When you do find success, it’s not because of the buttons and levers per se. It’s because you had a good digital marketing strategy, and you pushed the right buttons, pulled the right levers, and made the right adjustments—all at the right time.
To be consistently successful, you need to develop a way to strategize your efforts across different marketing campaigns. Your tactics within these strategies will differ between campaigns, but you can start with a general, replicable plan to get you on the right track.
To help get you started, we’ve outlined some steps that allow you to build an effective strategy for each campaign from the ground up. Check it out!
Define Your SMART Goals
Strategy starts with clearly defined goals. Ask yourself what the purpose of a specific campaign is. These should be SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
Take these examples for instance:
- Gain X number of social media followers within 3 months by boosting posts.
- Increase site traffic by X% within 6 months by creating more content for a specific keyword.
- Produce X number of high-quality leads within 30 days by running targeted social media ads.
- Improve conversion rate by X% within 1 week by adding a popup offer to your site.
- Increase your repeat order rate or customer retention rate by X% over last year by running email and social media promotions for existing customers and fans.
Once you know what you’re after, you’ll have an easier time coming up with ways to reach those goals.
Know Your Audience
Your marketing campaigns only work if they’re targeting the right audience. The easiest way to do that is to develop some buyer personas with information you know about your customer base.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of people who would be interested in your product. To create a buyer persona, you’ll want to dig up as much of the following information as you can about your existing customers:
- Background info: their name, occupation, education and interests
- Demographics: their gender, age, household income and location
- Value proposition: what value your product provides for this specific persona
- Top benefits: what specific benefits the customer gets from your product
- Common objections: what specific reasons the customer may have to not buy your product
Create 3–4 personas from your audience to tailor your campaigns around. You’ll have an easier time understanding who your audience is, what they need and want, how your product can help them, and how you can overcome their objections.
Use the Right Tactics & Channels
While your strategy is the overarching plan to achieve a goal, the tactics you use are the specific steps to get there. These tactics will differ between campaigns and will utilize different marketing channels, depending on the goal.
Here are some tactics and channels you might use to achieve a goal from above—producing leads by running ads:
- Create a 15-second video ad and 1–2 graphic ads that speak to your buyer personas.
- Make sure your landing page has the content your audience needs to solve their problem.
- Add remarketing pixels for your social media profiles to your site. With these pixels in place, site visitors will automatically be shown your ads.
- Use social media demographic tools to target other users based on their profile info (age, location, occupation, interests, etc.)
- A/B test your video ad versus your graphic ads to see which generates more clicks and adjust your ad spend accordingly.
- You can also A/B test across different social media platforms to see which one generates the best leads.
With a more focused strategy like this, you’re more likely to get the results you want sooner—and without wasting ad money on people who are unlikely to follow through.
Analyze & Adjust
Data is invaluable for any marketing campaign. Without it, you’ll never know what worked or why, and you’ll be hard-pressed to replicate the results on the next campaign.
Again using the lead-gen campaign from above as an example, you can use tools within the social media platforms to view click-through-rates and track your spending.
If you’re not seeing the results you want, perhaps you need to adjust your target audience to reach the right people. You might also need to tweak your ad content to address their concerns more directly.
You can also use Google Analytics on your own site to see if visitors are falling off somewhere along the line. Are users not making it past the landing page? Do you have low time-on-page numbers? Are customers abandoning carts? If so, you’ll need to tweak your pages to address these issues.
Rinse & Repeat
Throughout your marketing travails, you’ll come across different strategies and approaches that work better than others. Perhaps the ad campaign we mentioned earlier was a smashing success. If so, you can use the same demographics and ad format for future campaigns. If it wasn’t successful, you’ll know what steps to avoid next time.
You can reuse successful campaigns and models across different channels, too. If you noticed a particular email campaign had good click-through-rates, you can try to match the style and tone in your ad messages and throughout your site.
Finding what works and borrowing those ideas across different campaigns will help you find success no matter the channel you’re using.
Barge Marketing Is Here to Help
If marketing strategy isn’t your strong suit—and we’re sure you have other wonderful qualities—fear not! That’s where we come in. Barge Marketing puts strategy first in everything we do.
Our onboarding process uncovers everything we need to know about your company, brand, product, audience, competition and more. We build customized campaigns using strategies and tactics we’ve honed over the years.
Don’t entrust your company’s success to just anyone. We know strategy and we know success. And we’ll be with you every step of the way. To see how Barge Marketing can help you, contact us here, chat with us online or call us at 614-907-7577.