How to Set Up a Digital Marketing and Advertising Campaign
You want to put together a digital marketing and advertising campaign but you do not know where to start here’s how:
- Define your campaign goals and objectives
Before you start you need to decide exactly what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign. Be very clear. When I say goals, it could be conversions, you’re trying to sell a certain number of products or maybe if you own a hotel you want to sell a certain number of rooms within let’s say a month. It could be followers you want to hit a certain number of followers on your social media platforms from where you are now to where you want to get to. It could be engagement you want, for people to talk about your brand. You want to be able to engage them and have conversations but if you go to the engagement make sure you can measure that engagement it could be you want to create brand awareness and what does brand awareness mean? You also have to decide that’s what the goal is going to be or like most campaigns you might want to generate leads. You want to do a campaign where people are asked to either fill in a form or submit some data that allows you to be able to follow up, later on, to lead them down the path to conversion whatever possible.
- Define your target audience
You canât be everything for everyone. You have to know or decide who you’re trying to sell to and where they are. Are you a national company where you have stores? Are you regional trying to reach people in Tanzania or Kigali or Entebbe or are you just really trying to target people who are within a certain neighbourhood? It’s a narrow beam so define your target audience again where they are and who they are naturally. Survey who they are or you can even look at who your competition is targeting and the goal here is to try and build a niche or people who are more likely to engage the brand or buy the product or service.
- Develop your customer or buyer persona
Take your customer as a person and describe who they are and how this will work is that youâll be able to use this personâs description of who they are when you are targeting your campaign messaging. An example would be; this is a Sharon; Sharon is a software engineer. You describe her demographics and then you say that she is into let’s say travel, she follows politics and she loves pets. That way when you’re coming up with your targeting then you know exactly what profile to use to come up with the correct group of people to talk to.
- Define your budget
If youâre going to have a successful campaign, you’re going to spend money on these digital platforms. You are going to run ads. You have to agree on how much money are you willing to spend to hit your target and the targets are based on the objective. Be realistic because we cannot say that you’re trying to get to a thousand orders and you only need to spend a thousand shillings. So look at what you are trying to achieve whether its conversions, Leads, how many people you are trying to reach and then work backward to come up with a certain amount of money that you know you need to spend on these platforms to reach that magic number of people in your target audience that you need to convert to get to your goal. Define and stick to your budget then run your ads based on your budget and you should be able to achieve your goal.
5. Select the digital platforms or channels
To run the campaign remember we spoke about going through the process of defining and developing your customers’ persona and the process of deciding what your budget is. A combination of these two factors will help you decide which channels are best suited for running a campaign because if you know who you’re targeting, you have an idea where your target audience would be spending their time on in the digital platforms. Some people depending on their persona will spend more on Facebook versus the websites or more on Twitter than Instagram. So be clear about what platforms you want to run your campaign on. And again, use the homework youâve already developed in building your customer persona and in defining your budgets to help you to decide on the best channel for a successful campaign.
So, there you have it. You’ve gone through the steps, you’ve done your due diligence, you’ve done your homework so now all you have to do is just execute. Happy selling!