What exactly are the 5 Pillars of a Digital Marketing Campaign Strategy?

Here’s what you can except to learn from reading this post – how to:

1. PLAN 2. REACH 3. ACTION 4. ENGAGE 5. CONVERT

1. PLAN

Planning, is the first and the most impactful step that will ultimately decide the fate of your campaign strategy.

This is a step where you don’t want to be cutting any corners, instead you want to take your time to assess these 3 fundamentally important questions:

A. What is your ideal outcome?

The answer to this could be

a). to sell a product or service

b). increase signups to a newsletter

c). introduce a new product or service or

d). brand awareness.

Your desired outcome needs to be clearly defined as this will dictate your Campaign blueprint and target focus.

B. When to launch your campaign?

Do you wait for your product or service to be fully ready or do you soft promote prior to launch to whet the appetite of your target audience?

Timing of your launch can play a critical part in the success of your digital marketing campaigns and it does pay to study your industry sector trends for clues on what’s proving to be popular within your particular market niche.

Sites like Google Trends can prove to be a very useful tool in understanding what’s happening within your market segment as you can filter trend parameters by annual growth, country, region and city and time your launch accordingly.

C. How do you make this all happen?

So you now know what your end goal is and you also know when to start your marketing campaign but, how’re you going to get things off the ground?

Start by working out the resources that you will need to allocate to the campaign such as in-house personnel, expertise, time, budget and if you need to bring in outside help.

2. REACH

The next stage is to clearly define who your ideal target customer is, where they can be found online and why they should buy from you?

Working out who your ideal customer is a must to improving your campaign targeting and more importantly your conversion rates.

These FREE tools are extremely useful to research who your audiences are, where they tend to congregate online and what their buying habits are:

Google Analytics – The Audience tab here will help you decipher the following metrics:

Another extremely effective tool is Google’s Consumer Insights where the research & data will help you unlock fresh insights to drive your business by understanding the shifts in consumer behaviours, needs and beliefs.

Facebook Insights – Facebook’s business page insights will tell you who your fans are and by clicking on the Likes tab you get to see where your page likes happened.

The data listed here will tell you where you need to publish content and also where you can reach your audiences. 

You can also study your closest competitors to learn what, where, how and when they’re promoting their products and services to fine tweak your own Campaign Strategy.

IMPORTANT:  Digital marketing campaigns generate so much rich data right from the start so, agility is key to making crucial tweaks and adjustments swiftly to maximise the profitability delivered by your marketing strategy.

3. ACTION

Action is where you begin the launch phase of your digital marketing campaign.

This is where you will have all your props ready to go i.e. your landing pages, website or videos.

IMPORTANT: When launching your campaign especially if using free social media, the first 30 minutes to 1 hour can be crucial for success!

This is because most social media platforms have algorithms that check the audience engagement levels on your particular post.

And depending on the numbers will elect to either popularise it by sharing it more widely or unfortunately bury it, if the engagement traction isn’t significant enough.

And whilst this might not matter quite as much if you’re just running paid advertising campaigns still, it is good practice to pre-warm your audience up with an upcoming campaign notification letting them know the exact time and date of your launch.

Remember to keep a close eye on the numbers, tracking the results from each method so that you adapt your campaign quickly if necessary.

4. ENGAGE

Engaging with your audience by first listening and then responding can make a big difference to how an audience will perceive your brand.

Adopting a unified brand tone across all media is important to help audiences easily identify with who and what your brand actually stands for.

Most brands are happy to engage with their customers only when receiving positive feedback but this is a very big mistake.

Negative feedback however, should be seen as a great way to improve your products and services and brands should be thankful that customers have taken the time to state what they’re unhappy about.

Since consumers online can be rather fickle at times, simply click away and run off to find the nearest competitor.

So, if the key goal of your digital campaign strategy is to attract and retain customers then the 2-way narrative has to be weighted heavily in favour of the customer.

This means not taking a defensive stance, being immediately contrite and apologetic if things do go wrong and promising to fix the outstanding issue as swiftly as possible.

5. CONVERT

Converting your site visitors is going to be the final challenge of the 5 pillars of a digital marketing campaign strategy.

This is where you have pay very close attention to all the tracking metrics that you’ve employed during the life cycle of any campaign.

Learning from the Acquisition & Behaviour tabs in Google Analytics lets you gain real insights into how your customers found your website, landing page, video etc. and how they behaved once they got there.

Metrics such as who referred them and which social media platform converted the best will allow you to adapt your campaign strategy to deliver a better overall customer experience.

Here are some practical ways that you can better convert visitors into buyers:

• Simplify your page copy by cutting out any unnecessary hype.
• Clearly express your value proposition.
• Proudly display your customer testimonials and reviews.
• Use high quality images.
• Offer a cast-iron money back guarantee.
• Reduce any friction in the purchasing process.
• Offer less choice.
• Create a sense of urgency – employ countdown timers if applicable.
• Try answering any likely objections honestly and openly in your copy wherever possible.

And if the primary campaign strategy is to use paid advertising then follow these steps for better conversions:

1. Use Ad extensions – so that you ads appear larger online.
2. Allow for multiple methods of payment.
3. Use Facebook lookalike audiences.
4. Use re-marketing pixels.

Because you’ve monitored your campaign and addressed any underlying issues that you may have had with conversions, you can now move on to establish your business as the no.1 choice in the minds of your customers.

Some of the easy ways of doing this is by offering tiered payment plans, loyalty incentives for repeat purchases and free offers for brand advocacy and referrals.

Let’s recap…

To run successful digital campaigns businesses must have the right personnel and processes in place.

And while this may seem fairly obvious, it is surprising just how many businesses lose both stacks of money and potential customers through poor planning and ‘off the cuff’ promotional launches.

These 5 pillars of a digital marketing campaign strategy could therefore be used as your blueprint to ensure that every phase has been carefully planned for and chalked off for maximum success.

And if you ever need that extra little bit of proven magic then don’t hesitate to get in touch with our digital marketing experts for help and advice.

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