Is Your Next Digital Campaign Strategic Enough?

So you’ve just given the go ahead to a new fantastic looking digital marketing campaign that will take up a big chunk of this year’s digital marketing budget to deliver. And you’re sure it will deliver the results you want, aren’t you?

Well, only if it’s backed by a very robust, well conceived digital marketing strategy.

The fact of the matter is, unless your digital marketing activity is supported by a robustly constructed strategy, developed to deliver within the environment in which the campaigns will sit, the chances are you won’t get the kind of returns you need from your digital spend.

As we said in a previous blog post, many time-poor marketers are led by their supplying agencies, taking their ‘expert’ advice on which strategic direction to take to achieve the best results. Unfortunately, many agencies that claim to offer ‘digital marketing’ are in actuality not marketers but web designers who can deliver a number of other services to complement this core offer.

And this is can be fine if you need good quality outsourced web development and supporting online design and content development, but for strategic digital marketing, you are going to need a fully-fledged strategic digital marketing agency.

It’s unlikely that these web design agencies have the capabilities to develop successful, fully integrated strategic digital marketing campaigns, designed to communicate your key offer to the heart of your target market.

Nor are they likely to go on to accurately measure and analyse and interpret results to give you clear, visible data on campaign performance and return on investment.

So before you start developing your next marketing campaign, make sure you consider the strategy, ahead of planning the communications. To get you started, here are our top five tips to consider when implementing a digital marketing strategy:

1. Consider the key stakeholders and what their expectations are.

2. Scope out the campaign and ensure you have a clear understanding of what the campaign will cover, and what it won’t.

3. Ask yourself: can the digital campaign be integrated with other business activities to share resources and improve output elsewhere? An example of this is working with IT to rationalise hosting infrastructure.

4. Keep in mind your target audience, what drives them and what they want from your company. This may sound obvious, but many campaigns don’t.

5. Set out clear objectives for both the overall strategy and the communications campaign. What do you want to achieve?

By creating a strategy around your next digital marketing campaign, you will not only save time, money and resources through effective integration with the rest of your business, but also target your communications for your audience, enabling greater engagement with effective sales opportunities.

This blog post was originally published on the Novacom blog. Click here to view the original post.