A good marketing campaign is memorable. Consider the Coca-Cola brand, which is so renowned that it seems like they don’t even need to advertise anymore. And who doesn’t remember their Christmas truck ad that’s been running annually since 1995?
Although advertising is essential to marketing, it will not yield the required results without proper product placement. To succeed, marketing professionals must identify the correct channel and consumer sentiment and choose the brand representation strategy. The recent Bud Light fiasco is an exemplary case of misidentifying the company’s core user base’s political views.
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This guide will walk you through 7 tips to ensure your marketing campaign achieves its goals. Let’s dive in!
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Get my plan →1. Define Business Goals
What marketing strategy you will apply depends on your business goals. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I provide an entirely new product or improve on current services?
- How does it benefit the public?
- Is it a niche service, or can everybody use it?
- Where does my target audience gather? How do they get information? What grabs their attention?
Once you’ve figured that out, you can target specific channels with a prepared message. You will save time and resources otherwise spent on various tasks in a trial-and-error manner.
Define clear goals at this stage. For example, 200 relevant social media posts by the end of the quarter would get a thousand impressions and twenty shares. Use the SMART goals method: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound. This method is especially handy for digital marketing, where you can define your goals using vast amounts of user data, bringing us to the second step.
2. Research the Market
Paying for ads unprepared is a recipe for disaster. In 2023, reaching consumers is not as simple as paying for a few Google or Facebook ads. They will not be effective if your future buyers don’t hang around there. For example, you should focus on TikTok if you target Generation Z and LinkedIn if you want to reach more senior professionals.
You can also proceed with market research according to your SMART goals. It should give you a good idea of what Specific marketing strategies to use, how to measure their effectiveness, an understanding of whether these goals are Attainable in the current market situation, how Relevant the service is to the target audience, and how much time you can spend on it.
Avoid the mistake of sticking with ineffective marketing strategies. Apply measuring criteria at all stages, such as conversion rate, click-through rate, impressions, new users, etc. Some strategies may work in one way but wouldn’t produce the desired result. Your ads could get thousands of views, but if they have a low CTR and your end goal is to attract new customers, it’s not working. Simultaneously, if your goal is brand awareness, then a high view count is excellent, even if it doesn’t end up in a purchase.
What makes true market research is the use of factual and verifiable data. Let’s see how to get it using current data-gathering technologies.
3. Gather Relevant Data
The Internet is filled with unprecedented amounts of data from social media posts, news articles, academic research, etc. You can use all of it to improve your marketing strategy if you know how. Although much information is publicly available, getting it is harder than it sounds.
Imagine you want to set your price accordingly for your homemade jewellery as a side gig. Setting them too low will not compensate for materials and work, and higher-than-average prices will not attract buyers. You browse through several similar businesses in your area, but how do you know they set good prices and are doing well? You need more data input, but quickly realise that going manually over each enterprise will take too long.
Instead, you can master the web scraping technology. It will automate the information-gathering process and collect structured data without online restrictions. That means that it will target chosen websites for specific information no matter where they’re at.
This time, you can select competitors’ jewellery websites and instruct your scraper to extract price data. Furthermore, business web scrapers aggregate and return data in an organised format that can be immediately used with data analytics software if you really want to step up your game.
Note that a web unblocker is important for your chosen web scraping provider to have these days. That would increase the success rate in terms of data gathering, as it helps scraping mechanisms bypass the anti-bot systems.
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Lastly, web scraping allows the gathering of information without restrictions. The Internet is divided into separate regions with limited data access, sometimes blocking crucial business information. For example, many US websites are unavailable to European users due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). You can combine a web scraper with rotating residential Internet proxies to issue you new IPs in different regions and overcome geographical restrictions.
Businesses use web-scraping to establish their brands globally and streamline most data analytics tasks.
4. Analyse the Competition
Keeping an eye on the competition is mandatory if you want to remain relevant. The digital marketplace is extremely dynamic, with new services or improvements appearing daily. Imagine how much work Netflix has to put in to remain the most popular streaming service when Disney, HBO, Prime Video, and Apple TV are breathing on its neck.
In turn, Netflix must analyse other similar business strategies and offer something better to retain users. Competitor analysis helps adjust prices, ad keywords, content, targeted channels, and feature development. You will glimpse at what works for your competitors and what doesn’t – a win-win situation.
Competitor analysis is especially important for growing businesses. Introducing a service into an already established market poses additional challenges because consumers already have their favourite brands. However, after analysing them, you can see what’s lacking and focus on it as your initial release hook.
Lastly, you can see what keywords they use to make their ads appealing and where they place backlinks to ensure the service is distinguishable on Google. That brings us to the next point.
5. Improve SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and it’s one of the best channels to drive organic traffic. It ensures your website ranks as high as possible on Google’s search engine. If you don’t yet have a website, check out our other article on website development and design.
Top Google spots enjoy an outstanding CTR of more than 30%. However, pushing businesses out of top spots is extremely difficult because SEO is a time-consuming strategy that has to go through the whole set of Google’s algorithms and considerations until the change in the search engine placement is made. If you’re a new business entering a highly competitive market, relying on SEO as your primary source of incoming traffic would be a mistake.
On the other hand, it’s an excellent choice if your competitors haven’t invested in it, and the top spots are easy to take. Remember that once you set up an efficient SEO strategy, it takes relatively little effort and funds to maintain, although setting it up may be costly and time-consuming.
Tip for SEO strategist: Google has recently switched to Infinite Scroll design instead of placing results on different pages, and we’re all interested in what changes it will bring.
6. Provide Additional Value
Research illustrates that Generation Z is less likely to purchase things or service if it doesn’t provide additional value. The causes that businesses get behind are a green environment, poverty reduction, social equality, etc. Consider it as giving back to society, and even though social responsibility has been a great PR strategy for a while, the current situation demands a larger investment and exposure.
Do not make the mistake of supporting a cause without aligning it with your audience. However honourable it is, it will not gain traction if your buyers don’t particularly care about it. Furthermore, it’s best to avoid politically sensitive statements unless you target consumers with specific political views. It’s especially relevant in the United States, where the segmentation between the Democrats and the Republicans is massive. Marketing strategies applicable to one side will likely produce the opposite results on the other.
7. Ensure Data Safety
Lastly, don’t take unnecessary risks with user data. Successful digital marketing strategies rely on vast amounts of data to improve business decision-making. But if you collect personally identifiable information and leak it due to an insecure server structure, you will put your customers at risk and can irreversibly damage your business reputation.
It’s best to consult with a lawyer if you plan on collecting personally identifiable information and using it to streamline business processes. Simultaneously, many businesses work with cybersecurity agencies to ensure data is stored safely and protected against leaks. We highly recommend doing this as early as possible because failing to protect user data will get you in legal trouble. The General Data Protection Regulation regiments user data storage in the EU and the Californian Consumer Privacy Act in the US.
Conclusion
Nowadays, marketing campaigns heavily depend on data and technology. Although challenging, it provides outstanding benefits, such as accurate predictions, problem-solving, and human error reduction.
Our tips will help you safely utilise user data to drive more organic traffic to your website and ensure steady revenue. But don’t forget to think outside the box, as marketing, first and foremost, is a creative process.
Written by Uzair Kharawala
Partner at SF Digital Studios, a Google Premier Partner agency. Uzair has been helping businesses grow with Google Ads since 2002 and teaches it every week on YouTube.
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