There is always a sort of electricity that runs through the office whenever a new digital marketing campaign goes underway. After numerous meetings﹘both internally and with the client﹘to discuss slogans, discounts, budget, tracking, landing pages, and SEO, the campaign goes live and all that’s left is to wait and watch the first engagement analytics come in. From here, there are two prevailing feelings that occur, based on the performance of the new campaign: excitement at seeing the positive buzz and increased sales, or disappointment at seeing that there is still work to do.
Building a solid marketing campaign is like creating a work of art﹘it is the culmination of a lot of work within multiple disciplines, from content to social media to website development. Each has their part to play to ensure the campaign goes off successfully. Getting started down this path can be daunting; even more so if the campaign needs some mid-run maintenance. There are a few guidelines that, when followed, can give your next marketing campaign the leg up it will need to take your business to that next level.
Digital Marketing’s Big Questions
When starting development on a successful marketing campaign, there are a few foundational questions that need to be answered before anything else can be done. For the originators of a product or service (business owners, inventors, etc.), these might seem like no-brainer questions, but every campaign run by Gravitate One (or any other Utah marketing firm) will start by confirming the answer to these three questions:
- Do I know the product intimately? In answering this question, review whether you understand the product’s various systems and how they interface with the customer. Make sure you know the lifespan of the product﹘whether it is a single experience or good for multiple uses.
- Am I familiar with the competition? Having a familiarity with the product’s competition is essential for many reasons. Understanding how competitors advertise their products will provide you with a view of their marketing blind spots that you can exploit. You can also better answer the third question once you see how the competition’s product attempts to provide an answer.
- Do I know what the “big problem” is and how my product solves it? The “big problem” is the existential question that gives the product or service a reason to be. Each business exists for one of two reasons: because it provides a solution no one has thought of and it wants to corner the market, or it capitalizes on the excitement surrounding an industry by providing the solution better than anyone else. Knowing how to answer this question is at the heart of every successful marketing campaign.
Once you and your colleagues have gone through this self-inventory and come up with satisfactory answers, you are ready to start planning your big campaign. Whether you are spearheading the campaign in-house or working through a Utah marketing firm like Gravitate One, this process is sure to lead to success.
Speaking the Customer’s Language
As has been mentioned already, a solid marketing campaign is a joint effort between every department in the firm, so success lies in understanding everyone’s roles and executing them properly. This means the project manager will need to call a few meetings to make sure everyone is on the same page. The goal for each department should be to drive the consumer to fulfill a call to action, whether that’s putting something into their cart and checking out in the digital store, calling to set up an appointment, signing up for a newsletter, or even just liking, following, and sharing the brand on social media.
The Content Team
Meeting with the content team is essential to getting the voice of the campaign down and answering that essential third question. The content team will be in charge of essential steps like:
- Creating a slogan
- Writing the ad copy
- Writing the landing page
Content’s goal should be writing something informative, eye-catching, and ultimately brief. This is not easy, but everyone should have fun stretching their creative muscles.
The Social Media Team
Social Media is becoming more important every year, as nearly half of the world’s population owns an account on at least one of the social platforms. Your social media experts will be essential to the success of any campaign because they will know how to place your ads in front of the right people. The social team will be in charge of tasks such as:
- Fine-tuning the audience for targeted ads
- Controlling the money spent on social ads and boosted posts, including making educated suggestions regarding budget
- Defining the audience for ads and keeping an eye on the campaign’s performance data
- Supporting any new initiatives with a regular output of social posts to drive engagement
Your social media managers will be the “boots on the ground” when it comes to interfacing with the consumers; they will have the job of answering people’s questions and driving hype.
The Development Team
The dev team is full of unsung heroes who take everyone’s good ideas and make them a reality. Coding, graphic design, form creation, and squashing bugs all fall under the purview of development. Your development team will have responsibility for tasks like:
- Creating the landing page
- Redesigning the website
- Making sure the storefront is working properly
- Ensuring cookies are gathering the right type of data
The dev team is the ringers who help make all the other parts of the campaign run properly. They will install plugins and make sure the entire pathway of the client, from clicking on the call to action button to checkout is smooth and easy.
The SEO Team
Finally, the SEO team will be in charge of making sure the right keywords are bringing up your brand in search queries. They will be able to optimize pages so that the new campaign initiatives remain relevant and helpful. They will be in charge of jobs like:
- Picking relevant keywords and helping the content team get them placed all over the ad and website copy
- Optimizing web pages so that there isn’t any ambiguous language or keyword stuffing that would inhibit the search engines from placing the campaign at the top of the search results
- Ensuring that the campaign is full of helpful and relevant information that would be accepted by the search engine providers.
The SEO team will help bring the new campaign home on a larger scale, making it easy for regular people to find it in a search. Picking the right keywords will require them to be able to comfortably answer the three major questions because intimate knowledge of the product and some out-of-the-box thinking is what good SEO requires.
Don’t Set and Forget
Some platforms like Google don’t appreciate it when you change things up too quickly, as it messes up the automated learning phase that helps the ads get put in the right place. Other platforms are more forgiving. Knowing how or when to make changes takes experience and rational thinking. A firm like Gravitate One will have weekly meetings to discuss the campaign’s performance and whether any changes need to be made to increase engagement.
Becoming proficient in digital marketing is an organic process, one that yields better results the longer you do it. By working together as a team, keeping lines of communication open internally and with the client, and understanding what makes your product special, you will be able to tell the consumer a beautiful story﹘a story about a problem that was fixed by your product, which can be theirs for a fair price.
