What You Need for A Digital Marketing Campaign

What are Marketing Campaigns?

Marketing campaigns are a strategic set of marketing systems built up in communication with a target audience to encourage new customers. A marketing campaign is the overall “journey” of launching a specific ads program with a set map and end goals. 

Marketing campaigns that do well often have a set plan of action with a clear purpose and target audience. For a successful marketing campaign, a thorough theme and market insight are needed. There are all kinds of companies out there doing their best to market themselves as the next “up and coming” brand, but what will it take to get your business to stand out from the rest? This is why marketing campaigns are so needed. 

A good example of this can be seen every single day– simply turn on your television and watch a few advertisements. Remember the Paris Hilton Carl’s Jr. commercials? In-your-face, sensual, and controversial, right? That was a specific marketing campaign by Carls Jr. And it was greatly remembered– for a reason! The company had three goals they successfully achieved: 

1. Get audience attention
2. Make a memorable advertisement
3. Lure new & returning customers to their new product. 

Types of Marketing Tools for Campaigns

Obviously, not everyone can afford to have figures like Paris Hilton, football stars, or well-known celebrities to star in their commercials. In fact, most companies can’t even afford to air a proper TV commercial much less form a budget to advance their production. But the good news is, TV and expensive billboards are not the only modes of advertising today. More often than not, the internet is much more realistic of a platform when it comes to trying to advertise for any brand. 

To open your mind a bit more about the opportunity within marketing campaigns, here are some of the most popular types of media out there today:

• The internet (your website, banners, others’ sites)
• Social media (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube)
• Search engines
• Publicity (magazines, guest articles)
• Print
• Email marketing 
• TV
• Radio 
• Direct mail
• Phone calls 
• Special events or meetups
• Outdoor media (billboards, bulletins)

Most solid marketing campaigns have a specific target market but leverage all kinds of different marketing channels. They won’t stick to only two or three mediums to advertise on. Often the ad and overall campaign message will be shared throughout all popular social media apps as well as websites and audio/visual media. The message is shared over a set period of time, too. This way, people can gradually take notice over time and develop a relationship of brand awareness through the process. 

Small Campaigns Are Ok, Too!

Even though it’s a good idea to share a campaign across many channels, it’s ok to use a simpler campaign for one or two if the specific goal is to gain traction on those unique hubs. The focus should be more on getting CRO (conversion rate optimization) on that platform to complete the call to action. 

Planning Out the Marketing Campaign

As you can see, planning is the most important step of the campaign goal process as it truly sets the tone for success. Effectiveness is determined by having a good plan in place which will guide the entire campaign machines as well as your team. 

Defining the Target Goals

A great point of advice most companies use when setting up marketing campaigns is to first review yearly goals. If an annual goal is set, it’s likely to work your way backward and setup a plan to reach the actual numbers. Do you need more income to push the company forward this next year? Then figure out how many new customers each month it would take to reach those goals. From there, figure out what potential leads look like in order to meet those goals. And through this, you can strategize a campaign to help you fulfill each goal. 

Three underlying things you need for successful campaigns: 

1. Structured planning 
2. Realistic measurement of goals 
3. Creative team

Some examples of a starting board look like the following: 

• We want to get feedback on our product or service
• Our company needs to grow its brand awareness
• The business needs more overall revenue
• There’s an important event we need to advertise
• Our user engagement has gone down and we need to work on improving it
• The company needs to grow its local ads outreach
• As many people in the business world know, using SMART goals can boost the road to success.

Measurement and Tracking 

Now that there are goals in place and systems set up to get campaigning, how can we measure their success (or failures)? 

Again, this all comes back to your specific goals. The answer to the measuring question might look different for everyone. Some companies might prefer to track via a number of orders on their shop, email click-through rates, site visits, percentage of leads increase, and so on. Maybe even a combination of many different measurements can help your company grow. 

Many campaigns use multiple platforms such as email, landing pages, and social media. Remember all are worth tracking throughout the campaign. Some software is available to give detail, combined reports of all the tools and areas you have running. This isn’t necessary but can be especially useful for larger companies with broader campaigns. 

Define Your KPIs

The KPI (Key Performance Indicator) can help along with your tracking needs as well. To decide what your KPIs are, look at where you need most engagement on each platform. 

Some examples of KPIs include: 

• Email click-through rates
• Number of views per blog post
• Number of monthly leads
• Engagement on social media (i.e. comments on Instagram or Facebook)

With the goals of success in mind for your business, you can adjust KPIs accordingly. You might even be surprised at certain KPIs you weren’t previously aware of that are actually helping your business. 

Target Audience

To be a company that offers a service or product, you obviously need someone to target your campaign to. Sometimes, brands have a good working awareness of the idea of their ideal “target audience” from the beginning. But other times, when it comes to smaller or startup companies, it can be quite vague. 

Defining your target audience is ideal because it determines a specific group of people who would be more likely to be interested in your product. What are they like? What do they do? Where do they hang out on the internet? 

The key here is to become familiar with your customer base. Marketing’s main goal is to reach a specific audience for a helpful purpose. If you go into creating a campaign without knowing your own ideal audience or potential customers… well, you’re not going to do very well. 

Campaign Creation!

Lastly, after deciding why you need a campaign, how to track progress, and who the target audience is for your marketing strategies, you then need to figure out what you want your campaign to say and look like. 

Designing the identity of the campaign can be a whole process within itself. Luckily, if you followed the steps through, you’ll already have some good foundation on what your campaign can or should appeal to. This is where your brand’s voice comes to life. 

You’ll need a theme, a vision, and a voice. The creative team comes in key here as they’ll be turning the overall vision into reality. If you don’t have a team, hiring or outsourcing is a popular option for many startup campaigns. Freelancers come in all types of specializations these days so it’s not hard to find a great match online. The creative aspect flows through all areas of the campaign. Websites, landing pages, Facebook ads, logos and themes, and beyond. 

The rest of this process is all up to your unique brand and business. For further steps or a free strategy session, we at Owl SEM can help get your campaign off the ground running. Let us know how you’ve done with campaigns by commenting below!