Creating viral digital content is the key to a successful digital campaign, but how to make it right on the first try?
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We live in a time when people are overwhelmed with choices. Be it professional or personal life, we can choose our leisure activities, friends, love partners, and jobs. This ability to quickly change work, lifestyle, and preferences leads to the volatility of consumer behavior that is now observed across all sectors. Brands are fighting to get a buyer’s attention, but only a few succeed. Statistics show that an average consumer runs into 3, 000 to 20,000 brands per day. This extreme brand exposure makes it difficult for every new company to get noticed and for every known company to retain its influence.
This is a quick guide on how to build an effective digital strategy complying with your business needs.
1. Define your goals
Before starting off any marketing campaign, it is necessary to define its goal. A clear understanding of why your business needs a marketing strategy will let you choose the right tools and methods to affect the audience. Think about how it will help your buyers interact with your brand more effectively. Goals must be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. If you are a startup, it might be reasonable to focus on building brand awareness, while SME usually aims to increase brand engagement and generate more revenue.
2. Create buyer personas
Knowing your audience well is a pass to winning their attention. Audience research gives you the necessary insights into consumer wants and pain points. Besides demographic characteristics, you should be aware of their career, background, fears, and, most importantly, why they are looking for a specific product or service. Big enterprises generally have more than one buyer persona. When the audience is global and heterogenous, it is important to define general classes that share the same expectations and abide by the same values when making a purchase decision. But small-sized companies can work with one ideal buyer profile until their customer base increases.
3. Identify key channels
The success of a marketing campaign also depends on the marketing channels you choose to get visible to your audience. You don’t have to be present everywhere. Most of your customers are likely to prevail on one or another social media platform. This is what you need to hit. It is essential to put effort into the channel that gathers the majority of potential customers. If you are a beauty startup, it might be wise to start promoting your brand on Instagram, whereas larger business players most likely will use LinkedIn as a major tool to find a good IT consulting company, for example.
4. Make a content plan
Quality content is basically how you translate your marketing incentives into reality. Depending on the business activity, you can choose any media format to communicate with your audience, e.g. blogs, interviews, case studies, eBooks, videos, etc. Whatever you like, it is more important what you say. Don’t try to impose what you produce, be their guide to what they are interested in. The abundance of information shortens the average attention span. Unless your content is valuable to users, they will quickly abandon your website.
5. Plan resources and action
When you have prepared diverse content to be released on social media platforms or your own eCommerce website, it is time to think of the date to publish every single piece of content combined with ads. Get back to the insights from the audience research to understand how to interact with potential buyers: what time is the best to post on social media and what type of information is more preferred, whether entertaining or informative. These nuances have a substantial impact on marketing results as well.
6. Monitor KPIs
At last, once a digital marketing campaign starts, you should focus on measuring its effectiveness and performance. Data will show you whether your strategy is going to be successful or not. There are a number of KPIs to monitor the marketing campaign’s outcomes: Cost per lead, click-through—rate, organic traffic, conversion rate, visits, downloads, and many more. While some of them can be tracked from day one, other metrics can be accessible when the campaign is over.
What is the secret of marketing success?
Today it is not enough to be one-of-a-kind. Buyers also expect brands to have an appropriate image and philosophy. Apple’s ‘Think different’ became a revolution because it resonates with the audience’s thinking and desire to stand out in the twenty-first century. If you learn how to read your customer’s mind, you will see it bear fruit.
