Over 75% of marketers agree that the marketing initiatives they use have a direct impact on their sales. Your marketing campaigns have a profound impact on your sales, growth, and presence in the market.
As companies battle it out in the digital world to capture audience attention and grow their brand, it becomes important to hone your digital marketing strategies to perfection for maximum impact and engagement.
Take a look at some key practices to follow when creating a digital marketing campaign to get the most out of the campaign and drive maximum audience engagement through it.
5 best practices to follow when creating a digital marketing campaign
Digital marketing is one of the cornerstones of a company’s presence in the digital world of today. It helps you reach your target audience, form bonds with them, and engage them with you in meaningful ways.
When crafting a digital marketing campaign, there are myriad aspects you need to take care of in order for the campaign to land the way you want it to. At the end of the day, the goal is always to provide positive experiences to your target audience and engage them with you.
A campaign can accomplish those goals in many ways. Sometimes, a campaign can be solely about making the customer aware of your brand’s presence and position yourself as an option. Another campaign can be about getting the customer to make a purchase.
We’ve come up with some of the best practices to follow when creating a digital marketing campaign to make sure your campaign covers all the important aspects needed to connect with its audiences. Take a look.
1. Ensure compliance at every step
Marketers often take the importance of legal compliance in their marketing campaigns lightly. Data compliance, privacy laws, and CCPA compliance are some of the most important aspects surrounding a marketing campaign.
You need to be well-versed in them to make sure that the content you create and the actions you take during a marketing campaign don’t violate any laws. Businesses are slapped with lawsuits and hefty fees every day.
The best defense is operating within your boundaries at all times. Here is a guide on CCPA compliance to help you understand the basics. Moreover, you can consult a legal advisor to help you understand the specifics of compliance.
Training your staff about basic compliance also helps. You need to make sure that the content you create in your campaign, how you share it on various platforms, and your interactions with your target audience don’t violate any privacy rules.
2. Set clear & measurable objectives
We talked about how the larger goal of all marketing campaigns is to make a company’s presence grow and drive more customer engagement. However, that’s only the overarching goal every campaign leads toward. It’s not the end goal of any individual campaign.
For Example when crafting a retail digital marketing campaign, it’s crucial to calculate the sell-through rate to gauge product performance accurately. Also it’s essential to define Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) goals to accurately assess product performance and overall campaign success.
This allows you to make your efforts far more actionable as you have something tangible to achieve in a specific time frame. All your efforts will be directed toward it in a way that can be done. It frees you of a nebulous goal to achieve.
For example, the goal of a campaign can be to increase website traffic by 20% in 2 months. So, your KPIs here will be the number of visitors, the number of views per visitor, traffic by source, search volume, etc.
3. Tailor your tone accordingly
Omnichannel marketing has been proven to bring more engagement. More marketers are leaning toward creating campaigns that can be executed across multiple channels to draw maximum engagement with the same content.
However, a key component to making omnichannel marketing work is to tweak your tone according to the target audience as well as the platform. It’ll allow you to reach a wider audience while keeping your content authentic at all times.
It may seem like a given, to be tailoring your marketing efforts depending on who you’re presenting it to and where you’re posting it. But oftentimes, marketers simply forget or are not sure what kind of tone to take with a post.
For example, you’ve created a blog post to be shared on LinkedIn, a platform often associated with a formal tone. If you wish to share the same post on Instagram, you’d need to work around both the format of the platform and the tone you use in the post.
Let’s work through this example below:
a) Based on the target audience
To tailor your tone based on your target audience, take a thorough analysis of the users that interact with you on Instagram. Where LinkedIn is used for formal interaction about careers and jobs, Instagram is generally used by users with the intent of casual interaction.
But gathering insight into your user base and people who interact with your posts will give you a deeper understanding of what tone to take with them. You can divide your user base based on:
- Age groups
- Communities
- Nationalities and cultures
- Interests: likes and dislikes
This information will help you to find the right tone to frame your captions. You may take a casual approach if more of your user base comprises younger people, or a bit formal if most of your user base are older professionals.
b) Based on the platform
When it comes to tailoring your content based on the platform, it’s more about the technical aspects than the tone. Instagram is a photo-based platform that doesn’t link to outside blogs. If you wish to share a blog there, you’ll need to come up with creative ways.
You may share the screenshot of the beginning of your blog and link the blog in your bio. In the caption, direct the user to your bio to read the rest of the blog. Or you may share a data chart from the blog and write the introduction of your blog in the caption, directing them to the bio at the end to read more.
Doing so tailors the content to fit the structure of the platform you’re posting to and makes it easier for the users to engage with it. Studying the platforms extensively helps you understand their intricacies to make better use of them.
4. Ensure top-notch quality of the content
While a lot of focus lies on analytics, post timings, and sharing of content thoroughly in digital campaigns, it can be easy to pay less attention to the content. With 4.4 million blog posts being published every day, it becomes challenging to make your content stand out.
Brands are striving to put out relevant content to engage users and with the sheer volume of it, most of it is cookie-cutter or a rehash of already existing content. Few are creating original content that stands out.
You may not be able to create original content all the time, but you should certainly strive to make it well-researched and interesting. For example, OkCupid, a dating platform conducted a study with 34260 couples to come up with the most asked questions of first dates.
Many such brands are going out of their way to create captivating content that is not only unique but offers immense value to their target audience. It helps you project yourself as a thought leader in your industry and lets your customers see the value you offer.
Here are some tips to help you create stunning content:
- Conduct email surveys with your audience and publish their results.
- Create short video content giving a peak at the behind-the-scenes of your company’s activities: i.e, how products are made, packaged, etc.
- Encourage customers to give picture or video testimonials and create content out of it. You can even feature it on your socials.
- Conduct interviews with notable personalities in your industry.
5. Focus on the customer experience
Whatever content you create and share should focus on creating a positive experience for your customer, regardless of where they stand in the sales funnel. You may choose to educate them about your brand or simply get them to buy a product.
But the end result should be that the customer walks away with a positive experience, whether they took the desired step or not. Ensuring this makes it far more likely for the customer to come back to you and engage with you further.
Focus on engaging customers with positive experiences to find success with your campaigns
Digital marketing campaigns are essential in helping a company grow its online presence and foster a positive relationship with customers. To make sure your campaigns achieve their goals, begin with thorough planning that takes into account every aspect of it.
See that your marketing efforts abide by the obligations and rules concerning digital privacy. Set clear objectives with clear paths to achieving them. Make sure to tweak and tailor the content based on the target audience and platform.
Let us know in the comments what practices according to you help create a winning digital marketing campaign.
Author bio
Atreyee Chowdhury is a freelance content writer with more than 10+ years of professional experience. She’s passionate about helping SMBs and enterprises achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted and compelling content. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time. You can follow her on LinkedIn.