8 Steps to Building a Results Focused Digital Marketing Campaign

A digital marketing campaign has many moving parts that all work together to grow your business:

Once you get your campaign up and running with advertisements, email automations and sales funnels you will be able to review analytics and physically see your business developing. From defining your goals and budget to setting up Facebook and Google advertising it’s a long road, but we’re here to give you the best advice, tips and tricks to building your next digital marketing campaign.

1. Define your goals

Do you want conversions, followers, likes, responses to emails, to be #1 on Google searches? The options are endless in digital marketing but it is wise to decide what your main goal is going to be in your digital marketing campaign. If you want to send emails as well as run ads on Google and other social media platforms, consider hiring a digital marketing agency to help you out as this can be a huge task for a small business owner.

There are several different types goals you can focus on. Some important ones that you should be aware of are brand awareness, follower growth, conversions and lead generation.  

Brand awareness should be high on your list. How many times have you told someone to search for something on the internet but instead of saying “Go search for it” you have said “Just Google it”? This is brand awareness at the highest level. When users start to use your brand name to refer to a generic term, you’ve made it. But it’s a long process to get there.   

Gaining followers is not as easy as it sounds. Sure you can tell all of your friends and family to like your business on Facebook or follow you on Instagram. But you still need a digital marketing campaign. Here you can run follower growth ads on Facebook that target your specific audience and ask them to like your page. Send emails to your current clients asking for likes or follows. It is always a good idea to have something to exchange like a coupon or free gift. Getting people to convert to using your product takes a lot of coaxing. If you want your digital marketing campaign to be focused on conversions you essentially want someone to see your ad or open your email and make a purchase.

With each of these goals there are various steps you will have to take in order for your digital marketing campaign to be successful.

2. Define Your Target Market

What types of people do you want to target? If you already have a website and are running analytics you can pull reports to see what kinds of people are shopping for your products. If you are just starting out you will need to do some research. You can check out your competition to see who they are targeting but don’t just target their audience. You should find a niche market to target that they might be missing out on.

You will need to first decide if you are targeting other businesses or consumers. No you cannot target everyone. Find your niche market. A successful digital marketing campaign has a well defined audience that is carefully crafted by you, the business owner!

You can survey your current customers on your own or hire a digital marketing company to do the research for you.

3. Develop Personas

Create a buyer persona for you brand. Describe this person in detail – what they do for a living, their annual income, family situation, age, likes and dislikes.

Say you are opening a craft coffee company in your local community. The average price of a cup of coffee is around $5. Your ideal customer will likely have a higher salary and have some disposable income. Let’s map out a persona for our future coffee business.

This is Steve. Steve is a 27 year old marketing professional who earns $80,000 a year at his job. He loves his local community and is always looking for a fun new place where he can spend the days he works from home instead of the office. He is very tech savvy and loves a good subscription box. Steve loves learning about the latest technology but also enjoys the outdoors. He spends his Saturdays shopping at the local farmers market and taking his dog for walks in the park. He hopes to one day have his own tech company. Although he likes to save money, he will often splurge on locally crafted food and drinks.

This is a short summary of an ideal customer for our local coffee business. When creating buyer personas, you should consider your customers’ demographics, fears, goals and their online behaviors. Creating these takes time, practice, and patience to get them just right. 

4.Define Your Budget

For any digital marketing campaign you will need to come up with a budget. Keep in mind that digital advertising is the cheapest form of advertising! We have already compared digital marketing vs traditional marketing if you don’t believe us.

If you are hiring a digital marketing company keep in mind that you will need to budget for paying for services as well as having a budget for running Facebook or Google Ads if that is something you are interested in for your digital marketing campaign. You can start by asking yourself how much revenue you want to see. This is where you need to set a reasonable goal. If you are running a Facebook ad campaign and you want to make $10,000 each month and your product margin is $100 you will need to generate 100 sales from this ad campaign. And with that in mind, you can set your budget based on the profit margin you’d like to generate.

5. Choose The Channels You Want to Use

In your digital marketing campaign you will probably want to utilize as many channels as possible. If you are a business to business company you should not be using the exact same channels as a business to consumer company.

You can advertise on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and even Pinterest. Google Ads are popular as well and can quickly get your company website to the top of search results. Don’t leave email marketing out of your digital marketing campaign. Sending emails is often neglected by companies but this is one of the best ways to grow your business.

