6 brilliant steps in setting up your digital campaign in less than 30 days

Digital campaigns can help you get more traffic, improve your brand awareness, drive more sales, and much more.

Executing a digital campaign can seem like a complex process but by taking time to plan out your digital campaign step-by-step you can increase your chances of success while reducing overwhelm across the board.

In this post, you’ll learn what a digital campaign is, and the 6-brilliant steps you can follow to execute and build a digital campaign.

What is a digital campaign?

A digital campaign is a strategic online marketing effort that’s executed to achieve a specific goal. Usually, the result will lead to greater brand awareness, more traffic, improved conversions, or more revenue.

Putting together a successful online marketing campaign can be a lot of work, and there are a lot of moving pieces you’ll need a get right.

These are the 6 steps for setting up a digital campaign.

 

1. 1. Set a marketing goal

1. 1. Identify your target persona

1. 1. Identify the right marketing channel

1. 1. Create content with a clear call to action

1. 1. Run a pilot test campaign

1. 1. Performance monitoring

Step 1: Set a marketing goal

Setting goals is essential for your marketing strategy, a clearly defined goal, gives you a clear direction for your marketing strategy.

There are a handful of goals – brand awareness, increase in sales, lead generation, and social follower growth. More examples of attainable goals include:

 

• • Improve brand awareness by getting 5 mentions from major news outlets/websites

• • Increase search engine traffic by 5,000 visitors per month in 45 days

• • Double social media followers to 10k by the end of 2023

• • Improve sales by 200% by adding an abandoned cart sequence to our eCommerce store

• • Add 500 new qualified email subscribers in 30 days

For each goal, you have a set of action plans. For instance, if your goal is to increase organic traffic, then this will include evaluating your existing content, doing keyword research, updating older content, writing new posts, and even doing backlink outreach and promoting your content across social media.

You can run as many digital campaigns as you want. Overall, you’ll want to create a specific measurable outcome for every campaign you run.

This allows you to dig into your data to see what’s working, so you can refine your digital marketing strategy moving forward.

Step 2: Identify your target persona

Do you know your audience? Before you start a digital campaign you’ll need to define the exact audience you’re going to target.

If you don’t know this exact person yet, then you’ll need to spend some time thinking about researching who this person is.

 

One of the best ways to do this is to create what’s called a buyer or customer persona. This is a description of your ideal customer, and will include information like:

 

• • What they do for a living

• • How much money do they earn

• • What their family situation is like

• • Their age

• • Any hobbies they have

When creating an ideal customer persona you should also include:

 

• • What other types of websites do they visit online

• • The goals they have when visiting your site

• • Any fears or desires they have

If you’ve never done this exercise before, you can pull information about your target market from existing data.

One of the best sources of this will is Google Analytics. If your website has been getting traffic, then you can pour through your data to pull out information like:

 

• • Age

• • Gender

• • Where they’re from

• • How they navigate your website

• • The types of content they value the most

All of these should be combined into a document or user profile, you can even include images, so anyone working on the campaign can visualize this person.

If you have multiple different audience segments, then you’ll want to do this process multiple times and create customer avatars for each segment of your audience or market you’re targeting.

Step 3: Identify the right marketing channel

As you start to execute your digital campaign you’ll probably create campaigns across a wide range of digital channels. However, when you’re first starting you’ll want to focus on only one or two channels.

For example, you have Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest in the social media space. You have Google ads, content marketing, onsite and offsite SEO, email marketing, and a lot more.

There are chances you are going to be using a combination of different channels. But, you’ll have one main channel that ties into your goal.

Research your target audience to get a clear insight into the best channel to be used to get engagements and conversions.

If your goal is to increase your email subscribers by 500 in 30 days there are all kinds of tactics you can employ to achieve that goal:

 

• • Test different email opt-in-form copy and placement, including pop-ups

• • Optimize your existing content and create new content focused on pushing people to your list

• • Create value-add email newsletters that encourage readers to forward to a friend

• • Guest blog on popular sites in your niche with links back to an opt-in page

• • Share the link to an email subscriber page on your social media profile

As you can see there are a lot of different overlapping channels you can utilize to help you achieve your main goal of growing your email list.

Before you start creating your campaigns you’ll want to define the channels you’re going to utilize.

 

For any digital marketing campaign you’re running you need to come up with a budget. Digital advertising is the cheapest form of advertising, but you’ll still need to set aside a budget.

Even running organic campaigns will require an investment of time or money. For example, you can do keyword research, write your content, and do backlink outreach yourself, or you can pay someone else to do it for you.

Other forms of digital advertising will cost right from the start, like paid advertising.

Your budget needs to take into account anything you’ll be spending within your company, plus costs to any external companies or contractors you’ll be using to create creative materials, or even manage your campaigns for you.

Step 4: Create content with a clear call to action

Depending on the campaign you’re running, your content strategy determines the overall success of your digital campaign. It aids brand awareness, customer engagement, and search engine optimization.

Here are a few examples:

 

• • If your goal is to grow your organic search engine traffic, then you’ll have to create a series of blogs related to your brand with a clear call to action to make them take an action.

• • If you’re going to be running Facebook or Instagram ads, then you’ll need to create all of your ad creative materials and landing pages with a clear call to action to make them take an action to the page or place you’ll be sending traffic to

• • If you’re executing a video marketing campaign, then you’ll need to create, edit, and publish a series of videos with a clear call to action to make them take an action.

Action-taking is very important, it must be included and monitored or else the whole activity will not yield much result.

Step 5: Run a pilot test campaign

If you’re running advertising campaigns or any kind of paid media campaigns, you’ll want to run test campaigns first, so you don’t blow through your entire budget.

With your test campaigns, you’ll start with a small budget and make refinements as you get feedback and data. For example, when you’re creating ads you could test different headlines, different images, body copy, CTAs, and more.

You’ll want to strike a balance between keeping your initial budget small and still getting enough data to refine your ads.

If you’re doing paid advertising, even something as small as N1000 to N5000 per day will give you enough data to work with if you let it run for a month.

Step 6: Performance monitoring

With digital campaigns, there’s no shortage of data available. Whatever platform you’re utilizing, you’ll be able to find all kinds of data.

For example, email marketing tools have built-in analytics, every advertising platform has its ad dashboard, and there are a variety of third-party tools you can use for website statistics, and more.

 

However, before you start pouring over data you’ll want to refer back to your goals. This will help you zero in on the numbers that matter. Once you can analyze those numbers you can figure out what’s working and what isn’t, so you’ll have insights you can take action on.

By looking at the right data points you’ll be able to answer questions like:

 

• • Did the new blog posts lead to an increase in traffic and email subscribers?

• • Did you receive any new press mentions from the news piece?

• • Did the new email series lead to more product purchases?

• • Which Facebook ads led to more product sales?

There’s a good chance that a lot of your digital marketing campaigns won’t generate positive results. However, it’s important not to get disheartened, instead, look at conducting campaigns as an experiment to find what does and doesn’t work.