These days, marketing campaigns are made and unmade online. As the percentage of time spent by people online increases rapidly, companies are gearing their marketing strategies to go digital.
More and more businesses are setting aside special funds for online marketing campaigns. Manufacturers are trying to cut costs to reinvest the saved money in marketing campaigns. As it has always been in history, businesses will go to places where the people are.
However, running a successful online marketing campaign is easier said than done. There are too many factors to take into account. With a wide array of social media channels and the type of people on them to formulating a clear digital marketing strategy, every step is necessary to the success of an online marketing campaign.
In this article, we map out nine key ways to organize and run a successful Digital marketing campaign.
Nine Ways to Run a Viable and Unbeatable Digital Marketing Campaign
Know the Channels
Things were easier when there were only one or two major social media platforms. However, in the current digital marketing landscape, the sheer number of social media channels makes it difficult for digital marketers to organize a campaign around.
Thus, the first way to ensure an online marketing campaign is successful is to know each social media channel well. The key lies in identifying what type of content gets the maximum engagement on a particular channel so that digital marketers can suitably frame their content and messaging strategy.
Furthermore, a digital marketer also needs to know the general profile of a user of a particular social media channel. For example the average age of users on Instagram is around 18-29, while the average age of users of Facebook is around 40.
This kind of data helps digital marketers frame appropriate messages of different social media channels.
Do check: Digital Marketing Challenges
Set the Goals
The goal of every online marketing campaign is different. Some businesses are more focused on driving sales and revenue, while others use marketing campaigns to build a brand image.
Before brainstorming any digital marketing idea or formulating a digital marketing strategy, an online marketing campaign needs to have a quantifiable goal.
The goal can be anything based on the company’s need. Based on the nature of the goal, digital marketers can begin work on formulating an ironclad online marketing campaign.
Some common goals on typical online marketing campaigns are brand outreach, lead generation, and social media follower growth. Each goal changes the emphasis and respective digital marketing strategy of the online marketing campaign.
For e.g., if a B2B company wants to make its presence known amongst potential clients, the best online marketing tactic would be promoting the company’s LinkedIn page and using Google AdWords to build business contacts. In this situation, spending money on Facebook and Instagram becomes a wasteful exercise as a company is not likely to find B2B clients there.
Do Check: Guide To Viral Marketing
Know your Customer
Imagine you run a coaching institute, training students for a top engineering entrance exam. To promote your institute, you put up banners of the coaching institute across the city. And then, you hope new students would come.
But no one shows. There is not even a phone call asking about your institute. You wonder why nobody is noticing the banner.
After a few days, you learn most of the banners were hoarded in front of hospitals and bus stops.
The problem here lies in the location and identifying the target audience of a marketing campaign.
For any online marketing campaign to be successful, digital marketers need to know the exact details of the type of customer they are targeting. Ideally, marketers should create buyer personas. Buyer personas are a basic profile of the kind of personality and behavioral traits a potential customer might have.
Making Use Of Essential Online Marketing Tools
Monitoring the progress of an online marketing campaign is crucial to its success. There are times when digital marketers have to tweak certain things amidst an online marketing campaign being operational. Making such changes manually across all channels can take a long time. In such cases, online marketing tools come in handy.
Tools like Ahrefs for SEO, Canva for graphic content and InfusionSoft for E-mail marketing are some examples of tools which are very useful for digital marketers.
These tools are essential in giving digital marketers a more holistic picture of a given online marketing campaign and the necessary changes which may improve it.
Taking Advantage of Good SEO Techniques
SEO is basically about getting higher rankings on search engine pages and in turn driving traffic to a website. Since a large number of people online arrive at any given site through a search engine, it is only natural that digital marketers use SEO to optimize their online marketing campaign.
Improving the SEO of a given website involves a host of tips and techniques. Some basic things include:
- Keyword Analysis: Identifying specific keywords which have a reasonably good search volume and can drive traffic to a website
- Improving Title, Header and Description of Webpage: Inserting specific keywords in a webpage’s title, description and header also signal search engine crawlers to categorize the particular webpage accordingly.
- Backlinking: Getting other sites to a link to a specific website is considered a highly desirable SEO practice.
- Using SEO friendly URL: A URL having a correlation to the type of keywords associated with a website helps improve the site’s SEO.
Leverage the Power of Content
The best way to lure people to your online marketing campaign is putting out useful and fresh content.
We live in a cluttered world where content is not curated enough to be accessible instantly. Even today, users have to scrape the internet at times to find a quality article. Providing quality content to readers is a sure shot way of driving customers to your website.
To create quality content, digital marketers first have to identify the pain points of their customers and the kind of information they are looking for. Once this is known, content creators can create content, either textual, audio or video; based on the needs of the readers.
For instance, learning about cryptocurrency was relatively difficult in 2008, but it’s much easier today as there is a mountain of valuable content talking about it. This is a clear example of digital marketers and content creators identifying a gap in the market and filling it.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Optimizing SEO is a long process and requires months of patience. Most online marketing campaigns do not have as much time. To solve this problem, there is something called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
SEM is basically advertising on a search engine to make a particular website appear on top of specific search results.
Google AdWords is a prime example of SEM. Businesses have the option of choosing certain keywords to advertise on. For e.g. a person with a business of publishing school textbooks will advertise on the keyword ‘Class 10 maths book’. This way, the person’s website will appear on the top whenever someone searches the given keyword.
Other search engines also offer SEM options to advertisers. Services like Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing are some examples of the same.
Making full use of social media
Social media is a frontier which still eludes businesses. With a large mass of people present on social media, it is imperative for companies to use such a medium to its full potential.
There is a lot to unpack about social media. Firstly, each social media platform has a tone and voice of its own. While Instagram and Twitter are more evocative, LinkedIn is somber and professional. Depending on the type of online marketing campaign being run, digital marketers have to choose which social media channel should be targeted.
There are other specifics when it comes to social media as well. Each platform has certain times and certain days when their usage is at its maximum level. For instance, traffic on Instagram tends to spike late in the night and early in the morning. Digital marketers thus have to time their posts accordingly to make sure they catch the maximum eyeballs possible.
Affiliate and Email Marketing
Affiliate marketing is still a useful tool to drive initial traffic or sales through intermediaries. Many successful businesses today have been built on aggressive affiliate marketing tactics. E-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart still use affiliate marketing to grow their customers.
While running an online marketing campaign, digital marketers should set aside a framework for affiliate marketers. Not only do they drive traffic and sales, but also act as secondary promoters in a marketing campaign.
The same goes for email marketing. Email is still a great way to generate leads and find serious customers. For companies with small budgets for SEM and social media, email marketing is crucial and can pay great dividends.
The advantage of getting customers through email is that most leads generated are serious about buying a product or service. Likes and follows on social media can be misleading at times, but email is much more accurate.
