Following the revelation that 99% of businesses plan to up their spending in that department next year, Peter Bell at Marketo offers advice on how to build a successful digital marketing campaign.
In a recent study carried out by The Manifest, it was revealed that a staggering 99% of businesses plan to up their digital marketing spend in the next year.
This long-term trend towards digital marketing is not surprising as our day-to-day activities move online. Whilst billboards and print publications continue to have a role there is no escaping that digital marketing enables you to reach more people, more often, in any location, at any time.
However, there are pitfalls to digital marketing, it’s not as simple as plug-and-play. With many businesses set to increase their digital marketing spend, it’s important they build an effective digital marketing campaign to maximise their ROI. With that in mind, I’ve tapped into the wisdom of the wider Marketo team to pull together four top tips for creating a successful digital marketing campaign:
- Switch from Personas to Personalisation
Today’s consumers have low attention spans, and competition for limited consumer attention is fierce. Earning attention requires targeted, personalised communications.
If, as a company, you don’t know who you’re targeting, or you don’t have the right segmentation set up, your target message will not resonate. And when you’re spending money to run digital campaigns, every penny spent needs to be targeted wisely for the most ROI.
An experienced marketer will constantly be maintaining in-depth buyer personas, using demographics and interest reports, and modern SEO research. To many, this would seem enough, but the reality is, in 2018, all competitors will be doing the same.
The digital marketing campaigns that stand out today move from just personas to personalisation. Marketers need to ensure that their message is carefully crafted and aimed at the right audience if they are going to gain any traction. Effective digital marketing campaigns deliver hyper-focused communications.
- What success looks like
Every digital marketer would say metrics and analytics are important, but they can also be taxing. It’s important to understand and be prepared to highlight key performance indicators (KPIs) prior to launching a campaign. If you aren’t ready to report on the campaign from the beginning, you’re more likely to encounter problems with metrics further down the line.
Businesses should set goals, and work backward from those goals to define key performance indicators for each campaign, that are both measurable and attainable, remembering to do the following:
- Align your campaign goals with those of the wider business
- Ensure your targets can be tracked and measured
- Create achievable goals that matter
- Crowdsource ideas for your goals, the measurement for success shouldn’t be defined by one person
- Make a timeline for your goals to be achieved in
- Monitor! Track your progress against your targets throughout the campaign
- Test and test again
To begin with, it’s essential that the campaign is tested before going out to field. Test thoroughly and make any necessary adjustments based on your learnings. You don’t want to discover the campaign isn’t working once it’s already been actioned.
Once you’ve ensured that it works, check that it’s capable of hitting goals, and that it isn’t just functional, but capable of delighting in equal measure. Those ‘wow’ moments could be the reason behind generating leads.
Then, as the campaign launches, make sure it’s set up for A/B testing and that the testing samples are appropriately sized. The larger the pool of test data available to you, the more certain you can be that your results are reflective of your targets.
- Document and organise
In all likelihood, most businesses will have a standard process for creating, launching, monitoring, and analysing a digital marketing campaign, but it’s probably not documented.
Having detailed documentation of the campaign from start to finish will help marketers to track progress and assess whether or not any tweaks need to be made along the way. Importantly, it’s also useful to have a track record of the campaign when you inevitably come to analyse its success down the line, and will help immeasurably in finding improvements for next time out.
A Successful Digital Marketing Campaign
As the digital marketplace becomes more saturated, and MarTech becomes more sophisticated, digital marketing campaigns need to continue to evolve in order to merit attention. Marketers in most businesses only use personas or have mediocre metrics, but there’s an opportunity for businesses to get ahead of the pack by jumping forward to well-detailed and thoroughly planned personalisation.
By Peter Bell
Senior Director of Marketing EMEA