You’ve heard the term digital marketing, but what does it means? Meeting your business objectives and moving a customer through the customer journey from ice-cold prospect to raving fan requires actions. Those actions, if coordinated properly, are called campaigns. Digital marketing campaigns 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.
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.
- 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. To help move people through the customer journey, you need to include a call to action (CTA) within your campaign.
- In flux: The word campaign often refers to an initiative with a short life span, but 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.
