Digital Marketing: How to Plan Your Next Campaign
J Haselwood
Ampla’s Digital Marketing Strategy Blueprint series is perfect for small and medium sized businesses, nonprofits, and digital marketers seeking a fresh perspective on digital strategy. This is part 5 of 7.
If you’ve been following this series, then hopefully you’ve learned some tips on how to establish a digital strategy, the value of a digital audit, ideas on enabling brainstorming, and considerations to take into account in order to make your ideas a reality. This installment will outline important steps to take during the planning process for launching your marketing efforts.
1. Campaign Content – Answering the WHAT
You have a good feel for the digital marketing channels that you’ll be using. Now, it’s time to come up with the messaging and content for campaigns. This can be done on an annual or quarterly basis. The campaign process should answer the question WHAT on many fronts. For example:
What do we want to communicate?
What types of content can be repurposed across channels?
What would resonate with our audience?
What would I want to see if I was our customer/client/donor?
What has worked before?
What can we do differently?
What number of campaigns will we run over the next 12 months?
What will be the common theme between campaigns?
What types of images and color schemes should we use?
What is the number of emails, social media posts, etc., associated with each campaign?
2. Establishing Launch Dates
After you establish the content and themes of your campaigns, plan out specific dates for each piece of messaging. This would include emails, print and TV ads, social media posts, PPC ads, campaign-related website content and direct mail drops more. Some people call these launch dates, some call these activation dates. Whatever your nomenclature, the point is to establish specific dates in which the public will see your marketing messages. In some cases, such as email, you may also document the time of day for launch. Throw this calendar into some type of document or spreadsheet that is easy to recall, share and follow.
3. Identify Marketing Campaign Artifacts
Campaign artifacts include all the different creative documents and pieces needed for each campaign. For example, image sets may need to be developed in support of a multi-channel digital campaign. If your campaign involves a website banner, network display ads, email, and Facebook ads, then you would need several different versions of the same campaign images in different sizes. If possible, it’s best to know up front what dimensions and other specs of the images that will be needed. Other campaign artifacts may include creative briefs, copy decks, SEM ad sheets (or spreadsheets), and campaign calendars.
4. Identify the Players – Who Owns What?
Depending on the size of you company, you may be a one-person show or have a team of people for different marketing functions. If there is more than one person involved in your digital marketing, then roles must be assigned for the planning and implementation pieces. It’s vital that each person knows his or her role and responsibility for each phase. Otherwise, things fall through the cracks and accountability is difficult to pinpoint. If you’re doing a multi-channel campaign, it’ll be important to minimize the number of people who complete the copywriting and graphic work so that continuity exists between channels.
Here are some ideas on roles that may be needed:
Who will write the emails, social media posts, PPC ads, and web content?
Who will design the campaign graphics for our website, email, and PPC ads?
Who will write the creative briefs?
Who will approve the creative briefs?
Who is responsible for reviewing the creative across all channels to ensure the look and feel is the same?
Who will serve as project manager to ensure everyone is meeting deadlines?
Who will create the launch calendars?
Who will deploy the emails?
Who will post messages on Facebook?
Who will set up PPC ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, and Twitter?
Who will complete reporting and analytics for website traffic, email performance, PPC performance, etc.?
Who will update the website for each new campaign?
5. Create Internal Project Calendars
Internally, a project and/or production calendar should be put into place. Someone with Project Management experience sometimes does this. By creating internal calendars, it helps to establish a series of deadlines throughout the project that will ensure the project has time to be developed, reviewed, quality checked, updated, reviewed again, and finalized.
6. Contingency Planning
It’s been my experience that the best laid plans can still have hiccups. An employee may get sick, go on vacation, or leave the company. In the agency world, a client may take much longer to review a project than the committed review time. A new technology may have bugs that haven’t been worked out, causing delays in implementation. I’ve seen all these things happen and more. It causes a frenzy and includes the potential to derail a project, putting launch dates into jeopardy. Because so many companies are already stretched to the max with workloads, it’s often difficult to have a contingency plan in place. Here are some ideas for offsetting some of the risk when things go awry:
· Review previous scenarios where a contingency plan would have made a difference. Map out how those instances would be resolved next time.
· Build extra time into your deadlines to allow for disruptions. Always do this.
· Establish a virtual bench: People you can tap as backup support for different functions. These people may or may not currently work for your company.
· Establish a buddy system that has a primary and backup person for different functions
· Evaluate multiple platforms or vendors that may be involved in your marketing efforts.
Planning takes time, organization, and vision. Even then, some things can get overlooked. If you need help through any of the planning process, please contact Ampla to partner with you. Otherwise stay tuned for our next blog entitled, “Marketing Is Like Sports Because…,” which will compare deploying campaigns and evaluating its performance to the season opener of a sports team.
In case you missed the other blogs in this series, here’s a link to each of them:
Part 1: Framework: Digital Strategy vs. Digital Tactics
Part 2: A 30-Point Digital Audit Checklist