DIGITAL CAMPAIGNING

WHAT IS ONLINE CAMPAIGN?

 An online marketing effort put forward by a company to drive engagement,

conversions, traffic, or revenue.
 Ties in with the overarching goals of the organization
 Includes one or more digital channels in the efforts.
 Digital strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your
overarching marketing goal.
 Digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your
strategy that move you toward meeting that goal.
 Can help a company build a strong online reputation, increase brand awareness and
encourage traffic and sales conversions.
EXAMPLES

 Wayfair
Digital strategy: Owned media,
Instagram tags
 Wayfair, a home furnishings and decor merchant, has a truly innovative Instagram
strategy.
 Using Instagram's product tags, Wayfair has taken some of its prettiest home
interior shots on Instagram, and tagged them with product and price labels.
 It's a digital marketing campaign that shows people exactly how much each item in
the photo costs, helping Wayfair generate buyers right from its Instagram account.
 Delta Air lines
Digital strategy: Owned media,
Twitter stories
 Delta Air Lines is a prolific user of social media, specifically on its Twitter handle.
 The brand uses this account to engage potential passengers in a variety of ways that
are both timely and emotionally stimulating.
 In honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company began sharing personal
stories from Delta employees directly through the company's Twitter feed.
 Mastercard
Digital strategy: Owned media,Travel blog
 Mastercard bases its brand on the stories and adventures that cardholders go on.
 Priceless Cities, Mastercard's travel blog, gives readers a travel resource to go along
with the credit cards that help pay for these readers' destinations.
 It allows company to better align itself not just with the things its customers buy,
but with the places its customers go. Check out the blog here.
 Red Bull
Digital strategy: Owned
media, Lifestyle news
 Red Bull has become more well known for its sponsorship of extreme sports than
the energy drink it sells.
 It's a natural fit for the types of people the drink appeals to.
 But instead of creating digital content on the energy drink industry, Red Bull captures
its audience with articles and videos all about the latest happenings in the extreme
sports community.
 In this digital marketing campaign, Red Bull teaches us that what you sell isn't always
the ideal content strategy. Rather, it's the lifestyle that your customers live. Check out
the company's website here.
BLOGGING AND ONLINE FORUMS

 Why?
 Nearly 40% of companies use blogs for marketing purposes.
 B2C companies that blog get 88% more leads/month than those who don’t.
 Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors.
 B2B companies that blog get 67% more leads/month than those who don’t.
WHY BLOGGING?

 Marketing data clearly shows that blogging is a critical piece of the inbound marketing
methodology and directly correlates to better business results.
 Your blog has to be well-optimized and promoted, and, most of all, rich with content.
 Frequency of blogging plays an important role in this equation
 Companies who blog 20 or more times in a month see the most return in traffic and
leads.
WHY BLOGGING?

 A blog is a long-term marketing asset that will bring traffic and leads to your business
 It introduces you as a thought leader in your space and allows you to earn people’s
trust and stay top of mind for many in your community.
 Business blogging helps you in respect to search engine optimization (seo).
 The more blog posts you publish, the more indexed pages you create for search
engines to display in their results.
WHY BLOGGING?

 Name the biggest problem your customers have. With that problem in mind, write a
detailed blog post that provides practical and non-product focused solutions.
 Solve your customers’ problems with content.
 A blog gives you real estate to place calls-to-action in order to generate leads.
 At this stage of the game you are trying to retain your blog readers and engage them
further with your website and your content. So you might ask them to attend your
webinar or to download a free guide that you have. Calls-to-action introduce your
prospects into the buying process and start qualifying them.
ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGY STEPS

1. Build your buyer personas.

 You need to know who you're marketing to.
 Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching,
surveying, and interviewing your business's target audience.
 His information should be based upon real data wherever possible.
 To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a
mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who
align with your target audience.
Quantitative (or Demographic) Information
 Location. You can use web analytics tools like Google Analytics to easily identify
what location your website traffic is coming from.
 Age. Depending on your business, this may or may not be relevant. It's best to
gather this data by identifying trends in your existing prospect and customer
database.
 Income. It's best to gather sensitive information like personal income in persona
research interviews, as people might be unwilling to share it via online forms.
 Job Title. This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing customer
base, and is most relevant for B2B companies.
Qualitative (or Psychographic) Information
 Goals. Depending on the need your product or service was created to serve, you
might already have a good idea of what goals your persona is looking to achieve.
 Challenges. Again, speak to customers, sales and customer service representatives
to get an idea of the common problems your audience faces.
 Hobbies and interests. Speak to customers and people who align with your target
audience. If you're a fashion brand, for example, it's helpful to know if large segments
of your audience are also interested in fitness and well-being, as that can help inform
your future content creation and partnerships.
 Priorities. Speak to customers and people who align with your target audience to
find out what's most important to them in relation to your business. For example, if
you're a B2B software company, knowing that your audience values customer
support over a competitive price point is very valuable information.
2. IDENTIFY YOUR GOALS AND THE DIGITAL MARKETING TOOLS
YOU'LL NEED.

 Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of the
business.
 For example, if your business's goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your goal as
a marketer might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than you did last
year to contribute towards that success.
 Need to know how to measure
 Metrics which will help you adjust your strategy in the future.
 Brings all of your marketing and sales data into one place, so you can quickly
determine what works and what doesn't.
3. EVALUATE YOUR EXISTING DIGITAL CHANNELS AND ASSETS.

Owned Media
 This refers to the digital assets that your brand or company owns
 whether that's your website, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery, owned
channels are the things your business has complete control over.
 This can include some off-site content that you own, but isn't hosted on your
website, like a blog that you publish on Medium, for example.
Earned media
 Refers to the exposure you've earned through word-of-mouth.
 Content you've distributed on other websites (e.G., Guest posts), PR work you've
been doing, or the customer experience you've delivered,
 Earned media is the recognition you receive as a result.
 You can earn media by getting press mentions, positive reviews, and by other people
sharing your content on social media, for instance.
 Paid media
 Refers to any vehicle or channel that you spend money on to catch the attention of
your buyer personas.
 This includes things like google adwords, paid social media posts, native advertising
(like sponsored posts on other websites), and any other medium for which you
directly pay in exchange for visibility.
 Gather what you have, and categorize each vehicle or asset in a spreadsheet, so you
have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.
HOW TO USE MEDIA - EXAMPLE
 You might have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that's
been created to help you generate leads.
 To amplify the number of leads that content generates, you might have made a real
effort to make it shareable, meaning others are distributing it via their personal social
media profiles, increasing traffic to the landing page. That's the earned media
component. To support the content's success, you might have posted about the
content to your facebook page and have paid to have it seen by more people in your
target audience.
 It's not compulsory to use all three. If your owned and earned media are both
successful, you might not need to invest in paid.
 Evaluate the best solution to meet your goal, and then incorporate the channels that
work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.
4. AUDIT AND PLAN YOUR OWNED MEDIA CAMPAIGNS.

 Content is the King

 Every message your brand broadcasts can generally be classified as content, whether
it's your 'About Us' page, your product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics,
or social media posts.
 Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers, and helps to
raise your brand's profile online -- and when it's optimized, it can also boost any
efforts you have around search/organic traffic.
Audit your existing content.
 Make a list of your existing owned content, and rank each item according to what has
previously performed best in relation to your current goals.
 That might be a particular blog post, an ebook, or even a specific page on your
website that's converting well.
 Figure out what's currently working, and what's not
Identify gaps in your existing content.
 Based on your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the content you have
 If you're a math tutoring company and have discovered in your audience research
that one of your persona's biggest challenges is finding interesting ways to study, but
you don't have any content that speaks to that concern, then you might look to
create some.
 By looking at your content audit, you might discover that ebooks hosted on a certain
type of landing page convert really well for you (much better than webinars, for
example).
 In the case of this math tutoring company, you might make the decision to add an
ebook about 'how to make studying more interesting' to your content creation plans.
Create a content creation plan.
 Based on your findings and the gaps you've identified, make a content creation plan
outlining the content that's necessary to help you hit your goals. This should include:
 Title
 Format
 Goal
 Promotional channels
 Why you're creating it (e.g., “when you struggle to find time to plan blog content, so
we need to create a template editorial calendar")
 Priority level (to help you decide what's going to give you the most)
5. AUDIT AND PLAN YOUR EARNED MEDIA CAMPAIGNS.

 Evaluating your previous earned media against your current

goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time
 Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if
that's your goal) and rank each earned media source from
most effective to least effective.
 You can get this information from tools like Google
Analytics
 You might find that a particular article you contributed to the industry press drove a
lot of qualified traffic to your website, which in turn converted really well.
 Or, you might discover that LinkedIn is where you see most people sharing your
content, which in turn drives a lot of traffic.
 The idea here is to build up a picture of what earned media will help you reach your
goals, and what won't, based on historical data.
 However, if there's something new you want to try, don't rule that out just because
it's not yet tried and tested.
6. AUDIT AND PLAN YOUR PAID MEDIA CAMPAIGNS.

 You need to evaluate your existing paid media across each platform (e.g., Google
AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to figure out what's likely to help you meet your
current goals.
7. BRING IT ALL TOGETHER.

Here's what you should have so far:

 Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s)
 One or more marketing-specific goals
 An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
 An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media
 An owned content creation plan or wish list
DIGITAL STRATEGY EXAMPLE

 In January, you might start a blog which will be continually updated once a week, for
the entire year.
 In March, you might launch a new ebook, accompanied by paid promotion.
 In July, you might be preparing for your biggest business month -- what do you hope
to have observed at this point that will influence the content you produce to support
it?
 In September, you might plan to focus on earned media in the form of PR to drive
additional traffic during the run-up.
 By taking this approach, you're also creating a structured timeline for your activity,
which will help communicate your plans to your colleagues and team.