Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 42

Defining a Digital Marketing Campaign
Meeting your business objectives and moving a customer through the customer journey
(discussed in Chapter 1) from ice-cold prospect to raving fan requires actions. Those
actions, if coordinated properly, are called campaigns. Digital marketing campaigns, as we
define them in this book, have a set of specific characteristics. Digital marketing
campaigns are
Objective based: Digital marketing campaigns are coordinated actions intended to
achieve a specific business goal.
Multiparted: Every digital marketing campaign requires assets like content and
landing pages, as well as tools like email software or web forms. But those assets
aren’t enough to ensure the success of your campaign; you need the ability to make
those assets visible. In other words, you need traffic. Yet another part of every
campaign is the measurements you track so that you can determine how it is
performing.
Seamless and subtle: It’s worth pointing out that these multistep, multipart campaigns
are most successful if you walk the prospect gradually through the customer journey
(for more about the customer journey, see Chapter 1). To help move people through
the customer 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. In the coming chapters, you find out how to structure your campaigns in a
way that moves your cold prospects to become repeat buyers and purchasers of high-
ticket items.
In flux: The word campaign often refers to an initiative with a short life span, but as it
is defined in this book, a campaign can be something your business runs for as little as
a day or as long as several years. The advantage of digital campaigns over physical
ones (such as direct-mail campaigns) is that small tweaks and even wholesale pivots
are much simpler in a digital environment. As a result, you can optimize digital
marketing campaigns on the fly to achieve the best results.
The most important takeaway from this section is that a campaign is a process, not a single
event that is made up of numerous steps and parts. Digital marketing campaigns might
seem complicated to you now, but rest assured that campaigns can be extremely simple,
and we cover everything from asset creation to traffic and measurement in this book.