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“Half my advertising spend is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” So said either British industrialist Lord Leverhulme or American retail magnate John Wanamaker. However, this struggle doesn’t have to affect small business owners today. With an effective campaigns management strategy, you can create an omnichannel digital marketing campaign and track your most (and least) successful efforts.
Thanks to marketing automation and sophisticated campaign management software, it’s now possible to see where virtually every new sale and lead comes from. Collecting these insights may be the last step in your campaigns management strategy, but they’ll help you design and manage more effective future campaigns at every step of the way — from pre-launch to post-mortem.
In this article, we’ll share how to set up your marketing campaigns. We’ll walk you through pre-launch strategies that will set you up for maximum success on each marketing channel, and we’ll cover how to track your efforts once they’re underway.
Campaigns Management Techniques for 5 Digital Marketing Channels
Here are techniques to create a successful marketing campaign that will reach clients and prospects across five digital channels. Plus, we’ll share the metrics you need to analyze your campaign’s efficacy in real-time so you can see if your campaign’s management strategy is working.
1. Social Media Marketing
Many brands now allocate a significant portion of their marketing budget to promoting themselves on social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, because of the impressive returns.
Pre-Launch
Thanks to social media campaign management tools, you can precisely target the consumers and business decision-makers you want to reach.
Select the groups that reflect your target audience the most, and design your social media ad campaigns around them.
Ongoing Campaigns Management
There are two types of content you’ll need to create: organic (content that appears in your followers’ newsfeed free of charge) and paid (advertisement that appears for potential new customers).
Plan your organic content 3-4 weeks in advance so that each suggested post can go through the marketing team for amendment, improvement, and approval before it goes live.
For paid content, segment audience groups by demographics to promote the products and services that are most likely to interest each of your target demographics. This makes the content feel personalized, which will help you build stronger connections with your audience.
Measuring Success
Brands seek high levels of engagement with both paid-for and organic content. The higher the number of likes, comments, and shares, the better.
As part of your campaign’s management strategy, you can embed specific URLs to monitor click-through rates to track sales and leads from posts and from your profile page. This strategy can also help you measure cost-per-sale and cost-per-lead metrics.
2. Influencer Marketing on Social Media
Another social media strategy is influencers—social media account holders who’ve built up an online audience based on their knowledge of, experience with, and insights into certain topics.
They’re called “influencers” because their followers often end up taking action or making a choice based on what the account holder has posted.
Pre-Launch
The most successful influencer marketing campaigns are genuine partnerships between brands and influencers.
Make sure that you only consider influencers who regularly post content on the types of products and services you sell. Then, choose influencers with the highest engagement rates and whose quality of content is exceptional.
Reach out to them to introduce your brand and explain why you believe your products are a good fit for their audience.
Ongoing Campaigns Management
Think of influencers as team members and get them involved in your workflow when you come up with campaign content and a marketing strategy for their audience. Make them a true stakeholder in the process.
Remember that influencers are content creation specialists who have built their following, authority, and credibility organically. They have a natural talent for promotion and a reservoir of goodwill from their follower base, which your brand can tap into.
Mix up the type of sponsored content you create to keep engagement with your influencer’s followers as high as possible.
Measuring Success
Even the best in-house social media campaigns struggle to achieve the levels of engagement that influencers do.
Use the social media platforms’ performance dashboards to see whether your influencer’s content meets your goals.
You can also track growth in your own follower count, click-throughs to your website, and new sales and leads during the time that you’re running your influencer campaign.
3. Influencer Marketing on Niche Sites and Blogs
Although not as high profile as influencer marketing on social media, partnering with specialist sites and blogs that cover the types of products you sell is also an effective marketing approach.
Pre-Launch
Reach out to niche websites and bloggers that may have already reviewed your products and services or your competitors’ products and services in the past.
Check the quality of the posts and articles on their website. Are they of high enough quality for you to want to associate them with your brand? Is there enough relevant content on their website about the types of products and services you sell?
You may also wish to use a marketing tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush to check traffic levels to these sites and find out which pages have been the most popular over time.
Ongoing Campaigns Management
Many websites, bloggers, and YouTubers receive sample packs from partners. Then, they write reviews of the products.
The most popular websites and bloggers won’t give brands any editorial control over their content. This strategy has an element of risk attached because, although a good review may lead to increased sales, a bad review may dent sales.
As with social media influencers, you need to do some project management in your dealings with websites and bloggers. One strategy to get favorable headlines may be to send early notification of new products or of changes to existing products so that your blogger can be the one to “break the news.”
