Digital Marketing is Your Battlefield: Plan Your Winning Campaign

The Digital Essentials, Part 3

Developing a robust digital strategy is both a challenge and an opportunity. Part 3 of the Digital Essentials guide series explores five of the essential technology-driven experiences customers expect, which you may be missing or not fully utilizing.

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How confident are you with your current digital marketing? What big things need to be done? Take a look at your digital marketing to-do list.
Some design changes to test over here, paid search optimizations over there, updating meta data to get to the top of SERPs, and I’m sure, the list goes on and on. The more resources that you have the easier it is to get it all done, but what about simultaneously reaching your business goals? Are you confident in reaching those?
Sure, improving your website and optimizing you acquisition channels will help you reach your goals in the end, but amidst the 365 days of the year, every day that isn’t directly focused on reaching your goals leaves you a step behind.
This blog isn’t about how to manage that long digital marketing to-do list, but rather on how to simultaneously focus your efforts on your day-to-day business and reach your goals.
Enter, the campaign.
In searching for a good definition of the word, you’ll find many allusions to its military roots. Google defines a campaign as “a series of military operations intended to achieve a particular objective, confined to a particular area, or involving a specified type of fighting.”
Swap out “military operations” to “digital marketing operations” and you give outsiders a look into the mayhem of a digital marketer’s work. Not convinced? Take a look at that to-do list again or your calendar, chat with executives about where they’d like to see your digital marketing, or read up on the ever-evolving digital space, and you get digital marketing to sound more and more like a battlefield.
If that’s the case, and if campaigns win wars, why not do the same for your business? Using the components of that definition, here’s how to win the battle of digital marketing, one campaign at a time.
1. Sketch Out Your Campaign Calendar
You know your business and if you’re not confident in your knowledge, ask someone who is. What events affect your business? Is it a holiday, industry event, product launch, or a season? Are these recurring events you can plan for or more random and difficult to expect?
Sit down with a calendar and your team. Unless there’s a huge event within the next four weeks, skip it, and give yourself time to plan. Look out to next month, the next six months or year and decide what campaigns are going to really fuel your business. If you’re not confident in what’s coming, pull out last year’s calendar and see where revenue or website traffic ebbed and flowed and use that data and insights to predict what’s ahead.
Choose your top campaigns and determine the timing for each. Giving your team vision of what’s ahead and setting expectations of what will be planned and implemented will decrease the amount of times you say “Hey, can we whip something together ASAP” or “Shoot, we totally missed out on that.”
2. Determine Your Campaign Objectives
What’s the goal of each campaign? Is this a revenue-generating campaign, a brand play, or an engagement with your customers? Start with “Why did we determine this as a high-priority campaign?” and then ask “What are we hoping to get out of our efforts?” Be specific. If you want to increase revenue for a period YoY, set a percentage goal. If you want to engage users, what’s the underlying goal?
With every well-set goal is an even better measurement plan. There’s a reason sporting events keep score of points or warring countries keep track of how many battles they’ve won and the number of casualties from each. There’s no way to know whether a campaign was successful unless you set a measureable goal, measure your efforts, and review the numbers. Set goals for every campaign at the time of choosing them and establish what success looks like. This will help align everyone to making the campaign worth it.
3. Choose Which Digital Operations to Deploy
Every campaign needs an infantry that’s hand-selected for the tasks at hand. Determining who needs to be involved and deciding these teams early on will ensure that everyone can train, prepare, and be at attention when your biggest campaign is around the corner.
Once your teams are selected, layout the battleplans early. Some teams will need more time than others. For instance, if your search engine optimization team is involved, their efforts can take months to make an impact whereas a paid search or email campaign can be built and implemented in few hours.
Get the team together and draw up your plans. Don’t forget your goals! Ensure that every solider in your army knows what success for the campaign looks like so they can make the right decision. Answer questions and get aligned early. Your efforts well before the campaign will only help your execution later.
4. Confine to a Particular Area or Target with a Specified Type of Fighting
A series of blogs could be written about the importance of targeting, segmenting, and personalization, but I think we all know it’s essential if you’re looking for success. Every shot fired in a battle is targeted and even if it just misses the mark, it still makes an impact. Any missed shot is an opportunity to learn, improve, and adjust for the next one. And when you hit your target dead on, the results speak for themselves.
Determine who your target is for each of your efforts. Also consider how to best interact with this target and adjust as necessary. It comes down to reaching the right people at the right time with the right message. Think about what those right pieces are and execute.
In the end, if you hear the raining bullets around you and would much rather take shelter, do not fear. Take a break from your long digital marketing to-do list and focus on your business. Start planning your next winning campaign, rally the troops, and win a battle you can be proud of.