The 4 Pillars of a Strategic Digital Marketing Campaign

A common attribute among startups and SMBs is their limited capitalization. Many are reluctant to spend considerable amounts for marketing, allocating their budgets to core operations instead. Business owners should realize though that marketing is vital for the success and continuity of their business for it is through this process where new customers come in and new sales are generated.

What they need is a cost-effective channel like Digital Marketing that can deliver the results they need at a cost they can afford. Digital marketing is effective in generating business leads and at the same time provide considerable savings for business owners. Enterprises who utilize Digital Marketing channels enjoy 2.8 times better revenue growth as well as 3.3 times better opportunities for business expansion.

If you want to generate results like these, you need to start and embark on a strategic Digital Marketing campaign. But like any other endeavors or ventures, you need to establish yourself with the basics and carefully plan out your campaigns. You will need to fully understand and embrace these 4 pillars outlined in CJG’s “Marketing and Advertising Strategies in a Digital Media Environment” that was previously presented during The 4th EdukCircle International Convention on Marketing and Advertising.

Pillar #1 – Market Research

Consumers today are fully empowered and many enjoy the great freedom they have for choosing their purchasing options. As much as 80% of these consumers perform research on their own using whatever digital channels they have at their disposal. The key to Digital Marketing success is to get connected and engage with these types of consumers. To do this, you need to establish yourself with the first pillar of Digital Marketing – Market Research

1. Why is Market Research important?

• Market Research provides you with a better understanding of your clients
• Market Research clearly defined your Target Market
• Market Research helps you create a tailored marketing strategy
• Market Research helps you carefully plan your marketing ahead
• Market Research helps you create an optimized digital marketing strategy based on your allocated budget

2. How to do Market Research

• Identify the key products and services that needs promotion
• Identify the Unique Selling Point (USP) of these key products and services
• Identify the target market for these products/services (demographics, sex, age, interest)
• Identify the goals and objectives of the campaign. These may include:
  • Lead Generation
  • Increased social media followers
  • Boost brand awareness
  • Generate Sales
• Identify key competitors and check their current activities on social media as well as in other digital marketing channels

Pillar #2 – Marketing Strategy

Up to 137% of brands are ramping up on their multi-channel digital marketing strategies where they can integrate display, mobile, social and video marketing into their digital marketing mix. That’s how powerful and popular digital marketing is. However, to be effective in your campaigns, you need to strengthen up on the next pillar of Digital Marketing – Marketing Strategy.

1. Why is Marketing Strategy important?

• Marketing Strategy provides you with a clear roadmap on marketing
• Marketing Strategy provides you with a clear approach towards achieving business goals and objectives
• Marketing Strategy enables you to reach targeted audiences effectively
• Marketing Strategy ensures you spend your advertising budget wisely
• Marketing Strategy increases results, conversions and ultimately your profits

2. How to create a marketing strategy

• Goal setting (short term and long term)
• Decide on what approach to use: Direct or Indirect Marketing
• Choose which digital marketing channels and tactics to use
• Create irresistible offers and promotions
• Execute actual steps and strategies for implementation with each channel

3. Top Digital Marketing Channels and Strategies

• SEO or Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the process of making your website and business worthy for ranking at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is vital for your digital marketing campaign as up to 93% of online experiences begin by using a search engine. On top of that, up to 59% of search engine users find local businesses that satisfies their needs on a monthly basis.

• Good For: Businesses who have long term goals of appearing on the 1^st page of Search Engine results while getting free targeted traffic and exposure

• Social Media Marketing (Paid and Organic)

SMM is the process of utilizing the top social sites to create brand awareness, drive conversation and connect to the most targeted audience as possible. Social media users are increasing by up to 25% this 2015, that’s why up to 50% of businesses and digital marketers are planning to increase their SMM budgets this year.

• Good For: Businesses who want to increase brand awareness, reach more people, drive leads, generate contests and promos

• Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)

PPC Marketing is the process of using top PPC networks such as Google Adwords to reach potential customers who already have a need and are actively searching for products and services that can satisfy these needs online. PPC can deliver highly targeted traffic of potential customers within a very short period of time.

