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What is online campaign?

A digital marketing campaign is an online marketing effort put forward by a company to drive engagement, conversions, traffic, or revenue. … The company will use social media platforms for contests, marketing, pay-per-click campaigns and content marketing to read their audience.

Steps to a Successful Online Marketing Campaign

Explode Your Sales With a Five Step Online Marketing Plan

By Paula Polman Updated October 04, 2019

Reluctant to create an online marketing campaign because you think it will be too time consuming or expensive? Actually a planned, organized online marketing campaign with rotation through a variety of targeted sites is not hard to coordinate, does not need to cost a great deal of money and can generate traffic and sales faster than Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It takes a bit of research and a solid knowledge of your target customer, but you can plan and implement a simple online marketing plan in the space of a dedicated day.

A five-step online marketing plan follows. By doing the action following each step, you will quickly create an online marketing plan that can be implemented immediately and begin reaping sales successes.

Five-Step Online Marketing Plan

Step 1 – Define Your Customer

Defining your customer is as important as choosing or creating your products or naming your business. If you have not yet done a marketing plan you need to do this exercise.

If you already have defined your ideal customer in your business plan, you can skip ahead to Step 2.

Action: Answer these questions as honestly as you can. In other words, don’t project your expectations or hopes on them. What is your perfect, solid customer really like?

• Is my perfect customer male or female?
• Does my perfect customer work out of the home or in the home?
• What is the job profile of my perfect customer – an executive, manager, worker, entrepreneur, stay-at-home parent, etc.
• What is the net household income of my perfect customer?
• What level of education does my perfect customer have?
• Does my perfect customer have room in their spending budget for my product/service on a one time, occasional or constant basis?
• How do my perfect customers use my product/service – do they buy it for themselves or as a gift?
• Does my perfect customer spend a lot, some or minimal time online?
• Where does my perfect customer look for my product/service? Both online and in physical locations?

Once you have answered all these questions, you should have a good picture of where to start looking to place your message and how to write your message copy.

Step 2 – Choose Your Targets

Now, where are you going to post your ads? A coordinated effort across several sites and venues commonly frequented by your customers is the most effective marketing campaign. If you are seen in several places your visibility and retained message are much stronger.

Complementary sites that you can help cross-promote to your visitors, who will then see you there too, will provide excellent reinforcement of your message. Holiday specific sites that are well promoted are excellent areas to consider.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is another consideration for your marketing campaign. If you’re new to PPC, stick to places that allow you to set limits on daily expenditures. Google AdWords is a good example. This will also help you to experiment and determine the most effective keywords by paying close attention to the statistics of the PPC campaign.

Then there are the social media networks; all of the well-known ones offer their own advertising. See:

• Facebook Ad Basics
• Advertising on Instagram
• Pinterest Ads: A Simple Guide
• Get Started with Twitter Ads

When considering a website, social media network or newsletter for your ad, look at factors such as traffic, search engine placement, external linking (how many places link to it), quality of current ads and types of messages being presented in current ads.

• Are there many competitors of yours already advertising there?
• Is the advertising of a complementary nature to your business?
• Are the ads completely unrelated to your business and to the intended traffic of the site?

These are all clues to measure the best fit of your message to the traffic of the site.

Monitor Your Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are an important measuring tool. What exactly do you want to measure to determine the success of your marketing campaign? Is it sales orders? Newsletter subscribers? Downloads of your free e-book?

A conversion rate is the number of click-through it takes to achieve your target measurement. So if your page has 1000 hits, 14 clicks and one sale in a day, your conversion rate is 1:14 or 7.1%. In other words, 7.1% of the clicks are generating a sale during this period.

Close monitoring of your conversion rates will quickly tell you what’s working and what is not. Don’t hesitate to tweak or modify your ads if needed. This is a process in constant motion until you find the best fit. Remember too, an ad may work superbly in one place but not in another.

Action: Create a spreadsheet or document listing all the sites and venues that are a consideration in your online marketing campaign.

Step 3 – Budget

While some think this should be the first step, realistically you can better create the budget for your online marketing campaign when you have a good idea of the costs involved. That can only be done once you’ve figured out your targets.