You could also offer a blog’s readers special pricing on a particular product or service for a limited time. You can incentivize a blogger further by giving them an affiliate link to the discounted product and offering a commission for any sales or leads their post generates.
Measuring Success
After a blog uploads a review of a new product or service, check to see how many people have clicked through to your website. You could also measure the amount of traffic that’s come to your website from each partner site.
4. Content Marketing and SEO
Content marketing and SEO are closely related.
Good SEO, or search engine optimization, helps websites rank higher on Google search results pages. The higher the ranking, the greater the level of traffic you’ll get.
Part of SEO is content marketing.
Content marketing is the creation of high-quality written and visual materials — like blog posts and landing pages — designed to educate, inform, and engage existing and potential customers. For SEO to be successful, you need to produce high-quality content.
Pre-Launch
You should create content for each stage of the customer journey — from discovering your brand to investigating your brand to making a purchase — to answer their questions and convince them that:
- Your product or service is the best option to solve their problem or fulfill their need
- Your brand is the most capable of delivering the outcome they want
You should also examine whether there are any technical issues that may be harming your SEO efforts such as slow page loads, no sitemaps, broken links, missing ALT tags, and so on.
Ongoing Campaigns Management
Although there is no agreement on how often brands should post new content, there is a broad consensus that brands should post regularly.
The number of times Google crawls your website (or browses it for information) is determined by how many times it spots new content on your site. Give Google a reason to come back to your website as often as possible so that it gets to know your brand really well.
Also, check the technical performance of your website to see if there are any opportunities for improvement.
Measuring Success
There are four main metrics you can track to measure your SEO and content marketing success:
- Quantity of visitors: The number of people who visit your website
- Quality of visitors: The number of people who buy your product or leave their contact details for follow-up (usually expressed as a percentage of the number of visitors)
- Prospect database growth: The number of people not at the buying stage yet who sign up for an email list
- Backlinks: The number of other sites who link to your content, a reflection of the quality of content on your site
5. Email Marketing
Brands love email marketing because it has a very high ROI ($36 turnover for every $1 spent), you can get campaigns out quickly (within hours of ideation), and it’s very inexpensive compared with other forms of direct marketing. Here’s how to manage an email marketing campaign.
Pre-Launch
Not every customer or prospect is the same. Use the functionality within your CRM system to segment customers and prospects into “special interest groups.”
Only send customers content that matches their interests. The more closely the content of your emails matches the interests of recipients, the higher your click-throughs and sales will be.
Ongoing Campaigns Management
In email marketing, regularity is important. Your subscribers should expect to see your email on a certain day or at a certain time. Be careful not to leave too long between each campaign or you risk undermining the recognition you’ve built up in subscribers’ minds.
Varying the type of content you send out is also a factor in achieving the highest rates of engagement. If you keep sending the same offer time and again, you’ll be training your subscribers not to open your emails because they know there’s no new content.
As with your social media content calendar, you should plan out your email content calendar 3-4 weeks in advance so that it’s of the highest quality and you have time to change it.
Measuring Success
No matter how good your segmentation is, there will be errors in it.
One way to check for potential errors is to isolate subscribers who rarely open or click through to your website. This is a sign that they may be in the wrong group.
As part of your campaigns management, look at the people in this segment again to see if some or all of them would be easier to market to in a brand new segment or if they can be reassigned into already existing segments.
The right frequency of emails can also be hard to judge.
For brands like Groupon, we expect to receive an email every day because that’s their raison d’etre, but this would be too much for most companies and might lead to a spike in your unsubscribe rate. Experiment with different sending schedules to see which frequency leads to the highest revenue with the lowest number of unsubscribes.
Last, look at sales and leads generated.
Most email campaigns point through to a landing page. Experiment with different landing page designs and copy to determine which layout, which style of writing, and which offers deliver the best returns.
Master Multichannel Marketing With Effective Campaigns Management
Coming up with marketing campaigns is difficult. It was hard 20 years ago, but it’s far more complex now because of the many marketing channels available online.
Marketing campaign management is also challenging because of the sheer volume of data generated by search engines, social media platforms, and campaign management tools.
That said, the internet has made it much quicker and less expensive for brands to scale and grab market share.
Markerly has 10 years’ experience working with brands to maximize their returns on online marketing. From social media to influencer marketing, we’ve worked with clients as diverse as Coca-Cola, Dasani, Nike, Camelbak, Nordstrom, Levi’s, TruMoo, Lyft, Kraft, Beyond Meat, LiveNation, NFL, FitTea, and more.
Contact us to learn how we can help with your campaigns management.