• Good For: Businesses who want to get targeted traffics quickly, generate leads, and increase sales and profits

• Facebook Marketing

Facebook Marketing is the process of using and maximizing Facebook’s advertising platform to boost brand awareness and reach more customers online. You can reach out to almost any kind of general consumer, you just need to learn in what groups and pages your targeted customer stay frequently go to at Facebook.

• Good For: Businesses who want to specifically use Facebook to reach out to a specific market and get traffic quickly

Pillar #3 – Marketing Implementation

Traditional advertising has lost its dominance and touch. Internet advertising already surpassed ad spending on cable and TV and this trend will continue on as more businesses embrace digital marketing. 72% of consumers want to connect with brands using integrated digital marketing strategies so it’s now high time for you to cash in with these opportunities by establishing yourself with the third pillar of Digital Marketing – Marketing Implementation.

1. Three Most Important Aspects of Marketing Implementation

• The actual marketing steps and guideline
• Stick to the marketing plan and strategy
• Work consistently

2. Keyword Research

Keyword Research is the process of uncovering and generating relevant and related keywords. In Semantic Search, focus has shifted away from popular search terms to the more user-centric long-tail keywords. They may be a few if each unique search term is taken individually but if taken as a whole they make up approximately 70% of the total search term volume.

• How to do Keyword Research

Top keyword research tools to use:

• Google Adwords Keyword Planner
• Ubersuggest
• Bing Keyword Research Tool

Formulas to get useful and relevant keywords:

• The Root Word method

Root Word of your business — ex: Digital Marketing

Root Word + Company — ex: Digital Marketing Company

Root Word + Services — ex: Digital Marketing Services

• The Medium and Long-Tail keywords formula

Root Words – 1-2 words and has a high search volume

Medium Tail Keywords – 2-3 words with medium search volume

Long Tail Keywords – 3-5 words with low search volume

• How to Do On-page Optimization
  

check this link out for more.

3. Content Creation

Content creation is very important and is at the core of every digital marketing strategy. That is why up to 73% of B2B marketers are ramping up on their content marketing strategies. Content, particularly epic content, can deliver lots of benefits for your digital marketing campaign so it’s vital that you focus on generating high quality content for your campaigns.

• Content Creation Ideas

• Content must be very useful and relevant to targeted audiences
• Ideas and tips should be in their right context
• Use credible information backed by citation from authority sources
• Content should be easy to understand
• Principles presented can be used directly by your targeted readers

• Most popular types of content

• Infographics
• Comprehensive blog posts and how-to guides
• Whitepaper or pdf
• Videos and animation
• Memes or funny images
• Podcast

4. Link Building

Links building is still a very important ranking factor for SEO in 2015, although search engines have changed the way they interpret backlinks. Focus now is not on the quantity of backlinks but on the quality of the pages from where the backlinks were generated, taking into consideration the relevance and social popularity of the source content.

• How to Build Backlinks

• Backlinks must be contained and built around relevant content
• Backlinks should not be generated by SPAM and other black hat resources
• Backlinks must be generated from sites that are relevant to your niche or market

• Most popular ways to build backlinks

• Content submission sites (slideshare, infographics, memes, etc)
• Guest posting
• Web 2.0 posting
• Classified Ads
• Link Outreach

Brand mentions have also taken center stage in modern link-building campaigns and should be taken into consideration in your own campaigns.

5. Social Media Marketing

If you haven’t realized it yet, already 92% of digital marketers believe that you can get more exposure for your brand and business when you promote them through social media marketing. One in every six minutes is spent by online users now on social networks, so just imagine the tremendous marketing mileage you can reach through this channel.

• The Anatomy of a Successful Social Marketing Campaign

• Optimization
• Optimize social profiles for maximum social media presence
• Create custom and visually appealing cover photos

• Cultivation
• Share thought-provoking and highly engaging posts and images
• Consistent posting is the key to cultivate social media fans
• Engage, reshare, and like interesting posts from related pages
• Respond quickly to comments. Facebook users expect responses within 24 hours while Twitter users expect a reply within 2 hours
  

• Paid Social Media Marketing
• Paid marketing is the fastest and most effective way to reach prospective customers and clients
• Use paid marketing channel of Facebook to reach more people efficiently. Up to 1.5 million businesses are already investing in Facebook Ads, spending up to 122% more on ads than what they were used to

6. PPC Marketing

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing is one of the best digital marketing tools according to 88% of respondents in a previous SEOMoz industry survey. PPC can generate as much as 64.6% clicks, making it the second most effective lead generation tool next to SEO according to 91% of digital marketing experts.

