4 Steps to Building A Successful Digital Marketing Campaign
Quality lead generation is an important part of what we do as digital marketers. But before you can start driving traffic online, it’s vital to understand your customer and where you traffic comes from. Then, it’s all about tracking, testing, and repeating.
4 Steps to Building A Successful Digital Marketing Campaign
Step 1: Determine Product Market Fit
The first concept to understand is “product market fit.” This basically means that your product or service is in alignment with your customer. It can be a gut feeling, but it must be backed by reality (market demand).
It’s hard to market something that nobody wants without deceptive marketing or outright fraud. That’s why you need to spend significant time on PMF before starting your digital marketing campaign.
While you can spend the rest of your life reading about PMF (there’s over a million results in Google), it basically comes down to answering these simple questions about your product or service:
- What is it?
- Who is it for?
- Why would they use it?
- Why would I use it?
And don’t be afraid to ask your customers questions too. There are a lot of online tools to help you do this, such as Google Forms, Wufoo, Nicereply, and MailChimp.
Another way to identify your target customer and test product market fit is with a Before and After T chart.
- What does your customer have in the before state? What does your customer have in the after state?
- How does your customer feel in the before state? What about the after state?
- What is your customer’s experience in the before state? In the after state?
- What is your customer’s status in the before state? In the after state?
Once you have PMF and you’ve answered some basic questions about your product or service, the marketing should follow naturally. Learn how to market your business with these copywriting tips.
Step 2: Choose a Traffic Source
Don’t use the shotgun approach and try every form of traffic generation at once. Master one strategy before adding another.
From our experience, the best digital marketing traffic sources are:
- Pay Per Click (PPC) on Google and Bing
- Google Display Network
- Social Media Advertising (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Email Marketing
Other ways to drive traffic include:
- Blog posts
- Press releases
- Social media channels
- Speaking engagements (webinars, in-person events, etc.)
- Print, radio, billboards, and television
We have some resources for you to help drive traffic:
- How to Improve SEO for Your Blog
- How to Optimize Local City Pages
- Google Local Services Ads
- 5 Growth Hacking Strategies That Work
- YouTube Advertising Guide
- Facebook Advertising Guide
- Content Marketing Strategy
- Best Digital Marketing Tools & Strategies
- What to Know About Google’s Call-Only Ads
- How to Create a Content Marketing Plan
We suggest starting with Google Ads, which gives you access to Google’s Search and Display networks. The Search Network puts your ads at the top of Google search results. This gets your ad in front of people who are actively looking for your product or service. Once you have an effective Search Network campaign set up and running, then you can focus on other sources of traffic generation.
The Display Network is a different beast. It connects to a vast network of sites and apps, from small blogs to major news sites like The New York Times. You set your parameters and then your ad gets displayed to your target audience.
The key difference here is that people who are targeted on the Display Network are NOT actively searching for your product or service. Display ads show up on websites and apps while someone is engaged in something else. Prospects are generally not in the buying mood when a display ad appears. As a result, the ads you create for Search are going to be much different from the ads you create for Display.
Step 3: Start with Google Ads
Why should you start with Google Ads? First, you can almost instantaneously get listed at the top of Page 1 on Google Search. SEO strategies might get you to Page 1, but they take a lot of time and energy. Also, promoted ads get a featured placement above the organic results that you can only get access to through your Google Ads account.
The second reason for starting with Google Ads is that you can microtarget your audience. You can automatically qualify your audience through strategic keyword selection, geotargeting, and demographics. If someone in your area is looking for “landscaping service near me,” your business will show up at the top of the search results if you target that keyword and service the area the searcher is in. Since these users are actively searching for your product or service, they re in the buyer state and much more likely to convert.
Lastly, you only pay for the clicks on your ad. That means free exposure for business if a user does not click on your ad. They still see it, but you pay nothing. That’s why this form of digital advertising is called “pay-per-click” or PPC for short.
Google Ads gives you a lot of control over your digital marketing campaign:
- Keywords your ads show up for
- Your monthly budget
- How much you’re willing to pay for a click
- The geographic areas where your ads appear
- The days/times your ads run
- The messaging of your ads
- The page on your website the ads lead to
Step 4: Create a Marketing Calendar and Stick to It
The last step for a successful digital marketing campaign is creating and sticking to a promotional calendar. A promotional or marketing calendar will give you a roadmap for the journey ahead of you. It also allows you to keep your brand messaging consistent across all channels and media.
No longer will your team be confused about what the focus is for any given day or week. Everything has already been planned and now all you have to do is stick to it.
A calendar also allows you to track and anticipate your marketing budget for the year. Thinking in terms of promotions will give you a goal and make realistic predictions based on your understanding of the industry and your customers.
Creating the marketing calendar is only the beginning. After choosing a product or service to focus on and the advertising that goes with it, you will need to test, track, and scale.
It’s crucial to track your promotions to see what works and what doesn’t. Luckily, digital marketing campaigns allow extensive testing and tracking, unlike more traditional forms of advertising where you’re left guessing.
Analyzing your digital marketing campaigns allows you to see strengths and weaknesses in your campaign. Then, you can adjust your campaign or traffic sources as necessary to increase the bottom line.
VitalStorm offers a comprehensive tracking tool called VitalMetrics so you can easily see how your digital marketing campaigns are performing.
25 Digital Marketing Ideas for Growth
- Add an exit intent popup to website to capture abandoning users (consider adding a discount code to the popup)
- Use live chatbots on your website and social media
- Hire social media influencers to promote your brand
- Create a free piece of quality content for a lead magnet (infographic, ebook, etc.)
- Onboard new email subscribers with an email drip campaign
- Host a webinar or conference
- Increase site speed and user experience
- Use Google, Microsoft, and Social Media remarketing
- Write useful and engaging long-form content
- Add a call-to-action on your 404 and “Thank You” pages
- Answer questions on Reddit, Quora, and YouTube
- Create a Facebook Group
- Add social share buttons to your website
- Build partnerships with local organizations
- Buy newsletter ads/mentions in relevant newsletters
- Create Facebook custom and lookalike audiences based on your existing customers
- Start a podcast and/or get featured on a relevant podcast
- Use a countdown timers on deals and discounts
- Create a Buzzfeed-like quiz
- Optimize your website for conversions
- Optimize digital ads for conversions instead of traffic
- Consider promoting your content using Quuu or a similar service
- Re-engage unresponsive email subscribers with a re-engagement email sequence
- Sponsor relevant influencers and podcasts
- Use YouTube Cards in your videos
Start Advertising with VitalStorm
1-877-311-5695
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