Ryan Deiss - Digital Marketing For Dummies

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.

Consider the digital marketing campaign of a company like LasikPlus, which offers the Lasik corrective surgery for eyesight. As are most companies, LasikPlus is interested in acquiring new leads and customers for the procedure.

In this company’s marketing campaign, a prospect might first encounter an advertisement, such as the banner ad shown in the following figure.

Source: https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/a19548045/boyfriend-voice/

Clicking the ad shown in the first figure takes the prospective customer to a landing page, shown in the next figure, that explains the benefits of doing business with LasikPlus and makes a call to action to book a free consultation.

Source: https://www.lasikplus.com/lasik-250-discount-deal/

Selecting the call to action to schedule an appointment takes the prospect to a page where the prospect chooses the most convenient LasikPlus location for his or her consultation. After that location is chosen, the prospect is taken to a calendar page where a time for the consultation can be chosen, as shown in the final figure in this sidebar. The last step in setting the appointment is the entering of name, email, phone number, and birth date to confirm the appointment.

Source: https://www.lasikplus.com/ischedule.html#/schedule/Austin/4%2F6%2F2020

But it doesn‘t stop there. The LasikPlus campaign continues via email. Separate emails are sent to confirm the consultation appointment, teach the prospective Lasik candidate a bit about the procedure, and to remind the prospect of his upcoming appointment. Also, notice that LasikPlus graduates the prospect from a cold lead to a consultation rather than asking the person to pay for the procedure immediately after seeing the ad. This campaign moves the prospect seamlessly and subtly toward the conversion.

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.

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.

Each of these types of digital marketing campaigns has a very specific role to play in your business, as follows:

Acquisition campaigns acquire new prospects and customers.

Monetization campaigns generate revenue from existing leads and customers.

Engagement campaigns create communities of brand advocates and promoters.

The following sections explain these types of campaigns in much more detail.

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 customer 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 (see Figure 2-1).

FIGURE 2-1:Acquisition campaigns move prospects from the Aware to Converted stages.

The stages of the customer journey that Acquisition campaigns complete are the following:

Make Aware: To bring in new leads and customers, you need to reach out to what amounts to complete strangers. You should structure Acquisition campaigns to reach prospects who are completely unaware of the problem you solve or the solutions you provide.

Engage: The movement from Make Aware to Engage is often accomplished by providing value to the prospect, usually in the form of entertainment, inspiration, or educational content, before asking her to buy something or commit a significant amount of time. This is known as content marketing, a strategic marketing method focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent material designed to attract, retain, and ultimately drive a customer to a profitable action. Content marketing consists of a broad spectrum of activities and types of content, including blogging, videos, social media updates, images, and more. We cover content marketing in more detail in Chapter 4.