Create Effective Marketing Campaigns
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Summarize how marketers can meet the needs of all-digital customers.
- List ways marketers can optimize their campaigns.
Engage the All-Digital Customer
Customers’ needs and behaviors are changing fast every day. More and more customers are expecting digital experiences across all of their brand interactions, and ecommerce continues to grow exponentially.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, brands are increasingly taking their business online to reach customers. However, connecting with customers digitally takes much more than spinning up a digital storefront. Brands must transform every part of their marketing process to ensure they’re meeting the needs and expectations of their all-digital customers.
What does this transformation involve, exactly? Well, to engage customers, marketers are tasked with the following.
- Developing strategies to connect with customers on a variety of channels—including email, social platforms, and mobile apps.
- Personalizing touchpoints and experiences all along the customer journey using data-driven insights.
- Accomplishing all of this efficiently within budget while meeting business goals.
Marketers can make this transformation successful by optimizing their marketing campaigns.
What Is Campaign Optimization?
During campaign optimization, marketers assess the performance of their media and adjust their strategies to maximize customer engagement and ROI. This involves planning and pacing—or determining where, when, and how often they run a campaign.
When done well, optimization allows marketers to do the following.
- Proactively understand their campaigns’ performance against business objectives and adjust with agility.
- Make decisions based on data.
- Intelligently allocate budget at every step of the campaign.
- Create, manage, and analyze media plans in a centralized place.
Optimization requires both brands and agencies to take a closer look at their processes, systems, partners, and budgets and consider some key questions.
- How can we ensure that every dollar of our budget is being spent effectively?
- How can we create more value for our clients and provide greater transparency?
- How can we be more efficient and drive growth from every investment?
- How can we get a holistic view of our customers so we can quickly pivot to meet their changing needs?
By asking and answering these questions, marketers take the first step toward boosting campaign performance. There are additional strategies marketers can use to effectively plan and pace their campaigns.
Here are four ways marketers can optimize to deliver messages that make a big impact—and result in big payoffs.
Channel: Marketers should always look to optimize their campaigns across channels such as search, social media, display, and TV so they can deliver the right message. A clear panoramic view of all campaigns and channels in one place—complete with KPIs and insights—makes it easier to identify which campaigns to double down on and which ones to pause.
Audience: Customers are expecting brands to know them, and offer personalized experiences along the way. That means marketers need to know when to activate the right message for the right audience at the right time. Marketers need to fine-tune those messages so that they’re relevant to customers at any stage in their buying journey. They can do this by drilling down to see how content, creative, and keywords impact business results and customer experience.
Web and social: This optimization focuses on connecting marketing efforts with media influence (news articles, social media, and so on). Website, SEO, and social media are critical ways for customers to find brands. Marketers should look to connect those channels so they can get a more holistic view of how paid and organic programs interact, boost their best content, and improve campaigns to get quality traffic.
Public relations: PR and social buzz can help to boost customer loyalty to brands and products. It’s important to use data to better understand ROI and use those insights to influence marketing and the business as a whole. This step lets marketers answer questions such as these.
- How much brand awareness did the last launch generate?
- How many sales can a viral meme create?
- How does our corporate communications impact our organic search and social engagement?
Join us in the next unit to learn the importance of campaign planning and pacing, along with more ways to optimize your marketing.