Improve your marketing campaigns with these easy tips

It can feel as though launching a new marketing campaign is like throwing a boomerang into the distance and hoping it comes back to you. You know there are ways to ensure your marketing campaigns connect with your customers and help convert sales, but there’s always a risk that they won’t work the way you want them to. The good news is, there are proven strategies you can do before, during, and after your campaign to improve the overall performance. Plus, the process of taking control of your campaign also gives you the chance to get to know your customer-base better. And when you understand your customer base, you’ll have a better idea of how to reach them with your marketing.

Decide which metrics matter for your business

If you’re not paying attention to your marketing campaign’s metrics, that’s your first problem. You need to be paying attention, and more specifically, setting goals for the metrics that matter most. For instance, if you’re running a social media campaign on Facebook, when or how will you know that your campaign was successful? Facebook ads provide opportunities to run metrics and to see how many views and clicks your ad experienced. Also, you need to know what action you’re hoping to experience. For instance, do you want people to follow your Facebook page? Do you want them to click through to your website to learn more? Do you want them to join an email list? Do you want them to sign up for a virtual event? For each action item of your marketing campaign, you need to set a goal for customer (or potential customer) engagement.

Likewise, if you’re running an email marketing campaign, which metrics are most important? Do you only want to see an increase in open rate? Click-through rate? Or new sales that use the code you provided in the email? You can set goals for each item, but it’s important to set your benchmarks so you know whether you get the results you want, or if you’re falling short.

Quick note on this, though. Goals need to be realistic and attainable. This means you need to have an idea of how your campaigns have performed in the past. If you have email marketing platforms or social platforms that help track your statistics, you can look back on old campaigns to get a good idea of your baseline. For instance, if your email click-through rate tends to be about 2%, setting a goal for your click-through rate to be 20% is likely unrealistic and unattainable. A better goal would be to try to get a click-through of 2.5% or 3%, instead. That way you can feel good about seeing results and you won’t be setting yourself up for failure.

Target your ideal customers

The beauty of content marketing is that with the demographic tools available today, it’s incredibly easy to target the customers that are a better fit for your product or service. Take advantage of these tools! For instance, social media ads can be set up to target people who fall in a certain age group, have a certain relationship status or gender, who live in a certain area, and who have interests aligned with your business. If you’re a camping gear company with a physical store in Boulder, Colorado, you don’t want your ads being wasted on people who hate camping who live in New York City. By setting your target customer to those living in the Boulder area in the 18-45 age group and who have interests in camping, hiking, and rock climbing, you’re more likely to get engagement, and to get engagement from customers more inclined to buy from your company.

A/B test your campaigns

Before you launch a full-fledged campaign, you can A/B test a smaller target customer group to see which, of two possible campaigns, the potential customers respond to. Maybe you have two different photos, two different tag lines, and two different call to actions. You can send a small test campaign out to a limited number of target customers, and see which of the two campaigns received the most views, click-throughs, and sales. The campaign that got the better results is the campaign you may want to send out to a wider audience. Or, if neither campaign performed the way you wanted it to, you can make tweaks and changes to start again.

Use “trigger marketing”

When it comes to email marketing campaigns, you can implement a tactic called “trigger marketing.” Essentially, it’s a way to automatically set up follow-up emails along a customer or potential-customer’s path. For instance, once a customer has signed up for your email list, that action might trigger an email that has a first-purchase discount code, or that offers next steps for engaging with the company.

Another common trigger marketing tactic is an automatic reminder email for registered customers who leave an online shopping cart with items inside. For instance, if the customer leaves your webpage without making a purchase, this could trigger an email the following day to remind the customer that items are waiting. For someone who was on the fence about buying, or who got distracted before finishing the purchase, this type of automatic reminder can help convert “easy” sales.

Measure your results and tweak

If you’re not measuring your campaigns, you’re not doing yourself any favors. The results of each of your marketing campaigns can help you get to know your customers and respond even better the next time. If your campaign performed well, you can use that information to release similar campaigns in the future, but perhaps with an even more targeted audience. Or, if your campaign didn’t perform like you hoped, you can go back to the drawing board and try again.

Contract with a content marketer

If your attempts at online marketing never seem to get the results you want, it’s definitely worthwhile to contract with someone who’s an expert in the field. Chances are you don’t even need a full-time person. Fifteen to 20 hours a week could do wonders for your business and help you overhaul your marketing attempts. Plus, it’ll free you up to do other work that you need to do.

The Best Way to Generate Quality Leads

What would it feel like to have a consistent stream of perfect leads? A fresh supply of your ideal prospects, all warmed up and ready for conversion?

This isn’t a pipe dream. It’s the daily reality for market dominators and leading players. And it can be yours once you learn how to consistently generate quality leads.

Step One: Create SMART Goals

Effective generation of quality leads isn’t haphazard. Your approach to it should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant or Realistic, and Timely or SMART.

