Here are the things you have to get in order before any digital marketing campaign on any platform. Forgetting them leads to expensive campaigns that give no useable data in the end. Which can lead to critical problems later on.
1: Tracking
It’s not that important if you use Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or any other analytics tool, just make sure you implement tracking correctly on your website, as well as any tracking codes from your marketing platform. And for the love of coffee, don’t forget a backup system in case the tracking fails: Like a valid UTM structure.
2: Goals/KPIs/The why
I can’t count the number of times I have talked to clients that just “want to get a campaign up and running and out there” – with no strategy to base it on, no clear goals for the campaign, and not know why. Ask yourself: Why am I doing this campaign, what is my goal, and what is the most reasonable KPI (key performance indicator) for that goal?
3: Who are you talking to?
If you don’t know who you are talking to and why you don’t have a way of personalizing the content. Generic content is the death of most digital campaigns.
Get to know your primary audience as well as possible. That way you can also make sure you are reaching those people, rather than “all men over 45 years in the US” or some other random audience that won’t ever purchase your product or invest in your brand.
4: What do you need to say to them?
When you know your audience, you can hopefully guess what triggers them. Create a tone of voice, creatives, and a content plan that reflects that.
Remember that people’s attention span is really short on digital channels: Make sure you either separate your different messages into individual pieces of content or that you get to the point fast.
5: How and when?
This is the step many people see as the first step, but it should never be the first step. You need to know steps 1-4 before deciding how to reach your audience, with what, and when.
Only after this can you build a campaigns’ content, because you need to build the content to fit into each format on each channel, for each time period. If you start with the content, and not the goals or audience or channel, you’ll have to redo the job later on.
Just like with step 4, you should have an idea about how and when now: You know your goals and your audience. So now it is time to find the right channels and the right time, or you could set up a test to see where you get the best results.
Remember that most brands will have slightly different target audiences and goals. Be sure to make your plans, don’t try to copy someone else’s, chances are that won’t do you any good. The only rule of digital marketing is that there are no rules.