There can be a lot of moving parts in campaign planning for digital advertising. As marketers, it can be tricky to balance the time it takes to plan and execute a digital advertising campaign correctly.
The adoption of programmatic media buying has enabled marketers with the tools to launch campaigns quickly. But there is a delicate balance between defining your strategy and being able to create campaigns quickly. In fact, nearly 50% of organizations don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy.
Apparently, the balance isn’t being found. Or at least enough to formulate a plan. Instead, some marketers use some aspects of digital advertising here and there and yield little to no results, all because they didn’t have a clear plan going into the launch.
A good digital advertising plan is the best way to give your digital advertising campaigns everything they need to survive and thrive in the digital world.
Your digital advertising plan is a map to guide you toward your goals and achieve results—one that will get you there on time and with minimum stress. A plan will help you coordinate your effort, be proactive, and keep everyone on the same page on your objectives. With it, you are more likely to be realistic about your time, energy, and results. A plan will help you stay organized, think strategically, and enable you to optimize.
We’ll cover the seven main topics you should address in your digital advertising campaign planning:
1. Identify your target audience
While this might seem obvious, it can sometimes get missed when creating a digital advertising campaign plan. Identifying your target audience can help you determine core aspects to your digital advertising plan, such as targeting tactics, campaign goals, message objectives, and so much more.
Here’s a hint before we dig in: Your target audience is not “everyone.” Your task in defining your target group is to identify and understand your particular niche so you can dominate it.
The better you understand your target market, the more closely you’ll be able to focus your ads, so you can pay only to reach the audience most likely to convert into customers. As your depth of audience insight grows, you’ll start to see higher conversion rates and better ROI—key metrics that matter to all marketers (and marketing bosses).
2. Define your goal
Of course, to sell your product, but are there any other results that you want to see from your digital advertising campaign. Ask ‘What is the main reason you need to run this campaign’? Is it to generate awareness of a new product? Encourage more of your fans and leads to convert into customers or just to get your current customers to engage with more and maybe repeat purchase? Each campaign should have one primary purpose, this will make the rest of the process much more succinct.
Defining the goal, or the desired outcome, of a marketing effort, is the first step in choosing the right KPI or digital advertising campaign metric to track to determine if you’re getting results and achieving success.
3. Determine a budget
How much are you willing to allocate to your digital advertising campaign? Where/how much you’re planning to spend on it?
According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, they’ve suggested 7% to 8% of your gross revenue should be spent on marketing.
50% of that marketing budget should be dedicated to digital marketing in 2019. Seem a little high? Well in 2020, it should be 55%. The average company is spending 35% of their marketing budget on digital campaigns, and that’s not enough. The average company is stuck 3 years in the past. what
For a sense of scale, let’s look at a business that makes $2 million in revenue. If 7% of their budget is allocated to marketing, they have $140,000 to work with. Half of that is $70,000, which gives them their digital marketing budget.
Forward-thinking companies or companies that lean heavier on digital marketing might also spend the majority of their marketing budget on digital.
4. Create an advertising message
Now that you’ve defined the audience, goals, and budget for your digital advertising campaign, you need to look at creating your advertising message to include in your creative assets. Are you going to create your ad in-house or hire a designer? Do you have concepts or ideas in mind?
Many beginners in the marketing industry imagine that creative asset design is something that you require professional software and professional design skills. This may be true, for certain specific tasks but not for all. For instance, designing banners for digital advertising campaigns has become quite an easy task if you know where to look and which tools to use. Tools like Bannersnack or other web-based design tools.
The core things to remember as you are creating your digital ad assets is what will resonate with your target audience AND do you include a call-to-action that correlates to your goal.
5. Develop a media plan
Hopefully, by the time you’ve gotten to step five, you’ve figured out the direction of your digital advertising campaign. According to EMyth’s SOBO (State of the Business Owner), less than half of the teams report actually having a written marketing plan for their company.
And who could blame them? Digital advertising plans are notorious for taking up hours of energy during the onset of the campaign and then gathering dust during the rest of the remainder of the campaign. So it’s not surprising that a majority of marketers forego it.
This is unfortunate, however, since the same report (which surveyed more than 800 business owners in 47 different countries) uncovered that companies with a written marketing plan saw 30% faster growth than those without. And those with a written company vision grew 50% faster.
Stats like those are hard to ignore. So take the time to write everything down.
6. Execute your campaign
Put the plan into motion
7. Evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign
Make changes as needed to make your ad even more effective
Each step of planning a digital advertising campaign is critical to its success. One of the essential aspects of this process, though, is the beginning stages. A large number of hours will be spent on planning and shaping your campaign, but those hours are necessary because that often contains the fundamentals of the campaign. With a well-defined target audience, message, and plan, the campaign will prosper. Hence, a structured and informed approach and execution in terms of reparation, market research, and creating the design of the advertisement should be the focus of your time.