• Specific Objectives. What’s your concrete mission? Is it to get website conversions, book appointments, or generate leads that earn you revenue? Are you targeting your entire potential customer base or only a specific demographic?
• How will you measure, track, and analyze your results? Pick out the metrics and KPIs that matter. Include staple metrics like click through rate, conversion rate, time to conversion, and return on investment.

Also consider more informative ones like customer lifetime value, conversion rate per channel, and revenue attribution markers.

• Attainable, Achievable, and Actionable. Are you capable of pulling this off? Lead gen takes skill, savvy, and resources. Are you basing your goal on something realistic or are you working off false expectations set by marketing influencers?
• Relevant or Realistic. Make sure your goals are grounded in reality. Analyze whether or not your lead gen expectations are congruent with the market, economy, and business climate, along with your resources, capabilities, and offer.
• What’s your timeframe for this? If you want to generate leads for a time-related goal or event, then you already have a firm deadline.

Otherwise, you may want to break your efforts down into monthly and weekly sprints. Create time-bound goals with built-in periods for reflection and analysis.

Step Two: Identify and Understand Your Target

Pinpoint exactly who you need to generate leads from. This can be pretty simple when you have only one buyer and product user to think about.

But sometimes there are multiple buyers or when one person is making the buying decision on behalf of someone else.

Identify the buyers and decision makers you need to convert. Then begin to profile their behavior to find your most effective entry point.

• What channels are they most active on?
• Which of these channels do they talk about things relevant to your product?
• Which of those channels are most appropriate for your offer?
• How do they talk about the pain points and interests related to your offer? Note the specific terms, complaints, phrases, and sentiments.

Add this behavioral insight to your market research and target demographic information. It will help you create action-oriented, tactical buyer personas which in turn generates quality leads.

Step Three: Develop Qualification Filters

Lead qualification makes sure you convert real buyers who fit the profile of your ideal customer. This might be the most critical step.

You don’t want to generate a mass quantity of generic leads or even buyers. Introducing lead qualification conserves your time and resources. It concentrates your efforts on driving more precise business results.

A basic lead qualification system filters for the leads that are most likely to become buyers. And it eliminates the ones that are too difficult to convert.

More refined lead qualification filters for the buyers who are your ideal clients or customers. You can fine-tune this to get rid of hassle customers or select for those with a higher lifetime value.

You’ve already started this in your channel selection and copy development. But you can introduce more once you’ve attracted them to you, and then generate quality leads.

At a minimum, you should qualify leads for:

• Budget and Funds. Can your leads afford your product? Or do they value it enough to find the budget?
• Is this a purchase they can make on their own? If they do, do they have the personal freedom to continue their business relationship with you?
• Need and Challenges. Interest is fine, but how much do they really need it? Are there any painful consequences of not making a purchase? Look deeper to find the meaningful challenges that your offer solves.
• Is there a legitimate time element tied to their challenges and needs? This one isn’t about artificial scarcity tactics. Look for genuine reasons why a lead might prioritize your product.

Use these qualifiers to develop topics and questions to use throughout your marketing funnel. You can tailor your content, form submissions, and lead magnets with them.

Don’t focus on only drumming up awareness, interest, and conversions. Always qualify your leads to make sure you end up with ones that matter.

Step Four: Prepare and Deploy Your Marketing

The profiles and qualifying information you just developed tell you who the real target is, what matters to them, what language they respond to, and where this should be used. Now convert this into deployable copy, content, and assets.

Use content mapping to guide your content development. You can create a table for this or brainstorm it out with a free-flowing mind-map.

1. Write out your buying cycle stages.
2. Fill in the topics, challenges, needs, concerns, and issues relevant to each one.
3. List the social channels these are discussed on, along with the ones that are most appropriate for you to contact them on.

Now create pieces that are appropriate for each stage’s interest level.

• Awareness, Engagement, and Top-of-Funnel: infographics, social media posts, checklists, tip sheets, blog posts, videos, and quizzes.
• Consideration, Evaluation, and Middle-of-Funnel: case studies, white papers, pillar blog posts, webinars, e-books, and datasheets.
• Decision, Purchase, and Bottom-of-Funnel: sales pages, consultations, and demos.

The material you build around this will be more precise, relevant, and impactful.

Step Five: Score and Scale Your Quality Leads

The final step is to score your leads, then scale it out by systemizing what works best.

1. Analyze the leads you generated and converted, along with the ones that flunked.
2. Determine the similar traits and attributes in each group. Look at demographics, work titles, ages, marketing engagement, online activity, etc.
3. Look at these traits over time and try to pick out the most influential ones.
4. Check your marketing metrics and any attribution analytics you have.
5. Score each trait based on their conversion power. For example, if a certain job title makes a prospect 5 times likelier to convert, you can give this either 5 or 50 points.
6. Tailor your future marketing efforts towards the key traits.

