Let’s say you’ve got a great idea for a new digital marketing campaign and can’t wait to get it off the ground. You’re sure it will do well because you’ve done your homework, and the messaging and designs are really strong. But it would be easy to sabotage yourself by being too hasty and leaving out some critical steps when setting up your campaign.
The steps we’ve outlined below might seem like less interesting work, sometimes even admin (groan), but it’s important to include them to give your campaign the best chance of success. Skipping them will invariably undermine all the hard work that went into its other components and ultimately lead to disappointing results.
So, what must you remember to include on your campaign setup checklist?
Topic clusters
Structuring your content in topic clusters has been the best way to optimise your content for SEO ever since search engines began to focus on topic-based content. This entails writing an umbrella topic (or pillar page) with in-depth subsidiary content pieces that link to it, each focused on different aspects of the broader topic. This way, you can fully explore a topic using multiple pages, each optimised for specific related keywords.
This practice creates a solid foundation for your SEO efforts, building authority and improving your ranking in engine results for each page in your topic cluster while helping your audience find the information they’re looking for.
Keyword research
Keywords might not be as important as they once were for SEO, but they’re still very important, meaning you must do your keyword research. That entails finding the exact terms that your audience is using and finding opportunities to use keywords and phrases that are less competitive which your content could potentially rank for.
Competitor analysis
It’s so important to understand what you’re up against. Competitor analysis will provide the information you need about the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and find gaps that you might be able to exploit. Using this insight to hone your strategy can give you a real competitive edge.
A reporting plan
The beautiful thing about digital marketing is the ability to analyse the results in detail and show the value of your efforts to your company’s executives or your clients. A digital marketing results report will look at the metrics that matter most to your campaign and offer meaningful insight into its performance.
The first task is to determine what those metrics will be. Data visualisation lets you deliver this information impactfully and makes it easier to assess what’s working and what isn’t while emphasising achievements.
A reporting dashboard
You need to have ready access to this data in real-time, and a reporting dashboard is a platform that puts it all at your fingertips. This will allow you to respond quickly to double down on something that works, such as boosting a post that performs well. You don’t want to be flying blind, so you need a campaign report dashboard configured to your requirements so that your team can easily keep track of the important numbers.
The right platforms
There’s an array of platforms to assist digital marketers with tools for control and oversight. You need to be sure that your platforms offer the tools you need to be as effective as possible and not impede you with restrictions and blind spots.
Platforms you’re sure to need include:
CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is software that tracks customer information and all of their interactions with your brand to help you optimise the customer experience.
Social media
Be sure to make the most of social media by setting up business accounts on the social media platforms where your customers are most likely to be found.
Marketing automation tools
By leveraging automation, you can amplify your efforts, increasing scale and efficiency while offering a greater degree of personalisation to your customers and improving their overall experience. Email and social media marketing are prime examples of platforms where automation tools can provide tremendous value.
Paid media account creation
Paid media platforms such as Google Ads offer a wealth of insight and tools to manage the paid elements of a campaign. Set up an account and learn as much as you can about the functionality offered before launching your campaign.
Get all your bases covered
Executing a digital marketing campaign properly is a lot of work and it certainly helps to have some expertise on your side. That’s something we can provide as we take care of all the nuts and bolts to set your campaign up for success.
Learn more about the impact that the right approach to digital marketing can have by taking a look at these strategy-changing digital marketing statistics.
