How to Prepare for a Successful Digital Marketing Campaign

A successful marketing campaign can mean increased traffic or revenue for you depending on what your initial goals were.

Everyone can launch a digital marketing campaign, but very few can be successful at it. Here are some tips you can use:

1. Build a buyer persona

A buyer persona is someone who represents your ideal customer. Their interests align with the products and services you have on offer and they're more likely to buy from you.

But there’s more to this than wishful thinking, here’s how you build an accurate buyer persona:

Research

Research involves taking a look at your target audience and segmenting them until you get different groups of people who will buy your product.

The most important group to research is your current and repeat buyers. You can set up interviews with them or send them survey questions to find out why they're attracted to your product.

You should also contact those who weren't impressed with your product after buying it to find out what challenges they were having.

Look for similarities

You'll get a lot of answers after doing your research and so the next step is to look for similarities:

• What's the demographic (age, occupation) of those most comfortable with your product?
• What's the average skill set of this group?
• What common challenges and interests did you find?

Create separate personas

From your research, you'll discover your prospects have different problems they're looking to solve. For example, if your product is a specialist SEO tool, your marketing message for the group interested in keyword research should be different from the message for the group interest in link building.

2. Set smart goals

SMART goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Actionable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

And they’re crucial to any marketing campaign.

Setting specific goals

A plan to generate 10,000 visitors from your ad to your product page within 7 days is a specific goal.

A plan to boost blog traffic isn't.

This is also a great way to separate good digital marketing from the rest; amateur services promise vague goals.

The first example gives you an idea of the specific results you want your campaign to achieve, the second is vague and doesn't help because there’s no way to determine if the campaign is considered to be successful.

Setting measurable goals

A measurable goal is one you can track at each point of your campaign.

You can measure the number of links and new visitors your campaign generated but you can’t measure your authority.

In search, your traffic and links are the markers of your authority while on social media, your follower count, number of likes and comments per post tell the story. But authority isn’t actually a tangible metric you can measure.

Setting actionable goals

An actionable goal is one that you can reasonably expect to execute within a given timeframe.

Careful analysis of your available resources will tell you whether the tasks needed to achieve a goal can actually be executed, or if you need to adjust your expectations a little.

For example, you may want to increase your website conversion rates by 50% over the next year, but when you look at the time, budget, and other resources required, perhaps a 20% increase is more realistic.

Setting relevant goals

If you want to boost your search engine rank position, building 10 links to your site's pages is a more relevant goal than generating 10,000 new visitors.

There's nothing wrong with driving traffic to your blog but it has nothing to do with increasing your position in search so won't be relevant to a search ranking campaign.

Setting time-bound goals

Campaigns with a shorter duration do better than longer ones, because they allow the marketer to optimize their campaigns when the results are in.

If you run a 7-day traffic generation ad campaign to a product page, it's easier to look at the days with the highest conversions and pick out the particular techniques you used that could have influenced increased revenue.

It becomes more difficult to do that when it's a 90-day campaign because a lot of factors will have influenced those results.

There are several benefits to setting deadlines and sticking to time-bound goals.

For one thing, it can help you decide how to structure a campaign in terms of budget, resources, and tactics.

For example, a team might decide that they want to increase conversions on a product page by 50%.

The team with no target deadline might spend months pouring time and budget into PPC campaigns, social media content, and other tactics. They may reach the goal, but with a lack of time-focus, it can use up more resources than necessary.

The team that knows they must achieve this goal by the end of next quarter, for example, will be able to analyze the best use of resources and budget for the campaign. They’ll also better understand how to monitor progress towards the goal throughout the duration of the campaign.

3. Measuring Results and KPIs

The work doesn’t end here. Once you’ve formulated your plan and implemented it, the next step is to analyze the results.

For successfully optimizing digital marketing performance and spending, analytics is a critical pillar. You need to measure every action and conclude if you earned the expected ROI. When you measure the effectiveness of activities and strategies, it’s easier to make amends, change what’s not working, and set achievable goals, so ensure you have an effective measurement system in place.

As the digital world evolves rapidly, you need to be constantly on the lookout for some room for improvement and identify new opportunities.

Conclusion

Launching a successful digital marketing campaign isn’t impossible, but it does require planning and strategizing to ensure you don’t waste time or resources. By creating accurate buyer personas and setting SMART goals, your digital marketing campaign will be sure to achieve everything you want it to.