A combination of marketing on social media channels, sending emails, optimizing your website and using Google to advertise can build a strong strategy if done correctly. With all of these strategies working together, there’s a lot of room for user error. Of course, you can learn how to build an amazing digital marketing campaign yourself, but wouldn’t it be easier to let a professional do all of the heavy lifting for you?  

6. Do Keyword Research for SEO and PPC

If you are planning on running Google Ads (PPC) or optimizing your website for search engines (SEO) you will need to do some keyword research. Keywords are words that users type into search engines in order to find a product or service or answer a question.

If you don’t want to run ads you definitely want to make sure your site is optimized. SEO is free unlike PPC and is used to organically move your page up in Google search rankings.

The trick to finding keywords for your business is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Brainstorm a list of keywords that you think customers will be searching and then test them! You can type words into Google and let your search bar autofill like this. It will help you get an idea of what customers are searching for.  

You can also use sites like Answer the Public. This site will provide a web of questions that people are asking search engines based around the keyword you type in. As you can see these are all the questions that people are asking Google about flights.

Here’s a sneak peak into our keyword research process. We start by talking with our clients about their goals for their digital marketing campaign and which words they think customers are searching. We then compare what competitors are ranking for and check to see if there are any keywords you are ranking for already and if it’s possible to get you that number one spot.

After our initial research is completed we compile keywords so that we can compare their monthly search volume and keyword difficulty. We also like to map out which page we can optimize for each keyword or if we should create a new landing page. We are usually looking for keywords that have high monthly search with low competition.

For Example, here it is used industry-relevant keywords to optimize their website

Here you can see part of our process for defining which keywords will work well for this company and which won’t. We like to explore all of our options to make sure we don’t miss a potential keyword.

Our process for PPC is a little different as we have to compare the cost per click of each word and then group the keywords accordingly. With PPC we are focused on how much each word will cost when a potential customer clicks as well as the monthly search volume. Our goal is to keep your CPC low while reaching as many people as possible.

You can learn more about the differences between SEO vs PPC here!

Once you have completed your keyword research you are ready to start optimizing your site and set up Google Ads. SEO will physically take place on your site. You will need to change your title and meta descriptions, H1 tag, images alt tags and copy to reflect the keywords you have chosen. When creating your PPC ad campaigns you will use your target keywords so that when they are typed in, your ad comes up as one of the top ad results. If you are going to put time and money into something like SEO and PPC you want to make sure it is done correctly. Hiring a professional for your digital marketing campaign will ensure that a custom strategy is put in place so that you can achieve your goals.

7. Set up Ads on Social Media Platforms

Now that all of your research is completed and your goals are set, you can jump in to social media advertising. Wherever you decide to advertise (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter) you will need to create engaging advertisements that resonate with your audience. Since Facebook advertising is the most popular form of social media advertising in a digital marketing campaign we’ll show you an example.

You will be creating this ad in Facebook ads manager for your Facebook business account. They will first ask you to choose your objective. Let’s go with brand awareness.

You will then choose a name for your campaign and decide if you want to optimize your budget or not. You will then be prompted to create an audience for your ad.

Pro Tip: Use a lookalike audience. This is a great way to target people who are similar to your existing customer base. You’ll need an email list to start so that Facebook can build an audience for you. Once you have this set up you’ll be targeting potential customers like a pro!

This is an example of how we used lookalike audiences for our sightseeing service client’s PPC ads.

You will then set your advertising budget. Our best advice is to start small and then scale up. You wouldn’t want to spend a bunch of money on an ad set that’s not converting.

Finally you will create an advertisement complete with images and copy that is going to resonate with your audience.   

8. Manage Your Social Media Profiles

Not only is social media advertising an important component for your digital marketing campaign but managing and monitoring your accounts should not be neglected. Follower growth and reputation management are two management techniques that we swear by. You should always be focused on growing your fan-base because you want to continue to gain customers. Don’t just rely on your existing customers.

In order for your digital marketing campaign to be successful, you should make sure you have a good online reputation. This means you will need to interact with your customers on your social media accounts as well as reply to disgruntled customers who give you bad reviews. Reaching out to people who have had a bad experience (although it may be scary at first) builds trust and rapport with your customers.

Here’s a review that was left on Google. This could have really harmed the business if the owner had not responded. If a customer did have a bad experience you can open a dialogue with them, ask them to send you a message or an email about their experience or offer them a coupon to try your business again. As a business owner the best thing you can do is to make sure you are actively reading comments and reviews on social media as well interacting with customers.