What Is a Digital Marketing Campaign & How Do You Create One?

What is a digital marketing campaign?

A digital marketing campaign is a strategic approach to promoting products or services online, using various tactics such as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and content creation.

In this video, Dylan from the WebFX Earned Media team will tell you all about creating amazing digital marketing campaigns, so you can see a boost in customers and revenue for your company. 

Transcript:  I’m going to assume that you’ve interacted with a business’s digital marketing campaigns before. You may have seen digital ads, blog content, emails, videos…and probably a lot more.  All of these things can be a part of your own digital marketing strategy, so I’m going to tell you how to use your business’s resources to create a digital marketing campaign plan that actually works. But how do you define a digital marketing campaign? Let’s talk about that first. 

What is a digital marketing campaign?

A digital marketing campaign is a series of online promotional strategies that aim to grow your business’s online and/or offline presence. A digital marketing campaign can include both paid and unpaid strategies.

Typically, unpaid marketing strategies are referred to as, “organic,” while paid strategies involve some level of spend or investment. 

What does a digital marketing campaign include?

Some common strategies you’ll find in a digital marketing campaign plan are:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Digital advertising
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Web design
• And more!

You’ll hear more about these strategies in just a bit. 

What is the goal of a digital marketing campaign?

Generally, the goal of your digital marketing campaigns is to grow your business, but how you go about that varies from company to company. Some businesses may want to increase website traffic, while others might see conversions as a more valuable key performance indicator (KPI).  You’ll also learn more about setting campaign goals in this video, so don’t go anywhere.

How to create your digital marketing campaign plan

You shouldn’t create an online marketing campaign without first making a plan — unless you’re investing in digital marketing campaign management. Planning your campaigns might not be as glamorous as launching them, but it’s definitely just as important.  A plan helps guide your strategy so that everything you do aligns with your brand and your goals. You don’t want to end up with a disjointed campaign that’s way over your budget, do you?  I didn’t think so.  I’m going to start with the basics.

1. Decide whether to hire an agency or work in-house

Would you rather your marketing be handled by an outside agency or an in-house team? Or would a small in-house team be best supplemented by an agency’s services? Each choice has its pros and cons.  With an agency, some of the pros are their expertise from working on many campaigns, access to software and tools that could cost your business a lot of money, and the ability to easily add on new services without having to train or hire someone new.  On the flip side, some cons are that the agency might not be near your location, and you may not have as much control over the day-to-day tasks for your strategy.  Honestly, though, a good agency will have a lot of processes in place to keep you in the loop, encourage feedback, and show exactly how your budget is driving results.  The benefits of an in-house team include its accessibility (since they’re direct employees), complete control over the strategy, and 100% focus on your business.  But going in-house can cost a lot in time and resources, like software costs, team salaries, and training. And the expertise is limited to who you hire, so expanding to a new marketing channel might require more training or recruiting.   If you hire an agency, most of the steps I’ll cover in the rest of this video can be handled by your agency team.

But they’re helpful to know about, nonetheless. 

Bonus video: Weighing the pros and cons of an agency and an in-house team

2. Understand your business

Are you taking notes?  Most businesses want the public to see them in a specific way. Branding can help with that.

Know your brand

Your brand is much more than your logo and the colors you use on your website, although those are very important. Your brand also includes your business’s personality or tone. Are you laid back?

Sassy? Scholarly? However you’d describe your business, you should make sure to communicate with that tone in mind across all of your marketing channels. 

Identify your unique selling propositions (USPs)

In addition to your tone, you should be aware of what makes your business different from all other businesses.  If you’re having trouble identifying your USPs, ask yourself why someone should give you their hard-earned money.

Why is your business better than the rest? It could be that your yogurt shop makes everything from scratch, or your plumbing company guarantees service at all hours of the day.  Whatever your USPs are, you’ll want to mention them in your digital marketing campaigns. 

