Herrmann's Checklist for Successful Digital Campaigns
With all of the available channels for a digital campaign in the current market, it can be difficult to stay on top of every last detail in your campaign efforts. We’ve compiled a handy checklist of best practices, common mistakes and potential issues that may come across in your digital marketing campaigns, so you can draw comparisons with your own efforts to be more effective in this space.
- Plan Realistically
It’s easy to get carried away with so many channels available. Trying to balance Facebook Ads, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Adwords, geo-campaigns and any other media channels can be complicated, and takes more than one person to wrangle in. Plan your campaigns to overlap with each other; this will put less stress on your team for reporting, as well as make your returning data much clearer and more efficient to use in your next campaigns.
- Keep Email Marketing in the Mix
With all the new and shiny advertising platforms and the abundance of articles touting successes among them, it’s easy to forget about the tried and true merits of email marketing. Although professionals can be reached through all sorts of channels in today’s marketplace, email has not been replaced, nor is it going anywhere anytime soon. Quality email marketing is still one of the highest returns on investment, but it requires consistency – so if you currently have an email marketing schedule, don’t let it slip while you’re refreshing your new Instagram ads every few hours.
- Remember to Always A/B Test Your Ads
There is only one sure-fire way to figure out what’s going to work with your audience, and that is testing. Great marketers learn the most from data, so it’s worth the budget to experiment with limited runs of varying creative, text copy and landing page options for digital marketing campaigns. With the information you glean from even just a short run of test campaigns, you can make the necessary adjustments and then launch a campaign with the full ad spend to make the most of what was learned in the initial testing.
Don’t stop there though. It’s important to run options even during the full campaign in order have a well-rounded offering for the audience. Make sure you’re checking in and tweaking options that aren’t performing. Great advertisers are always testing.
- Run Your Ads to Landing Pages
Gone are the days of running ads to homepages, and for good reason too. Having dedicated landing pages for your digital campaigns allows for complete customization of a user’s experience after they engage with one of your advertisements. Being able to cut straight to the point of interest without distractions allows for better control of the user experience.
Segmenting your ads into specific interests, and then directing users to landing pages focused only on that specific interest helps streamline the experience, and helps the user get to their point of interest quicker. With a properly segmented campaign, users won’t be frustrated by having to search or browse a site to find whatever caught their eye, but rather they will be conveniently placed at the conversion point. The easier the movement through the sales funnel, the easier it is to convert.
Additionally, having properly optimized landing pages for your ad platforms helps improve your ad quality score. Good quality scores lead to more impressions for less ad spend, and ultimately more conversions for less money. Who doesn’t want that?
- Give Text Copy Equal Attention
Text copy can be just as important as imagery in advertisements, and in some cases (looking at you, Google Adwords) you will only have text available to your audience. This ties back in to #3 and the importance of A/B Testing your text copy to see how effective the ad copy is with the intended audience.
Additionally, in a world where people are bombarded with advertisements, it’s important to keep your ad copy succinct and relevant. Spam ads and irrelevant ads that make superfluous claims don’t perform as well as genuine content and copy, so remember to be honest with your audience, so they can in turn put their trust in your product.
- Measure Your ROI
With all the metrics and reporting options at your fingertips, a basic ROI analysis can get lost in the stacks of data available. Remember to back up to the bird’s eye view and figure out just what your return on the ad is, and whether or not you should repeat the process or pivot to something that could be more effective.
- Share Your Marketing Data with the Sales Team
If you depend on a sales team for follow ups, then passing on leads or data to them is crucially time sensitive. For an ad campaign that has form field or information submissions, don’t wait for the weekly catch-up meeting to dump that info on a sales manager. If you get contact info to a sales team immediately, it allows them to strike while the iron is hot and the appeal of your campaign is still fresh in the prospects’ minds.
- Remarketing Works
We’ve all seen this before: you view a product or ad online, and the ad just seems to keep reappearing everywhere you go online afterwards. There’s a reason that it happens — remarketing works! The ability to serve ads to an interested audience that has pre-qualified themselves is a great way to make sure your ad spend is going to the right place. Luckily almost every modern advertising platform or advertiser will have the ability to do this for you, so take advantage.
With all of the moving parts of digital advertising campaigns, it can be difficult to stay on top of best practices, as well as all of the great data you’ll be receiving in the process. We hope that by using this checklist, you’ll be able to better identify common mistakes, learn areas where you can improve your campaigns, and create stronger, leaner and more profitable advertising in the future.
If you still feel that your ads aren’t hitting the mark, or you would like Herrmann to take a look at your advertising efforts, please reach out to our Chief Business Development Officer, John Albert. John can be reached at 410.267.6522 x252 or john@herrmann.com. Herrmann is happy to provide advertising, marketing and website audits, along with relevant, useful information on how Herrmann can help elevate your brand.