You probably already have a figure in mind of how much you can really spend, so go back to your marketing campaign sheet and total the costs of all the ad spots you’d like to do. Chances are that total will exceed your overall spending limit. 

Action: Now go through that list and prioritize the ads in terms of where you think you’ll get the most exposure and results that fit within your budget. Move the others into a holding list. Remember, as the ads start to pull in results you can always go back and expand your campaign from that holding list.

If you are engaged in pay-per-click advertising, check in daily for the first week or so and monitor your results to ensure you are paying for results.

Don’t forget to consider ad swaps and bartering as part of your payment and marketing budget. Many sites will swap newsletter ads or banner ads for similar placement on your site if you have one. (And if you don’t, why don’t you? Every small business needs a website.) It never hurts to ask.

Step 4 – Creating Your Ad Content

Online marketing works best when you focus only on one or two things. You may have a variety of products but pick one or two items that are good sellers and have a solid appeal to your target market for your marketing campaign.

Next ask yourself, “What am I selling”? It’s rarely the product or service. You are selling a benefit, something that registers at the emotional level. If you are selling fishing rods, for example, you’re selling the excitement of successfully landing that monster in the lake. If you are selling cosmetics, you’re selling beauty.

The most successful ads use words that relate to the customer. Use the words “you” and “yours” and never put the focus on “me”, “mine”, “our”, “my” or “we”. Create several emotional words associated with the product – fun, comforting, relaxing, stimulating, addictive – and use at least one of them in the ad.

Coupons are also an effective marketing tool. They can be easily tracked either manually or by an automated shopping cart system. Use different codes for different advertising locations and you’ll quickly see which ones get the best attention.

Step 5 – Tracking and Monitoring Your Ads

Tracking and reacting to your campaign’s successes is critical in maintaining an effective marketing campaign. From your website stats to PPC stats, there are many ways to determine what is working and what isn’t. By paying attention you’ll learn volumes about your ads and how to hone them for best results.

Tracking tricks include using specific coupon or sales codes for each ad placement, setting up separate entry pages on your site for each ad, and utilizing a service that helps track activity.

There are advertising management services that help you to track ad performance, such as Google’s DFP Small Business, a free service that is relatively easy to implement and gives powerful ad tracking management and support. Some venues, such as Facebook ads, provide their own reports. 

An Effective Marketing Campaign Doesn’t Have to Be Expensive or Difficult

Successful online marketing campaigns are within the reach of any business, no matter what your budget. By following the five basic steps above and committing to the follow-through, you can create a cost-effective campaign with a substantial return on investment

How to create a marketing plan for Online campaigns

1. Define your business brief

Always start with market analysis. Before progressing, you should have a clear and realistic understanding of the performance of your products or services within your industry. One way to do this is to reach out to clients for honest feedback. Alternatively, you can turn to data / KPIs for this kind of info.

Research your competitors

Understanding where your competitors are succeeding (and failing) offers great insight. It helps you understand the right (and wrong) areas you should be targeting to reach your desired audience.

There are great online tools to help you do this. Paid tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs offer highly insightful breakdowns of digital performance, letting you easily compare your standing in the online world. Most offer free trial periods (from 14 days to a month) so you can try them out before you commit. Follow the links above to get started.

Define your goals & objectives

You should be looking for around 3-5 clear objectives for each campaign. Ask yourself…

• What is your overall aim?
• What (specifically) are you hoping to achieve?

And consider…

• Who (specifically) the campaign will target?
• How long the campaign will run
• How you will determine the campaign’s success

The more specific you can be at this stage the better. Digital marketing strategy is a detailed process, so try to hone in on exactly who you’re targeting and what exactly you want to get out of it.

To properly measure the success of a campaign, you should settle on at least 5-10 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you can use to track its impact.

For example, if one of your goals is to increase lead sign-ups from a given piece of content, you can track KPI’s following bounce rates from the assigned landing page. Successful or not, this type of data will allow you to get better and better over time.

2. Define your budget

Budget is often a difficult subject. It’s important not to restrict a campaign’s potential by being too tight with your marketing budget plan and cost allocation. However, every decision should be made with marketing ROI firmly in mind.

You need to consider where your budget will be going, and it’s vital that you’re realistic from the outset.

