Setting clear goals sets the foundation of a successful digital marketing campaign. Without defining your objectives, you won’t be able to know how effective your campaigns are, ultimately hindering your ability to make changes when and where needed. These goals should be aligned with your businesses objectives and reflect your overall business plans – whether that’s increasing awareness of your brand, getting more web traffic, generating leads or boosting your sales. 

 

It’s important to break down your goals into small steps that can each be measured and analysed – such things such as setting timescales for specific metrics can help to make goals achievable and show you where things are and aren’t working. Defining your goals is something you have to consistently do as you evolve and grow as a business, and must be one of the core focuses of your digital marketing campaign as a whole. 

Understanding your audience is critical to your digital marketing efforts – knowing who you’re targeting, their values, their online behaviour and their pain points will help you tailor your messaging, choose the correct platforms and create content that resonates with them and solves their problems. 

 

Start by creating an audience/buyer persona – this will help you craft an idea of your ideal customer that includes all information you can think of about them, such as their location, age, gender, income, interests, potential problems your item could solve, purchasing behaviours and job. By defining these characteristics, your marketing can become more personalised and relevant. When you’ve identified your audience, you can then start creating the right content and anticipate their wants and needs, which is essential for creating a campaign that connects and engages your target market. 

Setting a budget for your digital marketing campaign is essential to ensure your resources are allocated effectively, and stops you from overspending on methods that don’t end up working out. Planning a budget well can help you drive the most money towards the channels you deem to be the most important and impactful, whether that’s pay-per-click advertising, creating content or email campaigns. Again, consider your goals and break down your budget for each with the allowance to reallocate this budget depending on each goals performance and as these aims change. 

Strike a good balance between paid and free marketing methods is key to maximising how effective your campaigns are. PPC can provide results fast if done right – Facebook and Google Ads both proving popular with marketers – generating leads and clicks based on the information you provide about your audience. However it can be costly and take a lot of time to perfect if you’ve never been faced with creating your own ad, meaning other businesses swing more towards free marketing methods to get organic and sustainable growth without the financial impacts that can come with PPC. Having a balance of the both can help you figure out what works best for your kind of business, with pay per click helping to bring in sales or an audience that can then transfer over to your free marketing methods, working hand in hand to boost your visibility, income and brand awareness. 

Creating content is the backbone of your strategy – it’s what helps to hook audiences in, drives traffic to your page or website and builds brand loyalty and recognition. Understanding your audience is what really helps with content creation, and you must ensure the posts you put out are resonating with them. Whether your content is graphics, videos, blog posts, text based you need to stand out from the crowd and make room for yourself within a crowded digital market. Regularly published high-quality content helps build trust, establishes your brand to new audience members and displays what your business is really about. 

Keywords directly impact your SEO, so ensure your copy is rich – but not too overloaded – with important keywords that relate to your business and services. Effective keyword research involves understanding what your audience is likely to look for when searching for things your business has to offer, which you then need to include within your content so you can climb the search engine rankings and attract custom. You can regularly analyse data to see which keywords are emerging as popular phrases that you can then incorporate into your marketing strategy to enhance your visibility. 

Your analytics will show you how your campaigns are performing. The insights are valuable to improving and progressing your tactics, giving you opportunities to stay proactive with your digital marketing and make the needed changes and budget re-allocations when needed. It’s unlikely you’ll get it right first time, and that’s ok – using your insights and making tweaks can help you find the thing that starts to grow your audience and work well for your business consistently. 

Digital Marketing is a great way to bring your business to the forefront of people’s minds – get started on your strategy today and see what it can do to help your business.