able to spend, and not just with money. How many man hours, vendor hours, dollars, and other assets are you reasonably able to commit to the campaign? You need to make sure to break this down as detailed as you can. If you can outline how much you expect to spend on ads by platform, content creation by type, and hours by department, you will have a great idea of what types of tactics you can use together without overspending in any specific area.
FIVE – Strategize
You have your goal, your personas, your research, and your budget. Now, it is time to bring them together and create a strategy. How do you plan to achieve the goal you set above? Does it require some smaller goals along the way? This is really just putting the first four steps together in a way that makes sense and that you can track and measure as you progress through the campaign.
SIX – Set the Stage
This is the fun part. You know what you are trying to accomplish, so now you are going to map out how to get there. Use your goals, personas, and budget to choose the tactics you want to use in the campaign. There are many different tactics you can use in a digital marketing campaign. Just make sure that whatever combination you pick, it lines up with your strategy. Each tactic you use should be well thought out and tie back to a key performance indicator. You should also have in mind back up tactics incase something isn’t working.
SEVEN – Asset Creation
Time to get cooking on creating the assets you need for the campaign. Any blog posts, social media posts, landing pages, white papers, or other tactic you need for the campaign should be created ahead of time. This way you know before you launch you have everything you need ready to go. The more you can schedule out at launch time, the better. Also, set up any pixels, tracking codes, or utm codes you need for tracking the progress of your campaign.
EIGHT – Take it live
Yay! It’s time to launch your campaign. Do a final quality check and get it out the door. As we said above, make sure you schedule what you can. Test everything to make sure it works the way you want. This is also a great opportunity to have one or two people in the office who aren’t part of the campaign (or a friend or loved one) test it out for you. That way you can identify early if there are any sticky spots. Make sure that from the start you have the analytics you need in place.
NINE – Measure and Adjust
No digital marketing campaign is set it and forget it. Check on its progress every day. If you are using Google Analytics, set up a custom dashboard, so you can get to your KPIs quickly. If you are running ads, you should be checking them a few times a day, so if something isn’t working, you can stop or update the ad and not waste any money.
Don’t be afraid to make changes. If something isn’t working on your landing page, adjust it. If an email isn’t getting opened, edit it. Tactics can be changed or edited mid-campaign.
TEN – Victory and Debrief
Your campaign is done! Congratulations! Now you need to learn from it. Look over all the analytics and reports. How many conversions did you get? What was your ROI? What was hard, and what was easy? Do a thorough review of everything that happened and make notes for future campaigns. Now that you have your first digital marketing campaign done, you can start building a library of what tactics work for your business and personas and what don’t.
If you have any questions while getting your first digital marketing campaign underway or just want to tell us how it went, feel free to contact us! We can be reached on our website at www.wespeakeasy.com or on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter @wespeaksocial.
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