Don’t Launch Another Digital Marketing Campaign Without Doing These Three Things First

There’s a lot of groundwork that goes into building and launching a successful digital marketing campaign. These are the three things I recommend EVERYONE do before launching your next campaign.

STEP 1: Determine your desired outcome.

It might seem counterintuitive to launch a campaign without a set goal in mind, but you’d be surprised by how many people forget to start with this critical step. Before you start building an audience, before you start writing ad copy and designing your ad creative, before you set a budget or a timeline, start by setting a goal.

Whether it’s growing your email subscribers list by x, gaining x number of followers on social media, increasing traffic to your website by x% or selling a product or service online, each goal will have an impact on the way you set up, design and run your campaigns.

For instance, if you’d like to run a campaign to increase website traffic with the goal of getting new email subscribers, you’d build an audience, write ad copy and use images that are completely different than what you’d use for a retargeting campaign with the goal of selling an online course. Not to mention, you’d want to use a different budget too.

Setting a goal for your campaign, from the beginning, will help you build the right target audience, create better ads, and gauge the overall success of your campaign once it’s done. Which leads us to step number 2…

STEP 2: Track and measure.

Tracking and measuring your campaign may seem like something you’d do after it’s launched, but there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be done prior to launch to make sure you’re actually able to track and measure the success of your campaign.

Understanding what it is you need to track will help you determine which tracking tools to use, but regardless of your campaign goals, these are a few of my favorite campaign tracking tools anyone can use.

1. Google Analytics – Whether or not you’re launching a digital marketing campaign, you should set up a google analytics account for your business and install it on your website. It’s free and easy to use, and will provide invaluable data when tracking and measuring the success of your campaigns.
2. UTMs – A unique url used to track the source, medium and campaign name from where a particular lead has come. It’s important to have this information so you can determine the quality of the leads/traffic/email subscribers, etc. that you get from each of the campaign sources. Google has a free UTM building tool that allows you to build custom UTMs in seconds! Example UTM: https://socialography.biz/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social_media&utm_campaign=spring_sale.
   • Source = Facebook
   • Medium = Social Media
   • Campaign = Spring Sale
3. Call tracking – If one of your campaign goals is to get phone calls, you’ll want to set up unique call tracking numbers for each source. Many of the services that provide tracking numbers will also record incoming calls, allowing you to track not only the number of calls received from each source, but also the success and outcome of the calls themselves. This is especially useful if you have a salesperson or sales team fielding the calls.
4. Benchmarks – If you’ve launched a digital marketing campaign before, regardless of the success of that campaign, USE IT to help set a benchmark for the success of your future campaigns. One of the most common questions I receive when reviewing the results of a campaign with my clients is “what kind of CPC/CPL/CPM, etc., etc., should I expect for a campaign like this?” The ONLY reliable way to answer that question is to look at the historical data for that client on their own previous campaigns.
   While “industry stats” can be helpful (sometimes), directly comparing the results of your campaign to the results of another will never serve you, mostly because you’re not comparing apples to apples. Things like budget, audience size, campaign goals, campaign timeline, brand recognition, industry, etc. all factor into the results of a campaign, and without all of those factors being equal (which is impossible) there’s no value in comparison.

STEP 3: Build your ideal target audience(s).

Whether you’re running a marketing campaign on Google AdWords, Facebook, LinkedIn, or other ads platforms, there are endless options for setting up audience targeting to reach the right people. The goal of your campaign (hello step 1) will also impact the targeting you use when building your ideal audience. However, if you’re just getting started with narrowing down your audience targeting, here are some tips you can use to build an audience for your campaign.

1. Location: Would it help your campaign to target by country, state, city, or zip code? Most likely narrowing your audience down by location, rather than targeting an entire country, will help your budget go further in other areas.
2. Demographics: Does is make sense to target both men and women in your campaign? What age range does your target market most often fall within? Would it help to target your audience based on their education level, income level, job title?
3. Interests: Most likely you’re going to want to target people who are interested in topics related to your business. For example, if you’re an interior designer, you’ll want to set “interior design” as an interest parameter in your audience.
4. Behaviors: Does your target audience use their phone to access social media (mobile users), do they commute to work on a daily basis, are they married, do they engage with political content? Behavioral factors can help you further identify your target audience.

Just be mindful when creating your audience that you’re not getting too specific with your targeting. This will limit the size of your audience, in turn, making it difficult to reach enough people to have a successful campaign. Also keep in mind that you can create multiple audiences, with different interests, locations, demographics, etc. and compare the results, using the winning audiences in future campaigns.

For more tips like these, checkout my YouTube channel where I share some of my favorite marketing “secrets” and walk you through how to implement them for your business!