• How to do PPC Marketing

• Keywords
• Keywords must be related to specific products or services
• Keywords must be studied carefully
• Keywords must be segregated per products or services

• AD Messages
• Has features or benefits
• Has proper placed keywords
• Has call to action

• Landing Page
• Powerful headline
• Must speak directly to visitors
• Has call to action

• USP
• Irresistible offers
• Exclusive offer and promotion
• Very unique products or services

7. Facebook Marketing

Social media networks like Facebook has literally taken the business world by storm. Facebook is – backed by more than 1.28 billion Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and 1.01 billion Mobile Active Users – a formidable force to reckon with in this digital marketplace. It is of no wonder why 30 million enterprises have their own Facebook business page and even more are joining and setting up their own pages as we speak.

• How to do Facebook Marketing

AD Objectives

• Choose 1-2 AD objectives based on marketing goals
• AD objectives must be discussed and properly researched
  

AD Messages

• Has features or benefits
• Has call to action
  

Landing Page

• Powerful headline
• Must speak directly to the visitors
• Has call to action
  

USP

• Irresistible offers
• Exclusive offers and promotion
  

Target Audience

• Location
• Age Bracket
• Interest
  

What kind of results do you want for your ads?

• Clicks to website
• Website conversions
• Page post engagement
• Page likes
• App installs
• App engagements
• Event responses
• Offer claims
• Video views
  

Audience Definition and Targeting

• Age range
• Gender
• Languages
• Interests
• Behaviors
  

Facebook also offers Facebook Insights which gives valuable information on your social media presence. This includes identifying where majority of your “likes” come from or to identify if most of the likers in your page are middle-aged men or women. This will allow you to streamline your Facebook marketing campaigns to generate even better and bigger results.

Pillar #4 – Marketing Analysis and Optimization

While many have succeeded in their Digital Marketing campaigns, many have also failed miserably. In many cases, the reason for failure is not that the campaigns lack creativity, quality materials and qualified personnel but because they failed to establish the fourth pillar in Digital Marketing – Marketing Analysis and Optimization.

• Why is Marketing Analysis and Optimization important?
  

Don’t be like the 54% of unsuccessful marketers who say failed to invest and prioritized marketing analysis and optimization. Through marketing analysis, tests and optimization, business can get the following benefits:

• Identify what’s working and what’s not
• Check which marketing channels produce the most traffic and conversions
• Check your visitor’s demographics and behavior
• Uncover new opportunities
• Check which keywords have the most traffic (and use them later for paid ads)

• 3 Most Important Aspects Of Analysis And Optimization

• Web analytics utilization
• Data analysis
• Optimized activities and re-planning based on actual data

Top 3rd party analytics

• Google Analytics — This is a free application provided by Google itself that allows you to track various information about traffic and other information about your website

• Clicky – Is a good web analytics too that can monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web site\’s traffic in real time.
• Statcounter– is a web traffic analysis tool that can be used 100% free of charge to monitor actual human activity in real-time

• HubSpot – This is a good analytics platform that can help you measure traffic and inbound marketing that is ideal for use by small businesses

• Adobe Marketing Cloud – This integrated platform can provide you with good real-time and predictive analysis of your website performance

• GoSquared – This is another platform for real-time performance monitoring which also features a good eCommerce reporting channel to help you track revenues and ROI

• Moz Analytics – Moz is a comprehensive analytics platform that combine search, social, social listening and inbound marketing analytics

• Webtrends – This platform can provide you with multi-channel measurement that includes web, mobile and social analyticss

Top Hosted analytics

• Piwik
• Open Web Analytics

Top Web Analytics Metrics to keep in mind

• Visitors
• Pageviews
• Traffic Referrals
• Traffic Sources
• Average Session Duration
• Percentage of New Sessions
• Demographics
• Mobile and Desktop Users

The marketing and business world is continuously evolving. To get on top of the game and compete effectively in your niche market, it is important that you make use of effective digital marketing tools to spearhead your overall marketing campaign. Put your business in the right track by establishing these 4 pillars that will give you a strong, robust and effective digital marketing campaign.