In an ever-changing and highly competitive digital environment, not having a solid digital marketing campaign is a lost opportunity to attract new leads, engage your audience, and drive them through the funnel for actual conversion.

Still, so many businesses out there do not have a digital marketing strategy or know how to run an effective marketing campaign online. 

If you’re thinking about how to get started, in this post, you will learn what it takes to have a great digital marketing campaign.  

It’s only when you have the right structure outlined for your digital marketing strategy does it become easier to implement a campaign that delivers.

Here are key elements you need to keep in mind.

1. Market Research & Competitor Analysis

Before anything else, it’s always smart to first look into what others in your market are doing and analyse the performance of digital campaigns from industry leaders in your target market.

Do they have a strong social media presence? Are they running their campaigns on multiple channels? What kind of content are they putting out? What are they doing differently?

It’s important to identify what is working for them and what campaign strategy has the best potential for success. Doing this ensures you can leverage a tried and tested platform that is known to drive the kind of results you’re looking for.

2. Objectives & KPI Targets

It is difficult to run campaigns and expect clear results without first setting specific objectives and having a defined and quantifiable goal to guide you.

What do you want to accomplish with your campaign? Many companies look to increase sales and improve ROI, but without setting specific KPI targets and metrics to track, it will be difficult to measure the success of your campaign later on.

Whether you are after multichannel growth, high-quality lead generation, or search engine optimisation, having metrics help steer you in the right direction so you can do whatever you can to achieve these targets every month.

These KPI metrics can include:

• Brand awareness - tracking and identifying traffic sources
• Funnel conversion rate - converting X% of leads to customers
• Becoming an industry leader through better SEO optimisation
• Increasing audience engagement - measuring weekly X likes and comments
• Driving customer loyalty through repeat customers and visits
• Click-through rate and lead conversion

3. Buyer Personas & Value Propositions

Once you’ve established your KPI targets, the next critical step is to identify who your target audience is to ensure you are offering them the kind of value they’re looking for through the right distribution channel.

To do this effectively, understand who your customers are through detailed buyer personas. Buyer personas, as HubSpot succinctly points out, are “fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers”.

To build your buyer personas, you can start by segmenting your top customers based on these sample key points:

• Personal background 
• Job role
• Goals and needs
• Challenges and pain points
• The publications or blogs they read to get new information
•  Shopping preferences 

With detailed buyer personas, it is easier to craft your value proposition — an outline of the value you can offer them, how you intend to do this, and why you’re perfect for the job, more than anyone else.  

4. Multichannel Strategy

With specific KPIs and buyer personas to guide you, you can now choose the right distribution channel for your digital marketing campaign.

Using the goals you’ve established early on, plan out the best course of action and decide on the right channel for you and your target audience.

There are multiple channels you can use to implement your digital marketing campaign such as social media, content marketing, mobile and search engine optimisation, PPC, email marketing, website development, etc. Choose what is right for you according to the goals you want to achieve.

5. Implementation

In implementing your campaign, you can choose from a wide range of key tools and software to tie everything together.

Banking on a great content strategy, for example, means you can look to an inbound marketing and CRM tool such as HubSpot. HubSpot also works great for social media marketing and search engine optimisation; it also provides its own analytics to help you track the success of your campaign.

6. Measurement through Analytics

To measure success, use analytics to find out what’s working and what isn’t in your digital marketing campaign. This is where establishing KPI targets and specific goals prior to implementing your campaign come in handy.

Use Google Analytics to measure and identify which campaigns are working and bringing in the most traffic or conversion. Google Analytics also makes it easier for you to set up your own dashboard to track the metrics that matter the most in your campaign — from tracking your best-performing content, web traffic and conversion, and even how much engagement your site is attracting.

HubSpot analytics also provides its own web analytics and helps you keep track of important metrics such as traffic, engagement, sessions for repeat visitors, bounce rate, and many other site visitor demographics.

This is particularly helpful as well if you are running a content marketing strategy through blogging or tracking engagement when you send out weekly newsletters to your subscribers.

7. Test & Learn

Finally, once you’ve set up your campaign and have established the right tools to measure your success, you can start testing your campaign by implementing your strategy through specific time periods.

You can run an A/B test to identify how differences in how you run your campaign can impact customer behaviour. You can do two variations of the same campaign (with minor differences such as a different landing page or a banner) to a controlled group of customers to see which one is more effective.

You need to specify how long this test will run for, but ultimately, it will help you identify the best campaign parameters that drive results in getting better conversion, increasing traffic, and improving overall engagement.

Tying It Together

The greatest online marketing campaigns are not necessarily tied to a huge budget.

As long as you know yourself, what you want to accomplish, and your target audience, you come out in a far better position to use all the resources available to you to come up with a winning digital campaign strategy.

When done correctly, a great marketing campaign online can help you transform how you engage and reach your target audience with the least marketing spend.

By implementing a carefully crafted campaign through one or multiple channels, you can get real and quantifiable results in a few months’ time while taking the guesswork out of not knowing what is not working and what needs to progress continuously through the pipeline.

This blog article is part of the latest Step Change series, The Director’s Guide to Digital. Read the third post in the series, The Hierarchy of Content Engagement.