Digital marketing is a broad term that can mean anything from posting an image of your product on Facebook to crafting an email subject line to optimizing a blog post for search engine traffic. Digital marketing involves many seemingly disconnected tactics, and that’s what makes this chapter so important
Every business is interested in generating leads, making sales, retaining the customers they have, and selling them more of the company’s products or services. Achieving each of these goals requires a different approach, however. In this chapter, you decide what you want your digital marketing to accomplish by identifying your business objectives, because those objectives are what should dictate the campaigns you construct and, ultimately, the tactics you employ.
Establishing Marketing Objectives
Before you start a blog, open a Pinterest account, or start gathering email addresses, you need to choose your business goals. When you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll be able to direct your energy into the right marketing campaigns and employ marketing tactics that move the needle on the right business metrics.
Defining a Digital Marketing Campaign
It’s worth pointing out that these multistep, multipart campaigns are most successful if you walk the prospect gradually through the buyer journey. To help move people through the buyer journey, you need to include a call to action (CTA) within your campaign. A CTA is an instruction to your audience designed to provoke an immediate response.
Usually, a CTA includes an imperative verb to convey urgency, such as “buy now,” “click here,” “shop today,” “watch this video,” “give us a call,” or “visit a store near you.” Next, a well-oiled marketing campaign removes the friction between the prospect and the action you want that prospect to take. An extreme example is to ask an ice-cold prospect to buy a $10,000 product or service. Such a tactic would be neither seamless nor subtle.
Understanding the Three Major Types of Campaigns
Although you may have many business goals that you want to affect through your digital marketing, you’ll find that you can meet most objectives with three broad categories of digital marketing campaign: Acquisition, Monetization, and Engagement.
Campaigns that generate new leads and customers
If your goal is to raise awareness for the problems you solve or the solutions you provide, or if you’re just looking to acquire new leads and customers, you need an Acquisition campaign.
The role of your marketing is to help move a prospect, lead, or customer from the awareness stage of the buyer journey to brand promoter. You deploy Acquisition campaigns to do the work on the front end of this journey, taking the prospect from Aware to Converted.
Campaigns that monetize existing leads and customers
If your business objective is to sell more to the customers you already have or to sell high-dollar, more complex products and services and profit maximizers, you need a Monetization campaign. In short, the goal of a Monetization campaign is to make profitable sales offers to the leads and customers you acquired with your Acquisition campaigns.
Last word
If your business objective is to successfully get new customers on board and move new leads and customers from being prospects to fans of your brand, or to build a community around your company, brand, or offers, you need an Engagement campaign. The most beloved companies create online opportunities for customers and prospects to interact with each other and with the brand. Companies that build engagement into their marketing enjoy the benefits of customer interactions that go beyond the simple transaction of buying goods and services.
