Setting up a digital media campaign can be a daunting task, even when working with a media partner! What tactics should you use? How do you measure success?
These are the initial steps to setting up, executing and learning from your Digital Strategy Playbook®.
STEP 1: STRATEGY & PLANNING
Who is your audience?
Programmatic Advertising allows for very targeted ad campaigns. No one wants to see ads for products or services that they are not interested in. Crafting a campaign around who your ideal audience is will return excellent results. Some targeting criteria can include (but not limited to): age range, income, gender, family size, purchase intent, hobbies, behaviors and much more!
What are your campaign goals?
Branding, Awareness, online sales or Return on Ad Spend, there are several goals and KPIs a digital media campaign can fulfill. When strategizing the media solutions and tactics it will be important to know the campaign goals ahead of time. Banner ads fit a different need compared to paid search and knowing the goals of the campaign will ensure the tactics are geared for success.
How are you going to track your goals and success?
Tracking the success of a campaign is a common struggle for marketers; planning ahead will make measuring success a breeze. Will you rely on Google Analytics? Vendor or ad server reporting? Both? Have you placed conversion tracking pixels on your thank you pages and other conversion points of the website?
What creative resources are available?
Limitations on creative resources can include budget and time. The most important thing to remember about ad creative is that the messaging be relevant to the target audience and that it has a clear call to action (e.g. Shop Now, Learn More, Download A Guide, etc.) This messaging should continue to the landing page of the site as well to make it as easy as possible for the consumer to find what they are looking for.
STEP 2: CAMPAIGN EXECUTION
Use the scientific method when A/B testing a campaign.
For each campaign, you should only test one variable at a time. Testing or changing too many things during the life of a campaign will make it difficult to build insights into performance. Creative variations, audience, geography, timing, technology, and media mix are common variables for testing during a campaign. For example, if you have 10 different ad sizes or creative styles and you want to determine which ones drive the most engagement, test the campaign by creative with all of the same targeting and setup. This will remove any question on what caused the difference in results other than the creative in question.
Work with your media vendor to determine media mix allocations.
When you work with a media vendor that can deploy numerous media tactics and have multiple solutions in market at a time, collaborate with them on the evolution of the campaign. One of the many benefits of digital media advertising is the ability to shift tactics and change things around that are not performing as expected. If a campaign is implementing video, native and social media, but native is outperforming the others, shift the budgets towards native and drive better overall performance during the campaign!
Give it time.
When a campaign launches or when any changes to the targeting or creative are made it may take up to a week for the digital campaign to resume at full pace. Making too many changes may prove ineffective. Let the campaign penetrate the market and let insights build before making any changes to the campaign.
STEP 3: RESULTS
How did the media mix perform against your campaign goals?
Review your reporting and determine if your campaign goals were fulfilled. Did website traffic go up? Did the campaign reach cost and conversion goals? Did performance improve over a similar time period in the past?
Is there confusion on the results?
Sometimes media campaign reporting can be confusing! CTA, CPA, ROAS, 50 creative variations and 6 media tactics in the mix, it can be a lot to decipher. Work with your media partner to determine what the reporting means and boil it down to the metrics that will matter for you and your team.
STEP 4: NEXT STEPS
What actions are you going to take based on your campaign results?
Did one tactic bite the dust? Did one set of creative really shine? How can you turn the results of the campaign into an actionable result? Review how everything performed and how close you came to meeting or exceeding your KPIs.
When are you going to retest your learnings?
The digital world changes rapidly. One tactic or solution performing well today may be outshined by something new in 6 months. A creative design choice may standout during A/B testing now but may have the opposite effect during a different season of the year. Keep campaign testing on-going and with a short-term memory.
Contact Orange142 today to begin setting up your next digital media campaign. Orange142 works with advertisers and media buying agencies to help them understand every aspect of the digital sales campaign setup, execution, insights and more. Through collaboration and transparency, media campaigns engage with the end users and drive results!
