As a marketer, digital advertising should be a critical part of your marketing mix, helping you reach and engage qualified audiences. However, if you don’t start with a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, it’s likely that your ads will perform suboptimally.
When establishing a digital marketing strategy, you want to run ads across platforms where your audience spends the majority of their time. One platform will not meet all the needs of your business, so having a mix of advertisements across Google, Facebook and LinkedIn will allow you to be most effective and efficient with your media budget.
To ensure you’re creating ads that are both enticing and effective, you’ll want to develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy by following the guidelines below (or by asking your UPRAISE team to do it!)
Establish Your Objectives
Whether you’re trying to increase the awareness of your business or product, trying to increase sales, or trying to increase website traffic, you’ll need to start your digital marketing strategy by establishing clear objectives to help guide your campaigns. Your objectives will help to generate advertisements that are helpful, relevant and targeted at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Brand Awareness Objectives
If you’re a startup, you’re probably going to establish some form of brand awareness objectives. Brand awareness represents how familiar your target audience is with your brand or product. Brands with high brand awareness are generally referred to as “popular.” Establishing brand awareness is extremely valuable when marketing and promoting your company, especially in the early stages of your business. Brand awareness helps foster trust, creates an association and builds brand equity.
Acquisition Objectives
Many acquisition objectives are established around lead generation. Acquisition objectives are established based on the actions you want your audience to execute. For example, the objective of your ad could be to drive traffic to your website or take an action on your website such as downloading an eBook or whitepaper.
When developing your objectives, it’s important to assess key performance measures on how your digital channels are currently performing so you can ensure that your objectives are realistic and achievable.
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Establish Your Audiences
Once your goals are established, start to build your target audience within each ads account. Instead of being hyper-focused, consider a larger audience segment. This will allow you to reach a larger audience that can be focused over time. Each advertising network will be able to make updates to your advertisements based on the performance of your ads. Allow the advertising network to find your audience for you and spend your money more efficiently. Win-win.
Define Your Audience
To build your audiences in your Google, Facebook and LinkedIn Ads accounts, think about the characteristics that define them, like age, gender, interests, job title, etc., and what keywords they may search for.
Now, it’s time to get creative! Your advertisements should be thoughtful and customer-focused. Both the messaging and imagery should help solve problems for customers and prospects, speak to them and provide solutions.
Define Your Messaging
Advertising should be about solving problems for real customers, removing barriers in their research and path to purchase—this is what separates good advertising from bad. By personalizing your message for your prospects and customers, you are connecting with your audience and the individual viewing the ad.
Captivate Your Audience
You’ll need to accompany your ad with imagery that makes your audience stop scrolling and pay attention long enough to complete the call-to-action. The best images, graphics and video will vary by business and audience, but you can play around with various forms of media to identify which resonates best with your audience and measure it by which content elicits the most actions.
Measure Results and Optimize
You should be consistently monitoring how your ads are performing. Based on the goals and objectives you established, are your ads effective and efficient? If you set brand awareness objectives, some measurements you’ll want to look at are reach, impressions and views. For acquisition objectives, you’ll want to focus more on measuring calls, website visits and purchases, leads and conversions.
A unique benefit of digital advertising is the ability to make adjustments along the way. Digital ads are not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing tactic, they can (and should) be adjusted at any time. Once you’ve gathered an understanding of how your ads are performing, consider optimizations such as revising your bid, swapping out keywords, adjusting copy, etc.
Having a digital marketing strategy for your organization is essential to ensuring that your marketing activities are supporting specific marketing objectives. The rise in the number of different digital channels available to target your customer base is only continuing to grow as customers differentiate their online activities.
Are you ready to build your digital marketing strategy? UPRAISE can help! By building a sound framework to manage, monitor and measure your digital marketing performance, we build activity both at the bottom of the funnel (to close sales) as well as at the top (to build brand awareness and interest). Contact us to get started!