How to create digital marketing campaigns that work

Digital marketing can invariably be a little hit or miss in terms of coverage and shares and not even the best companies in the world can produce campaigns that win every time, but following some of these key factors below can help your digital marketing campaigns move up a level and create the buzz that your brand or client deserves.

Research, research, research

With any digital marketing campaign research is key to getting the most out of it. Who are the people you want to target, which websites/social media networks are they more likely to use, how are you going to get them to talk about and interact with your content and ultimately become a customer.

Conducting market research and looking at what your competitors are doing is a great way of finding out what is really happening in the sector and what sort of content is being shared. It can also help you gage how successful certain types of content are.

Having specific and achievable goals for your campaign is also important as it can help focus the outreach procedures, for example, if the goals are for a certain number of social shares the outreach can be social media orientated instead of spending time creating and contacting people on a journalist list. Alternatively, if your goal is to improve brand awareness or increase traffic then targeting national and local news sites and sector influencers would be the main priority.

Idea generation and implementation

Once the initial research is complete it’s time to generate some ideas. If you did some competitor analysis, discuss their campaigns, what types of content are being regularly shared and if you could do any ideas better.

Here at Bronco, the Digital Marketing team has access to designers and coders capable of building a range of graphics, widgets and mini sites, but if you do not have access to these skills it is better to start off small with content you can produce in-house.

Cost effective ideas which can generate a lot of coverage include writing informational content, conducting customer surveys on various relevant topics and running competitions and giveaways. These types of campaigns can be pushed to sector publications, influencers and bloggers for coverage, and don’t forget about any company news including new products or services as pushing this information to news agencies is a great way to create a buzz.

Once you have your idea ready and the relevant information together it’s time to implement your campaign. During the research stage you identified your target market and now it’s time to seek out the influencers, journalists and bloggers who could potentially cover your content to maximise the coverage and shares for your campaign.

Outreach tips

The way you contact people can largely affect how successful a campaign is and great care must be taken to maximise the engagement of your content. Don’t just send out a generic email to everyone on your list because recipients will just ignore it or even worse block you from sending stuff to them in the future.

Instead, try to tailor your emails to the specific person, for example always use their name (if you have it) instead of using Dear Sir/Madam and try to reference any similar content they have written about or featured on their website as this shows that you have taken the time to have a look at their website.

Above all, make sure that the content you send out is relevant to the website, there is no use sending a travel related piece to a beauty blogger as it does not fit in with the theme of the website.

Analysing the results

Although many of you reading this will not have access to all the tools and software we use in-house there are free ways to analyse how well your marketing campaign has done.

Social media networks track the amount of likes and followers you have so any positive change in these is a good indicator that the campaign is working. Facebook can also track specific content and tell you how many views and interactions a post has had.

One of the best tools to use to analyse your campaigns has to be Google Analytics. This powerful tool can help you track the number of website visits to your campaign, how long the user spent on that page and if they click your content to go to another page or to buy the product/service.

With Google Analytics you can also track where the user left the website so that you can identify anything that could potentially affect sales such as pages not working properly as they should or calls to action being hard to find.

Learning from your mistakes

Possibly some of the best advice I can give you is to never give up and learn from your mistakes. Just because a campaign isn’t working doesn’t mean that none of them will. Through trial and error you may find that your customers interact more with graphical campaigns as opposed to informational content or that competitions actually get you more sales after the event than traditional advertising avenues.

Whatever the case, learning from your initial mistakes and keeping a close eye on what your customers like and dislike can help future campaigns to become better and more focused. The internet is ever changing as are people’s tastes and habits and getting to know your customer better is a great way of tailoring your content to something that they will be interested in.