This is a precise, reliable way to consistently generate quality leads. Once you get a handle on things, you can begin to buy ads and work the process at scale.

The first-ever record of evidence goes nearly 2,000 years back when clay tablets were used to set up advertisements for ointments and other products. The nature and discipline of advertising have continued to evolve since then, and just like all other forms of mass media and communications, advertising has also phased into the digital realm.

What is Digital Advertising?

Advertising is any piece of written, visual, or verbal content that aims to present a product to a specific audience in a way that the product seems to meet an unmet need or want of that audience. When done via digital streams, such as blogs, websites, social media, email, text messages, and other virtual methods, this becomes a niche of advertising which we refer to as digital advertising.

How is Digital Advertising Different from Traditional Advertising?

To understand the difference between the two, let’s start with the forms of advertising. There are three types of advertising: Above-the-line (ATL), below-the-line (BTL), and through-the-line (TTL).

Above-the-line advertisement is the one we see in most mainstream media in the form of one-way communications in primarily radio, newspapers, and television. Below-the-line advertisements are more intimate, two-way communication modes, such as emails. The third one, through the line, is where newer forms of mass media adopt mainstream advertising methods, such as blogs, vlogs, and social media posts, and can maintain discreet, personalized, two-way communications at the same time.

Simply put, digital advertising is the merger of both ATL, BTL to form a TTL mode of advertisements.

How Does Digital Advertising Work?

Digital advertising is done through the following steps:

1. Finding a Product to Advertise

The first step consists of several steps on its own, but to narrow those down, we can say that it’s about finding the product you want to advertise. The product can be a message, a tangible utility, an idea, a cause, or anything you have to convince people to invest in.

2. Explain the Purpose

The next step is to define your purpose for digital advertising. It can be a decent buyer-seller ad, which is how most laypeople define the term. Otherwise, the purpose of your digital ad can also be to inform and create awareness and caution, ask them to contribute to a cause, or educate your viewers.

3. Set a Target Audience

The third step is to define who your target audience is. There are all sorts of internet users, YouTube viewers, blog readers, and Instagram followers. But, who do you think is the ideal person for your product? From middle-aged Armenian men to Japanese disabled teens to Somali single parents, you’ll find all sorts of categories on the Internet. Of all these masses, you have to design your advertisement for a specific group of people. Identifying your target audience in the digital realm is highly important because it’ll help you pick the ideal ways of digital advertising as well.

4. Pick Your Media

The digital world can be as static as a pop-up advertisement, or as interactive as a gamified advert. Therefore, the mode you choose is totally your call. You can design your ads using a software you prefer, plan an audience engagement strategy (responding to comments, arranging questions and answers, planning giveaways, and so on), and then find the digital media streams that are the most compatible with your product. It can be YouTube, Facebook, digital TV, AR/VR, or any other format that you feel is the most beneficial and displays your product in a good light!

Another factor to consider here is the audience concentration. For example, is your audience a part of the ’60s-’80s era? Then they’re probably Facebook users, Tweeters, and epaper readers. On the other hand, if they belong to the ’90s-early 2000’s era, their preference may lean towards more complex and advanced streams, such as Snapchat, Instagram, or live gaming apps. Therefore, it’s pretty apparent you should pick a stream where most of your audience resides!

 5. Plan Your Advertisement

Finally, let’s face the mammoth task: plan out the actual ad. Your options in the digital advertising world are only as limited as your imagination. The more creative you are, the larger and better your avenues will be!

A pretty basic way of advertising would be to promote through a simple post with a single picturized advertisement and a few hashtags. This sounds quite simple, but if you’re a tad more innovative, you may ask your audience to share their endorsement of your product and repost it on their pages.

However, some advertisers bring the best of their originality to the whole game and suggest never-tried-before ideas! For instance, you can add a quiz or a questionnaire to your website where visitors guess the attributes of a new product. Then, once they get to the end of the game, you may have sufficiently built their excitement and engagement, so you may be able to get them to hit the purchase button located on the screen!

6. Paid Versus Free

Once your ad is made, you can either choose to spread it organically or through paid promotion. Organic exposure is when you solely rely on your followers, their reactions, comments, and shares to increase the reach and impact of your advertisement. You only invest in the ad and then leave it to your audience’s creative sense to pick the trail.

Paid or inorganic advertising is when you pay the platform to promote your advertisement so that it’s more visible to the audience. Then, you use the platform’s analytics and their free space to boost your content.

7. Engagement

This is the element that garners more traction for your brand much better than traditional media! You can get instant feedback on your advertisement, fix any minor communication issues, and engage with the public in real-time to increase their interest in your brand.

Conclusion

Digital advertising combines all the traditional and cutting-edge advertising practices to build an experience that thrills both advertisers and audiences alike. It’s vast, dynamic, and highly interactive, enabling advertisers to create a more lasting impact with real-time, valuable feedback!

References:

https://rockcontent.com/blog/what-is-digital-advertising/