Consider…

• Resource allocation
• Amount/type of assets
• Distribution strategy

For example, if you plan to use Pay Per Click advertising to get seen for a specific Google search, the funds for this need to be considered at this stage in the campaign development process.

3. Define Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a breakdown of an ideal customer, which then serves as a representative for a specific section of your target audience.

Built on very real characteristics and attributes – starting with age, job role, income, etc. – a good buyer persona should get to the heart of this type of buyer’s central challenges and goals and will serve as the core of your digital strategy for the campaign.

With an understanding of their goals and the types of challenges they face, you can begin to draw out…

• Themes – that you can use as the foundation for your content creation
• Keywords – that will enhance the impact of your content with this audience segment
• Channel strategy – an understanding of where this audience exists in the digital space (LinkedIn, Twitter, publication X, etc.)

It’s a common mistake to completely mute a good campaign idea by choosing the wrong marketing channel. This is simply bad digital marketing tactics. However, with a strong understanding of your audience and your objectives, this shouldn’t be a problem.

The central concern is this: which channel(s) will allow you to deliver your key messages to your target audience? (PPC, email marketing, display, content marketing, SEO, social media, affiliate, etc.) Crack this nut and you’ll be well on your way to meeting your digital marketing goals.

4. Content Development

When writing a digital strategy for a campaign, it needs to be geared towards a specific audience segment. To make this distinction clear, your digital marketing campaigns should be split across 3 distinct categories:

• Awareness
• Conversion
• and Nurture

Each type of content will target audiences at different stages of the buyer’s journey, with each stage requiring a different type of interaction to connect and engage that specific audience.

• Awareness Content should be developed on the basis of who will share it. It needs broad appeal and mass share ability. Which influences would be good to get on board? Could you interview someone who has a large following? These are the types of questions you should be asking.

• Conversion Content must respond to the challenges that your buyer personas are facing.  If it doesn’t add value, don’t make it a part of your digital promotion strategy.

• Nurture Content is designed to be helpful, useful, educational, anything that is suited to your audience and will keep them engaged with your brand. Done well, nurture content will transform the success of your digital branding. 

5. Implementation

At this stage, you’ll have ideas prepared for your awareness, conversion and nurture content based on your audience insight and keywords. The rest of the implementation phase can be roughly broken down into 3 key areas:

Time planning

Before producing the digital content, you need a firm grasp of the time frame for your campaign. This will help you divide time and plan resources efficiently and effectively throughout the entire digital media campaign.

Asset Creation

Now’s the time to start turning your amazing digital content ideas into real life assets ready for distribution.

Distribution planning

Here you should determine exactly where and how each piece of digital content will go out, and who’s responsible for the various aspects of that process. You should also consider how your content fits together as a larger body of content. For example, if you have a blog post that will link to a conversion download piece, you’ll need the downloadable content set up and ready to go when the blog post goes live.

6. Reporting

Measuring digital marketing campaigns is vital. If you’re not measuring your campaigns there’s no effective, reliable way to improve them.

Depending on the length of your digital campaign, you should set up a system of closed loop reporting that allows you to track and measure the progress of your campaign via key statistics and performance indicators. If your campaign is short, there may be no time to use the results of a given campaign to improve itself, but they can be used to influence future digital marketing campaigns.

The more you can measure (the more data you can collect, the more KPIs you can track, the more graphs, stats, metrics you can use to understand your online audience) the more you can track the success of your digital marketing campaigns, and the more you can adapt when you see something working exceptionally well, or when something isn’t quite right.

This can be done in real time. Something not working? No problem… Understand it. Fix it. Improve it. Learn from it.

In no time at all, you’ll see your digital marketing success evolve through natural selection. If it fails, it dies. If it works, it lives on to give rise to and influence whatever comes next.

That’s the magic of doing digital marketing the right way. It’s responsive to the digital environment in which it exists. A good digital marketing plan is the best way to give your digital marketing campaigns everything they need to survive and thrive in the digital world. Now it’s time to put it into action for your business. If you have any questions or queries about online digital strategy, using our marketing strategy template, or any of the digital strategy steps we have covered in this article, you can get in touch via our website, or give us a call to speak with a digital marketing specialist