There are a lot of online businesses who think that if they just get ranked number one for a particular set of keywords inside Google, they will be making millions and millions of dollars. Now, while that is true for many cases, it’s not 100% accurate. The thing is, the landscape of digital marketing is evolving along with the consumers. Simply put, you need to have a digital strategy, but you should not be married to it. In this article, we will guide you towards having a foolproof digital marketing campaign. So, let’s get started.
Identifying objectives
There are two types of objectives: Branding and performance. A branding campaign’s aim is to increase awareness amongst the target audience whereas a performance campaign’s aim is to drive conversions and deliver ROI.
Identifying buyer persona
Companies will be identifying heterogeneous sets of consumers who can be categorized into multiple personas. Only one buyer persona is pretty rare for a company. Try to answer the 3 Ws (who, what, why) in each personas. Who is your target audience? What are they looking for to solve their issues? And finally comes the “why”- why will the target audience buy your product? All of this should not be based on hunch but on data fetched by tools like Google Analytics.
Identifying the content strategy
You must analyze what type of content resonates with the target audience. Do they prefer images or videos or infographics or memes or something else? You must analyze which posts have done well in the past and what was the nature of their content?
Channel strategy
What will the relevant importance be of paid, owned and earned media? Do you want to run paid ads on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn? Which blogs or forums will you use for your PR? You need to lay out a plan by doing market research and aligning the trends with your target audience’s preferences.
Identifying the timelines
You must prepare a calendar which indicates your activities that you will do in a month, incorporating the above steps in the calendar.
Identifying the budget
Paid media requires more budget as the organic reach in most social media channels is very limited. Typically the percentage of budget allocation for paid media ranges from 60-90%. Paid media is great for customer acquisition, creating awareness and building reach and is a good short-term strategy. Earned media is for businesses which have a lot of customers as it is mainly a customer retention strategy.
Bottom line
As mentioned before, the world of digital marketing is constantly changing. Digital marketing agencies take the “adapt or perish” phrase pretty seriously and rightfully so. The fact of the matter is that if you are too loyal to your initial strategy which is probably based on your principles, then your business is not going to survive. Stubbornness is not going to get you anywhere. Be willing to learn, analyze new market trends circulating around and measure your strategy at every step.
