In 2017, digital advertising spending worldwide reached more than $229 billion. By 2020, that number is expected to $100 billion more per year.
Online marketing has been rapidly outpacing traditional advertising for years, and that trend is only going to continue. If you haven’t broken into the world of digital marketing yet, now is a great time to get started!
But when it comes to launching your first online marketing campaign, there are a few things you need to know. Keep reading to learn a few tips for online marketing to help ensure that your launch is a success.
1. Start With Clear Goals
While it may seem that all advertising campaigns, digital or otherwise, share a common goal, that isn’t entirely true.
Advertising at its core should spread awareness for a brand. But the reason you’re spreading that awareness is the goal of that advertising.
Setting clear goals about why you’re launching an online marketing campaign is essential. This allows you to define how you should structure your campaign.
For instance, if your goal is to sell a specific product, you’ll want to focus on channels where consumers shop or where they go to learn about new products.
If you’re more interested in spreading brand awareness, your online marketing campaign should reflect that. You might focus on influencer marketing, or invest in having a brand guide created to guide the rest of your marketing decisions.
2. Visualize Your Ideal Client
Before you can start designing a digital marketing plan that is going to help you reach new audiences and boost leads, you need to determine exactly the type of audience you plan to target.
There are more than 3 billion people around the world using the internet. If you don’t narrow the scope of the audience you’re targeting, you’re essentially targeting all of them, an impossible task.
Defining your ideal audience allows you to choose the marketing tactics that are best for targeting that audience.
For instance, if your ideal target client is a young professional, social media sites and LinkedIn might be a better choice over the long-form content on a blog.
Narrowing your audience will also allow you to create brand guidelines that target the demographics of your ideal client. Your choice of everything from colors and text to language should be a reflection of the audience that you’re targeting, and what the expectations and preferences are. Definitely, this is one of the best tips for online marketing that you should follow!
3. Create a Cohesive Brand
Having clear goals in mind will help you create a strong online marketing campaign.
But you’ll also need a cohesive brand if you want to have a lasting impact on the consumers that you reach.
A brand is a set of guidelines and images that represent a company. Brand guidelines often include a set of colors used in any visual materials. They might also include texts used in ads, a logo, and other features that guide everything from digital ads to blog posts.
When you put these guidelines to work across your digital marketing tactics, you begin to build brand awareness. This means that when a consumer already knows about your company and spots something you’ve released, they’ll recognize that it belongs to your company.
From social media posts to blog updates, your brand guidelines should be applied to every element of your online marketing campaign.
4. Narrow Your Reach
Whether you’re setting your goals or designing your online marketing campaign, it can be tempting to overdo it.
After all, when it comes to digital marketing tactics, there are countless options. From social media to PPC ads, SEO efforts, blogging, and everything in between, it would be impossible to include every tactic in your online marketing campaign.
For that reason, one of the most important steps in designing your campaign should be to narrow your reach. You should focus on targeting only the tactics that are best suited to your goals, your company, product, etc.
Choosing just a few tactics to focus on first, such as launching a website and implementing SEO, and starting a social media campaign on one or two platforms, means that you can put all of your energy into those efforts.
You can always implement additional tactics later on.
5. Set a Timeline or Milestones and Stick to Your Plan
A digital marketing campaign is never finished. Instead, it is an ongoing process that will need to be maintained continuously if you want to continue reaping the results.
If you launch a blog, you’ll need to continue to post updates and implement SEO strategies if you want to keep up your traffic. If you’re utilizing social media, you’ll need to continue to post photos and other content if you want to keep your audience engaged.
Tackling this never-ending process can feel overwhelming at first. But creating a timeline for implementing your digital marketing campaign, or setting milestones for your work, can help.
A timeline for when you plan to implement each element of your campaign, such as launching a blog first, setting a proposed date for announcing a new product, or setting a schedule for how often you’ll post to social media makes your digital marketing campaign more manageable.
Milestones work in the same way. If you aren’t certain how long various elements of your digital marketing campaign will take, then it can be tough to set a timeline.
A milestone could be gaining a certain number of social media followers or landing a set number of leads. When you reach that milestone, you might then roll out your next campaign tactic.
For instance, if your digital marketing campaign revolves around social media, a milestone might be to gain 1,000 followers. Once you hit that number, you might host a giveaway to continue growing, or announce a new product now that you have a steady audience to target.
6. Be Prepared to Make Constant Adjustments
You’ll need to plan to continue implementing your digital marketing campaign indefinitely and expect to make changes to your previous marketing efforts if you want to continue to enjoy the growth it generates. But you shouldn’t assume that you’ll continue implementing it in the exact same way.
The world of digital marketing is constantly changing.
Google and other search engines regularly roll out changes to their algorithms that affect how sites are indexed and ranked. Social media platforms change their requirements and practices, affecting how content can be viewed and shared.
There are a variety of adjustments that you’ll need to make to your marketing campaign to ensure that it remains successful.
Researching popular keywords, staying up-to-date with what types of content, such as short videos or memes, are popular at any given time, and adjusting which social media platforms you use are all musts if you want your campaign to continue to have an impact.
7. Consider Your Funnel
One common mistake that many first-time digital marketers make is to create a flat campaign. While each of the digital marketing tactics may be successful on their own, they fail to connect them.
Connecting each of your tactics allows you to create a marketing funnel that guides your clients along from their first introduction to your company to making a purchase.
For instance, your social media pages might be the first time a person learns about your company, brand, or products.
A good marketing plan would then put tactics to work that guide your social media followers to your website. Once on your website, clients would find engaging, useful blog content that would further expose them to your products or services.
After several exposures, both on your website and on social media, to your products and services will then [hopefully] lead to a sale.
Considering this funnel, and how various elements of your marketing plan will connect to one another right from the start will save you lots of time and effort later on, and help you generate more solid leads.
Having trouble visualizing the marketing funnel, TrackMaven built this great visual:
Image Source: “How the Marketing Funnel Works From Top to Bottom” (TrackMaven)
Launching Your First Online Marketing Campaign
Launching your first online marketing campaign can be intimidating. But with the right preparation and a little planning, anyone can launch a campaign that will help them grow their audience.
Maybe you’ve already begun implementing marketing tactics and aren’t seeing the growth you were hoping for. If so, don’t worry. It’s never too late to make adjustments.
The above tips for online marketing for creating a successful marketing plan can be implemented at any stage of the process.
Do you already have a website and social media pages in place? Are you wondering whether they are doing all that they can to spread awareness of your brand and help you land leads and sales? There is a simple way to check.
Run a free SEO audit today to see how your site ranks and whether it’s optimized for the right keywords and phrases.
Have any questions on tips for online marketing or want to learn more? Please subscribe to our newsletter and blog.