Posted by Digital marketing is here to stay, with forecasters predicting the global industry will reach a value of $786.2 billion by 2026. That’s because this is the most powerful and cost-effective way to reach customers in the digital age.
So, if you aren’t already on board with digital marketing, you’re missing out.
Don’t let your lack of experience in the field hold you back. These tips on how to launch an online marketing campaign will help pave your way toward becoming an internet sensation.
Before You Launch an Online Marketing Campaign
An online marketing campaign involves more than throwing some words and images at the internet and seeing what happens. It’s a focused and deliberate sequence of events aimed at an end goal.
Most businesses want to increase sales with their online campaigns, but you can also use them to build your brand or create awareness around your services and products.
To achieve these goals, you must plan every detail of your campaigns before you publish anything online. While this may seem like a lot of hard work at first, it soon becomes second nature.
Planning helps you define your goals, identify your audience, and articulate ways to bring the two together.
Types of Online Marketing Campaigns
There’s more than one way to skin a cat when it comes to online marketing. A business may employ one or more of the following types of campaigns to get its message across:
- Product marketing campaigns
- Brand development campaigns
- Email marketing campaigns
- Content marketing campaigns
- User-generated content campaigns
- Public relations campaigns
- Direct mail campaigns
- Affiliate marketing campaigns
- Social media marketing campaigns
- Acquisition marketing campaigns
- Paid marketing or advertising campaigns
Each of these campaigns may form part of a larger marketing campaign, or act as a precursor to further marketing efforts.
Online Marketing Campaign Elements
Every marketing campaign comprises a selection of components working together to help you achieve your goals. These usually include:
The Marketing Team
Every marketing campaign relies on a team of individuals committed to the same goal. Make sure you allocate someone to take care of every aspect of your campaign and get them on board at the outset.
You don’t need to employ a team of experts to do this for you, you can hire freelancers or work with an agency instead.
Online Marketing Budget
Online marketing is one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. It doesn’t cost much to publish content online unless you opt for paid campaigns.
However, you will need a budget to pay for your team’s efforts, buy any necessary tools, and cover incidental costs.
Channels
Focus on growing the channels that work best for your audience and leave out those that don’t appeal to them.
For instance, if you’re targeting teenagers, you won’t enjoy much success with email marketing but you’re sure to get their attention on YouTube, as 95% of teens spend their free time browsing this channel.
Content Format
This is the meat and potatoes of your campaign and includes all the creative assets you’ll use to tell your story. It might involve press releases, blogs, and video ads.
Creative Assets
Creative assets refer to all the attention-grabbing aspects of your campaign. They’re usually visual elements like infographics, website design, or videos.
It’s imperative to choose your design so that it appeals to your target audience and present it in a format they enjoy.
Key Progress Indicators (KPIs) and Goals
Although you’ll measure the success of your campaign as you go along, it’s important to set these targets at the outset of your campaign.
Be specific about your aims, instead of measuring your success in terms of ‘more likes’, rather define ’10 new followers per week’ as your target.
You can measure these metrics using online tools like Looker and Google Analytics.
Key Aspects of Online Campaigns
Online SEO is one of the major components of all online communications. It helps streamline your potential customers’ digital experience and allows them to discover your campaigns more easily.
For this reason, you should keep SEO in mind when planning every element of your marketing campaigns.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is the same as SEO except you pay Google to display your ads whenever people search for your selected keywords. PPC advertising is a type of SEM where you only pay if searchers click on your advertisement.
Content marketing is closely tied to SEO and revolves around providing customers with the information they need to choose your products above the competition.
Similarly, affiliate marketing is when you pay skilled marketers for promoting your business through their content.
Steps For Marketing Businesses Online
Every marketing campaign has three major steps broken down into smaller tasks. These are:
1. Planning Your Marketing Campaign
You cannot succeed in marketing without a solid plan. Your campaign must have a goal, so think about why you’re running it and what you hope to achieve.
Every step after this depends on this purpose. Examples of campaign goals include:
- Driving leads
- Boosting user engagement
- Promoting your products and services
Once you have your basic idea in mind, turn it into concrete goals like achieving 100 new leads by January 1st for a new product, using a branded Instagram hashtag.
These goals should be:
- Specific (achieve new leads)
- Measurable (100)
- Attainable (using Instagram)
- Relevant (new product)
- Timely (January)
In this way, you transform your general idea into an actionable goal.
Once you’ve got your SMART goal in place, you need to figure out a way to measure it. There are many digital marketing tools available to help you keep track of new leads generated by a specific campaign.
Keep an open mind. For instance, your campaign might not generate many leads, but it could result in extra exposure for your company, or increased activity on your Instagram account.
When this happens, make a note of these unexpected wins, they could pave the way for future campaigns.
Defining Your Target Audience
You must center your campaigns around the appropriate stage of the buyer journey. For instance, when targeting leads, avoid overly sales-oriented language that’s better suited to customers further down the funnel.
It’s important to identify your audience’s pain points and interests at this point. Try to understand what makes them tick, which types of digital channels they use, and what they use them for.
When you know your customers well, it’s easier to come up with a concept that appeals to them.
Conceptualizing Your Campaign
At this point, it’s a good idea to rope in some expert help to assist you with designing a concept that appeals to your audience while staying on brand.
Every marketing campaign should reflect its parent brand while maintaining its own identity. If you don’t have an in-house team to assist you with this, you should consider hiring a marketing agency.
2. Distributing Your Marketing Campaign
This stage of the campaign centers on what you’ll show your audience and when you’ll show it to them.
Your choice of channels depends on your audience preferences, your budget, and your desired brand engagement levels. Analyze your current media channels to see which ones are performing best according to your chosen audience.
It’s vital to set a deadline for each campaign. This makes it easier to plan your publishing dates and measure your successes.
An easy way to do this is by marking your start and end dates on the calendar and sprinkling your ideas evenly across this time frame.
Based on this you might need to add a few more opportunities for customer engagement or save some for another campaign. You can either add each instance manually or use scheduling software to do it for you.
3. Monitoring and Analyzing Your Campaigns
This is one of the most important parts of any campaign as it measures the effectiveness of your efforts.
Monitor your campaigns regularly to see if they’re achieving the desired action you stated in your original goal, e.g., generating leads.
If not, you may need to rethink your calls-to-action, lead forms, or landing pages. Remember, you can use these tools together, or individually, depending on what works best for you.
Be sure you’re focussing on the right metrics. An upswing in engagement, impressions, and click-through rates are positive outcomes, but they don’t serve the purpose of your campaign.
When you reach the end of your campaign, go through all these reports to gauge whether you’ve achieved your goals. If not, it’s time to go back to the drawing board with a renewed focus on what works for your business.
Always review your campaigns in light of the information these metrics reveal. They can help you learn more about your audience and the best ways to reach them.
Embrace the Digital Era and Watch Your Business Grow
Getting expert help is often the best way to get started in your online efforts, and there are many experienced marketers available to help you launch an online marketing campaign.
There’s no reason not to get started right away.
Are you curious to find out more? Browse our blog for more insights on a wide range of related topics.
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