Fine-tune your audience targeting 

The goal of digital marketing is not to cast a wide net and hope some of the people who see your stuff become your customers. We’re here to target a specific audience, so there’s a better chance your efforts are seen by the right people.  Creating personas can help put a face to the people who have previously invested in your products or services.  Who typically interacts with your business, whether online or in-person? What do they like to do in their free time?

What type of information are they looking for? If your audience consists of professionals in your industry, you probably don’t need to create content for beginners. It works the other way, too.  If you’re an electrician, for example, the average consumer will not understand industry jargon. And why do they need to?

They’re hiring you, so they don’t have to be the experts. You’ll have to keep your campaigns simple and make an effort to explain anything complex.  Before I move on to setting goals for your online marketing campaign, I just want to cover that it’s important to understand your environment. 

Analyze competitors’ digital marketing campaigns

Spend some time doing a competitor analysis, including a SWOT analysis, to better understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats surrounding your business. You won’t regret gaining this knowledge.  And onto setting campaign goals!

And also your budget!

3. Set your budget and goals

Why are you investing your time — and your money — into a digital marketing campaign? Are you trying to generate more website traffic? Do you want to increase sales?  Every business needs a unique set of goals that drives campaign decisions.  For a service-based business, you might want to focus on increasing qualified leads and phone calls.

An ecommerce business might be better off focusing on sales.  You can break those broad goals down into smaller, more specific KPIs.  The SMART goals method can help you figure out what goals your business can actually hit. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.  If you’ve done digital marketing before, you can take a look at past campaigns to figure out a benchmark for your new strategy. Then, figure out how much you can spend. 

Bonus video: How to plan your marketing budget

4. Choose your channels

Okay, it’s rapid fire marketing time. Defining six popular digital marketing channels. Two minutes on the clock.

Go!

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Optimizing your website so that it shows up in search engines like Google and Bing.
• Digital advertising: Paying for your content to show up online in places like search engines, social media channels, and other websites.
• Content marketing: Creating things like blog posts, videos, infographics, and guides to answer people’s questions online
• Email marketing: Sending targeted email messages to your audience to turn subscribers into customers   
• Social media marketing: Curating, creating, and sharing paid and organic content across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. 
• Web design: Making sure your website works well, is easy to navigate and looks good, so it creates a good user experience 

Did I do it? Two minutes, six channels?  Choose the channels that make the most sense for you. You don’t have to do all of them.

You want to be where your audience is and do what works for your goals and your budget. 

5. Create and launch your digital marketing campaign content

This is going to be a short section.  You’ve spent time researching and making your digital marketing campaign plan. You can’t skip the creation process. After you’ve chosen your channels, do some more research to figure out what content works best on those channels (and for your audience).  Once the content is ready, put it out in the world. You can learn more about how to launch a marketing campaign on our website. 

6. Review your results

Whether you launched a video ad, amped up your SEO strategy, created a LinkedIn account, or debuted a fresh web design, set time aside to review your campaign performance.  Using tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or even our MarketingCloudFX platform, you can monitor all of your campaigns and see if they’re hitting the goals you set earlier on in your campaign plan.  Just remember: The Internet changes quite often. If you see some not-so-great results, make some tweaks to your campaign.  Don’t count it as a setback. Look at unexpected results as an opportunity to learn.

Success can be as simple as adjusting your audience targeting or slightly altering your website design. And the most important part of any online marketing campaign? Let your creativity loose! Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.

Take creative risks. You can always pause a campaign or switch things up if your original idea wasn’t THE idea. 

Create your first digital marketing campaign now

So, what is a digital marketing campaign? I hope I answered that—and so much more.

If you have any questions, drop them in the comments. We’d love to answer them.  If you enjoyed this video, take a second to hit the subscribe button and give us a thumbs up. We would really appreciate it! And if you want some well-crafted emails in your inbox, you can find the link to our email newsletter, Revenue Weekly, in the video description. Thanks for watching!