Beginner’s Guide to a Digital Marketing Campaign

Digital marketing campaigns can be daunting to begin no matter your level of experience. There are many factors that play into how successful your campaign will be. Will there actually be results? Will I be wasting time and money? What if it all flops and the world burns?

No need to stress about the world burning over your digital marketing campaign—here is a simple guideline for an effective plan that will achieve results every time.

Plan with the End in Mind

Similar to traditional marketing, start with establishing goals. Want to boost social media engagement? Create leads for your sales team? Increase website traffic? Goal-setter beware, don’t just pick snazzy-sounding objectives from a list you Googled. Make sure the goals are specific and relevant (SMART) to your business so you can realistically measure the success of your digital marketing campaign. And then assign realistic numbers to them. Here are a few examples:

Specific Goal

Okay: Increase the number of people engaging with my social content.
Better: Encourage social engagement with quarterly Instagram photo contests.

Relevant Goal

Okay: Create funny viral videos to engage donors and volunteers.
Better: Develop a 10-part webinar series with industry experts to establish our non-profit as a thought leader.

Measurable Goal

Okay: Drive more traffic to our existing website.
Better: Increase unique visitors by 15% through targeted Facebook ads.

After giving your goals some grit, benchmark your starting point and develop tactics that will help you meet these goals! Need help coming up with or executing ideas? Get in touch with us!

Integrate and Automate

In a market crowded with messages, reaching customers once is good. Reaching them multiple times is better. And integrated marketing provides opportunities to create multiple, consistent interactions with customers, providing a seamless brand experience. Integrated marketing connects your efforts, from SEO to blogs to landing pages.

To integrate your efforts, first, do some research to see which channels currently impact your business the most. Also, look at who your target market is—for example, an excellent email campaign is wasted on millennials; it’s better to focus your efforts on video or social. Then, build a plan that communicates, repurposes, and amplifies your content across:

• Organic search
• Paid search
• Email marketing
• Display advertising
• Social media
• Websites
• Blogs
• White papers
• Etc.

Another concept that functions as the foundation for your efforts is marketing automation—how you can market via multiple channels and automate tasks. A healthy list of tools exists to make our jobs easier when it comes to automating and streamlining tasks and steps related to your digital marketing campaign. Two of our favorite marketing automation platforms include Hootsuite (specifically for social media) and HubSpot. A sampling of the benefits of these tools includes:

• Setting up keywords to track conversations about your brand
• Scheduling posts across major platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Personalizing content by automatically creating lead profiles
• Connecting platforms like GoToWebinar, Wistia, SurveyMonkey and Salesforce to track where leads come from and how they behave to customize their conversion journey
• Scheduling a series of emails that nurtures leads through drip campaigns
• Pulling detailed reports

Measure

In an era of instant gratification, digital marketing can be grossly satisfying. With tools like these, you can see – in real-time – how many people are opening your emails, watching your videos, and surfing your site. Go back to those goals you established way back in the first step and see how your efforts are paying off. If you aren’t meeting your goals, you can adjust efforts accordingly—increase your ad spend, change the call-to-action on your website, etc.

So, there you have it. Whether you have 8 hours, or 8 weeks to plan a successful digital marketing campaign, you should always follow these steps for success! Or if you’re looking for more information, download our resource on how to “Create Your Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategy.”

Partner with Pyxl

Whether you are starting from the beginning of a new digital campaign or you’re looking to reevaluate current campaigns, Pyxl has a team that wants to help! We can elevate your goals and create a successful campaign with measurable results. Contact Pyxl today to get started!

Updated: Apr 19, 2022