The Most Important Element to the Success of Your Digital Marketing Campaign is the Strategy

If you could discover the best kept secret of the top Internet marketing firms, what would you do with it? Likely you would want to run out and put it to the test in your own Internet marketing campaign. But where do you start? Always with a goal. That goal has to be specific and it has to have a date attached to it. Say you want to sell 1000 teen clothing items by January 10. Once you define the goal, then it’s time to develop the path to reach the goal. This is the strategy.

You can use existing ad campaigns and align them to your strategy, or develop new ones. Maybe you’ll work with your digital marketing agency to create an animated character that tells people why they should subscribe to your awesome teen clothing newsletter. Your strategy is to use this character to get the teens signed up for the newsletter where they get coupons and insider news on all your latest teen clothing. You can also use the character for other parts of your campaign, driving towards your goal of selling the 1,000 teen clothing items.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Then why do some Internet marketing firms and their customers have trouble coming up with effective strategies? Lots of reasons. If all this were easy we wouldn’t have the #fails by brands we see on social media. Socialmediaweek.org presents three of the most recent, epic fails. Most of them deal with poor decisions about context; using messages and images in inappropriate contexts that can offend people.

So when creating your animated character, for example, you might want to have your agency do some research to ensure that the character is appropriate and in no way offensive.

A big part of strategy is being cognizant of current events. Presentation of your brand message has to not only move your campaign forward, it has to be inclusive — advertising today always includes the audience and its unique perspectives. The very best Internet marketing firms will ensure that your campaigns are based on this premise.

Making your strategy a success has to include identification of which channels you’ll use to achieve your goal. Customer research is key: If you find that your audience spends most of its time on Twitter and Instagram, then use those networks to present your message.

The tactics you’ll use to make your strategy work involve creation of irresistible content. So in our previous example, you’ll want to introduce your new character via multiple content touchpoints (blogs, video [short and long form], images, social media posts, etc.). It’s vital that you create an editorial calendar broken out into the various content categories, with dates, so you’ll know when and where your content will be posted. Plus you can use this calendar for tracking what worked and what didn’t, so you can zero in on which content helped push you closer to your goal.

Another key component to a successful strategy is timing. You can work with several Internet marketing firms who are really good at creating content, but the one that is also great at timing will be the one you want to stick with. By using a social media scheduling tool your agency can keep your message in front of your audience at the times they will be most likely to engage. Have your agency use a tool that also helps track your engagement so you can measure progress. This list of tools is a great place to start:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/254712

Frequent tracking and reporting using social tools and Google Analytics will help you move towards your goal within the time frame you and your agency prescribed.

Top Tip for Digital Marketing Campaign Success: Find ways to tie online to offline and vice versa. The top Internet advertising companies know how to do this. Make your campaign one that transcends online so people remember it and feel like it is uniquely applicable to them. You can successfully combine offline and online by adding social sharing icons to print ads. Provide special codes on direct mail postcards for redemption online. You can also offer codes to radio listeners so they can claim discounts online. These are but a few of the ideas you can use to tie offline with online. Remember that Internet marketing firms that develop a unified strategy offer you the best chance to achieve your marketing goal!