A digital marketing campaign is necessary to ensure the success of your online business. No matter how innovative your strategy is or how many resources you spend, without the right foundation, your digital marketing campaign’s potential success will always be limited.
Define Success
For any digital marketing campaign to be successful, it needs to have met or exceeded its goals. Therefore, the very first step of creating a successful digital marketing campaign comes from defining what success means in this context.
It is useful to define success not only in overarching terms, such as ‘we intend to increase website traffic by 40%’ but in key performance indicators too. A key performance indicator or KPI is a measurable value tied to specific objectives of a marketing campaign. Using KPIs will allow you to measure your progress and help you stay on track to meet your targets as you are working through your campaign strategy.
Target Audience
Every successful marketing campaign is built upon understanding one specific concept, that is, your target audience. For your campaign to yield the results you desire, every aspect of your campaign must have, at its core, a clear understanding of your target audience. An understanding of your target audience should be based on more than a generalized demographic, such as age or gender.
Before you begin your campaign, you should make sure that you have a clear understanding of who your target audience is. One way to illustrate the depth of understanding you need is to answer questions about your target audience, such as:
- What do your target audience value?
- How do they spend their free time?
- Where do they live?
- What types of jobs do they have?
- How much do they earn?
- Where do they get their information?
- How do they communicate?
If you are struggling to answer these questions, you must try to learn more about your target audience before beginning your campaign. One way of learning more about your target audience is to change focus a little and learn about your buyer persona. A buyer persona differs from a target audience as the term does not refer to a business’ potential purchasing audience. Buyer personas go deeper than a target audience, offering a set of insights that are based on market research and existing customer data.
Your Brand Identity
The next step of creating a successful digital marketing campaign is to outline your brand identity. Your brand identity is likely to have informed many other business decisions and is, therefore, more likely to be clearly understood than your target audience might be. However, it is vital that you consider your brand identity in relation to your target audience to ensure that every marketing decision you make accurately represents your brand image while appealing to your target audience. In a similar manner to your target audience, your brand image should inform all of your digital marketing choices, from the communications channels you use to the types of content you create.
Website Architecture
Your digital marketing campaign’s success does not only rely upon a conceptual understanding of your audience and brand. The way your website is structured and designed can severely impact the outcome of any digital marketing effort. Without a well-structured site that is secure and easy to navigate, you will never be able to yield the highest returns.
The main way in which your website architecture will affect the success of your digital marketing campaign is in your search engine rankings. No matter how much time and money you invest in search engine optimization, you will never be able to reach those valuable top placements without the right website architecture. In order for a website to be awarded a high ranking, search engines check to see if they are a reliable, safe, and trustworthy site. As there are millions of websites, it is impossible for search engines to employ people to run checks on websites, so they use bots instead. Search engine bots crawl websites and automatically classify those with poor site architecture and poor security as untrustworthy.
The structure, particularly the security of your website, can impact your search engine rankings and their relationship with your customers. For example, websites with poor cyber-security are an increased threat of datacenter hacks, which can expose all of their customers’ personal information. If you are worried about your digital security, USWired has created a very handy checklist for small businesses.
Create an On-Site Conversion Funnel
Many digital marketing campaigns are deemed to be a success if it has managed to increase the amount of traffic to your website. While increasing the amount of traffic to a site is, of course, important to ensure your efforts return your investment, this traffic needs to convert into sales. To ensure that the traffic to your website stays on your site and makes a purchase, you should try to usher visitors down the conversion funnel. The term conversion funnel refers to the journey a consumer takes through your site, from the way they enter your site to the point at which they make a purchase and convert into a customer. Your conversion funnel considers every step in the journey your customer takes from the moment they arrive on your site, to ensure that every interaction is optimized for sales. Without a conversion funnel, you will not fully monetize the success of your digital marketing campaign.