THIS CHAPTER
Digital marketing is a broad term that can mean anything from posting an image of your product on Facebook to crafting an email subject line to optimizing a blog post for search engine traffic. Digital marketing involves many seemingly disconnected tactics, and that’s what makes this chapter so important.
This chapter helps you understand what a marketing campaign is. We explain the three different types of campaigns and how and when to use them so that you can use these strategies effectively in your digital marketing campaigns.
Every business is interested in generating leads, making sales, retaining the customers they have, and selling them more of the company’s products or services. Achieving each of these goals requires a different approach, however. In this chapter, we help you decide what you want your digital marketing to accomplish by identifying your business objectives, because those objectives are what should dictate the campaigns you construct and, ultimately, the tactics you employ.
Establishing Marketing Objectives
Before you start a blog, open a Pinterest account, or start gathering email addresses, you need to choose your business goals. When you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll be able to direct your energy into the right marketing campaigns and employ marketing tactics that move the needle on the right business metrics.
Here are six common goals that your digital marketing strategy can affect:
Increasing problem and solution awareness: Your online marketing can help prospective customers become aware of something they need, an effect called problem awareness. Your marketing can also make prospective customers aware that your company provides a solution to a problem — called solution awareness. Your objective is to help people realize that you can take them from the “Before” state, in which they have a problem, to the desired “After” state, in which they have obtained a positive solution. (We cover this idea in greater detail in Chapter 1.)
Acquiring new leads and customers: Gaining more leads and customers is a primary objective of most businesses. Without generating new leads and customers, your business will never grow beyond what it is now. You need to bring in new blood in order to scale your business.
Activating leads and customers: If you’ve been in business for more than a few months, you likely have leads and customers who have yet to buy or haven’t bought in a while. You can use your digital marketing campaigns to encourage people to buy from you for the first time, as well as to remind past customers who haven’t purchased from you lately of the value you bring and why they should buy from you again. Your digital marketing campaigns can activate these dormant leads and customers and help keep your business in mind.
Monetizing existing leads and customers: Acquiring new leads and customers is expensive and time consuming. Don’t forget to create digital campaigns intended to sell more products and services to those new leads and customers. Monetization campaigns make upsell, cross-sell, and other types of offers to sell more to your best leads and customers.
Onboarding new leads and customers: New leads and customers deserve special treatment simply because they are new. They need to be taught who you are and how to be successful with what they’ve purchased. To achieve this goal, create content such as welcome emails or welcome packets that tell people how to use your product or service, what they can expect, and where they can go if they need help with their purchase.
Building community and advocacy: To move prospects, leads, and customers beyond a shallow, transactional relationship, you need to build campaigns that create communities of advocates and brand promoters. One of the most effective ways to achieve this advocacy is through social media, such as through a Facebook group or a Twitter page. Here, people can reach out if they have praise for or questions about your product or service. By creating an outlet, you help to cultivate a sense of community for your customer base, which leads to increased satisfaction and loyalty. Find more on social media tactics in Chapter 9.
Defining a Digital Marketing Campaign
Meeting your business objectives and moving a customer through the customer journey (discussed in Chapter 1) from ice-cold prospect to raving fan requires actions. Those actions, if coordinated properly, are called campaigns. Digital marketing campaigns, as we define them in this book, have a set of specific characteristics. Digital marketing campaigns are:
Objective based: Digital marketing campaigns are coordinated actions intended to achieve a specific business goal.
Multiparted: Every digital marketing campaign requires assets like content and landing pages, as well as tools like email software or web forms. But those assets aren’t enough to ensure the success of your campaign; you need the ability to make those assets visible. In other words, you need traffic. Yet another part of every campaign is the measurements you track so that you can determine how it is performing.
Seamless and subtle: It’s worth pointing out that these multistep, multipart campaigns are most successful if you walk the prospect gradually through the customer journey (for more about the customer journey, see Chapter 1). To help move people through the customer journey, you need to include a call to action (CTA) within your campaign. A CTA is an instruction to your audience designed to provoke an immediate response. Usually, a CTA includes an imperative verb to convey urgency, such as “buy now,” “click here,” “shop today,” “watch this video,” “give us a call,” or “visit a store near you.” Next, a well-oiled marketing campaign removes the friction between the prospect and the action you want that prospect to take. An extreme example is to ask an ice-cold prospect to buy a $10,000 product or service. Such a tactic would be neither seamless nor subtle. In the coming chapters, you find out how to structure your campaigns in a way that moves your cold prospects to become repeat buyers and purchasers of high-ticket items.
In flux: The word campaign often refers to an initiative with a short life span, but as it is defined in this book, a campaign can be something your business runs for as little as a day or as long as several years. The advantage of digital campaigns over physical ones (such as direct-mail campaigns) is that small tweaks and even wholesale pivots are much simpler in a digital environment. As a result, you can optimize digital marketing campaigns on the fly to achieve the best results.
PUTTING TOGETHER A GOOD-LOOKING DIGITAL MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Consider the digital marketing campaign of a company like LasikPlus, which offers the Lasik corrective surgery for eyesight. As are most companies, LasikPlus is interested in acquiring new leads and customers for the procedure.
In
