Today, we continue our “Getting Started” series of blog posts. Strategy, is a loaded word. By strategy, we are specifically speaking about understanding what you want to learn (what insights you want!), what the priority is, and how we will go about defining our approach. For each element we identify as an important, where we want to obtain an “insight”, we will need to isolate that element to measure its impact. (You will note that we know delve straight into tactical concerns!) For starters, let’s break down our marketing campaign into three core elements:

Audience - This is the “who” we are targeting. Understanding what audiences “perform” well is critical to our campaign’s long-term success. We generally counsel our clients to start with audience identification tests. Once an audience is defined and its scale is understood, the other elements are easier to apply. Gotta know who to speak to, right?

Offer - Traditionally, the offer is the price point or other commerce-related attribute (e.g. Free Shipping) that entices a targeted audience member to convert. But, an “offer” can also be a Call-to-Action. We often identify the offer with the question “What are you asking the target audience to do?”. The answer is generally your offer. After audience, this is a critical element to test. Should you ask your audience to “buy now” or maybe “sign up for our newsletter” or “learn more” is a more productive offer? Testing will reveal the answer.

Creative - Creative is how you communicate the offer to the target audience. Most marketers think of the creative first. In the long run, it is the most important component of your digital marketing campaign. But, it only becomes important with your audiences and offers are understood.

Landing Page - In digital marketing the landing page is so important yet so often overlooked or relegated to a secondary concern. We often hear, “We already have a landing page?”. A landing page is distinct from other web pages on your site. A landing page should facilitate a “soft landing” for your campaign clicks. Ideally, it contains relevant content and a similar look and feel to your ad creative. You are paying for every click (or paying for the media to generate the click) and an effective landing page is one of your best tools for ensuring those paid clicks don’t bounce away from your site. A campaign landing page should be considered a critical campaign component that should be tested early in your marketing efforts. (Note: Google and Facebook both have declared the importance of the landing page. Google’s “Quality Score” and Facebook’s “Relevance Score” are partly based on their measurement of the relevance of your landing page as it pertains to your keywords/ad.)

This is just an overview of the initial steps of developing an effective marketing strategy. We’d love to talk to you more about getting started on developing a digital marketing strategy that can meet your marketing goals. Next week we’ll discuss probably my favorite topic, measurement and reporting. I’ll do my best to make it less dry than normal.

Well, maybe it is. There are a bunch of considerations you should understand before hiring an agency, a consultant, or even giving it a go on your own.

Here are a few things to think about as you start down the path of campaigning:

Objectives - An objective is a qualitative statement that defines a favorable outcome. Example objective statements might include:

Increase awareness about our product or service
Obtain New Customers
Generate Revenue
Sell Product X

Goals - A Goal is a quantification of the objective. Goal statements for the objectives listed above might look something like:

Serve 5MM impressions driving 5,000 new site visitors to our website in a month.
Obtain 250 new customers in a month at a cost of no more than $X per new customer.
Generate $5,000 Revenue in a month.
Sell 250 units in a month.

The exercise of goal setting will help you understand what a reasonable budget might be, what reasonable cost per conversion might be and even what reasonable expectations might look like. Is your goal reasonably obtainable? DO NOT RUN A CAMPAIGN WITHOUT STATING YOUR OBJECTIVES AND GOALS.

Budget - You will be asked by every partner, consultant, agency, “What is your budget?”. Budgets at the beginning, are tricky but there are a few ideas to consider:

Goals - If your goal is to sell a low priced item, like an e-book, your budget will be, by necessity, very different than if you are selling enterprise software platforms. Your budget will need to be realistic to what for your goal/objective.

Start as Small as Possible - There will be time to “go big” and ramp up budgets after you have proved out your campaigns. Small is better. Understand what the minimal, viable budget is to complete any tests you have designed. Small means less risk, easier to control campaigns, and less variables to understand and isolate.

Time Horizon and Investment - It is unlikely you will boot up a campaign and it will crank out significant returns in the short term. It will likely take investing money in campaigns that don’t provide much in the way of conversions to understand what will and won’t work. It takes time and investment to find the elements that come together to achieve your marketing goals.

Statistical Validity - This is where the quantitative wonks start shaking their fingers at you. We’ll go into this in greater detail in a subsequent blog post, but Statistical Validity determines whether or not you can rely upon the results of a test or trial campaign to be repeatable in the future. If your campaign results and not statistically valid, you have learned nothing as the results are not reliable. Your budget needs to be large enough to obtain a statistically valid result. There are many variables that come into play when considering statistical validity and we’ll cover those in a future blog post.

Landing Page(s) - You will NEED a landing page. Many initial marketers (and even some experienced) marketers will try to land campaign traffic on an existing page on the site or God forbid, your homepage. In most cases that attempted shortcut undercuts all impacts a campaign will have. In order to effectively utilize a marketing budget, a campaign-specific landing page should be created.

Website - This probably comes across as ‘Duh”, but really, you need to consider your site carefully when using it as a destination for paid traffic. Is the “content’ valuable? Will audiences find it useful, entertaining or, hopefully, both? To be clear, the only way to really know is to traffic some media, obtain some clicks, see how those site visitors behave and review the platforms relevance data. You will find out quickly if the world considers your site content “relevant” or not. Be prepared for your content to be proven NOT relevant. This is very common.

Channels - Which channels should you utilize? Paid Search? Display? Social? All? None? This is a fairly nuanced discussion, but initial efforts should probably utilize, at least, Paid Search as it provides access to quality audience whose intent is often revealed by the keywords queried. Depending upon the channels chosen you will need to consider appropriate site tags.

Testing Strategy - Entire books are written on this subject. For the moment, just consider the three elements of any marketing offer and how you can test these elements. For the most part, the insights you will harvest from any campaign are those the you design into a campaign. There is a misconception that insights are a natural product of campaigns. Fortunately for we marketing professionals, that is not the case!

Measurement Protocol - What is measured, when it is measured, and how it is measured and presented are important topics will cover soon. Measurement is paramount, but it needs to be efficient and with just enough detail for management teams to evaluate performance and make decisions about marketing programs.

Talent - Do you have a team? Are they internal staff? Freelancers/Consultants? An agency? Just yourself? All of these are options and all have benefits/costs. As a Freelancer/Consultant, I think that is a great option, but I’ll be clear if I think it is not right for you. If your budget and goals are large enough, perhaps an agency is the right path? Or maybe you want to run your own campaigns? Be prepared to make mistakes that cost you money, but maybe this will turn into a long-run great decision that will allow you to run your own campaigns. No matter what you choose, it is important to find a solution that will work well for you now and in the future.

This is a lot of detail, maybe more than you really wanted at this stage. But these details and a fair amount of complexity are what a good marketing partner worries about on your behalf. Watch out for charlatans that promise the application of Artificial Intelligence and zippy sounding technology to create easy, fast gains. It is work, often not very sexy work. Pay attention to the basics and preparation and you might find that digital marketing efforts are incredibly productive for you, given proper investment, testing and time.

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