1. Having Clear and Identified Goals
Whether it is attracting new customers or just raising awareness, knowing what it is you exactly want to achieve will ensure that your campaign has a firm foundation to be built on. The key to this is identifying your goals. In other words: ‘What do you want to achieve from your campaign?’
You might be launching a new product or promotion and want more sales, or you may have undergone a rebrand and want to announce it. Having these clear and identified goals will not only make measuring its success far more straightforward, but it can often mean more cost-effective results.
2. Knowing Your Audience
If you run a marketing campaign to the wrong audience, you may as well throw your money away. Imagine, for example, your business sells baby food, it would be far more effective to target parents who recently had children than a bachelor who is living alone. Knowing your audience is paramount to a successful marketing campaign.
Audience is more than demographic targeting though – where your campaign appears is also key to its success. There would be little point advertising diesel motor spares on an electric car enthusiast’s website. Making sure your adverts are running in the right place to the right people is paramount to their success.
3. Using The Right Platforms
Following on from the previous point, it is vital to use the correct platform for a successful marketing campaign.
Advertising through search engines such as Google and Bing is a great way of attracting new customers searching for a specific product. When users type in a keyword, the search engines return results most relevant to that keyword. They also show sponsored ads, paid for by advertisers to show when a specific keyword has been entered.
These platforms also offer a wide variety of campaign types for different purposes – the aforementioned text ads, visual display ads that show on partner websites, video adverts appearing on sites like YouTube, and remarketing ads that ‘follow’ a user around to drive traffic back to your website.
Other platforms such as Facebook allow for even more specific audience targeting. For example, you could if you run a yoga class to women over 40, you can target women over 40 who like yoga.
4. Measuring Its Success
Tying everything together is the ultimate pay-off. Once the campaign has run its course, measurement of its success is directly related to the first point in this article. Some goals can be directly measured – completing an enquiry form on a website can be tracked through Google Analytics; others, such as awareness campaigns, are more abstract in their results. It’s key to use the available metrics - like the number of people who have seen your ad - to gauge how much business has been generated from them.
All in all, the points above are what our team of experts have learned through experience. Online marketing is constantly changing so it's essential to the success of your business that your understand how to market yourself successfully. If you want to know more on any aspect of online marketing, get in touch with us