Want to spread the word about your company, services or products? A paid digital marketing campaign could be the answer. Sookio’s Campaigns Manager, Hector Corey, shares how to plan for success…

A paid campaign can be the quickest and most effective way to reach your target audience on social media, as you can set a daily budget for promoting your ad to specific audiences.

With a range of advertising options on each platform comes new opportunities to reach your target audience anywhere in the world - and an increased importance on being more relevant and engaging than your competition.

1. Understand your campaign objectives

Before starting any campaign it's crucial to be clear on the business objectives. These should serve as the foundation of your campaign strategy and will help you remain focused on the goal when you make any changes later on.

How does the campaign support where the business is headed and what it wants to achieve?

By aligning your campaign goals and business objectives, you can ensure your efforts contribute directly to the company’s overall success. Setting clear and measurable goals from the outset will help you stay on track and, come the end of the campaign, you’ll be able to demonstrate the tangible impact of your work. 

Imagine you’re scrolling Instagram and you see an ad for Nike; a typically high budget video showcasing a newly available colourway of Air Jordans. The marketing team at Nike will have set out some goals ahead of their campaign launch.

For a campaign advertising a product, the most likely goal will be for a certain number of conversions. However, pre-defined campaign goals can be any measurable metric. A specific number of clicks, impressions or a certain value of CTR or CPC for example.

2. Carefully research your audience

Understanding your target audience is one of the most crucial contributors to the success of any marketing campaign. By delving deep into demographics, interests, and behaviours, you can tailor your campaign to resonate with your audience’s preferences.

What do you know about your audience? How do they behave on the web? What platforms do they use?

Creating a consumer persona, depicting what a typical member of your target audience looks like, how old they are, their gender, where they live and what their interests and hobbies are is the most valuable exercise before setting up your audience targeting.

This understanding will allow you to choose the right platform and create more effective ads that speak directly to your audience. It’s the key to driving higher engagement and increasing the likelihood of conversions.

Knowing where your audience spends their time online and which platforms they engage with the most allows you to allocate your resources strategically.

3. Get clear on your budget and timelines

Ad budgets depend on what you’re advertising, to whom and what the intended outcome of the campaign is. Different platforms tend not to mirror each other in advertising costs.

Some flexibility with your budget will allow you to adapt to market fluctuations and changes in campaign performance to seize opportunities. For example, if your campaign performs well, it’s a sign that your targeting, messaging and content are all good. In these instances, once the performance begins to plateau, the logical decision is often to increase the budget.

This will open the door to new potential customers or subscribers. A well-put-together ad campaign now being shown to a whole host of new people will drive conversions. Also, the increase in budget, even if only temporary, will result in a surge in performance. This is done by platforms (such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Ads) to incentivise advertisers to pump more money into their campaigns, and it works.

I’m currently running a campaign promoting downloads of a whitepaper for one of our biotech clients. Due to the campaign’s success, I suggested an extension and budget increase. The client agreed and as expected, the budget increase led to an immediate surge in performance, as the platform began showing the ads to new members of the target audience. 

4. Develop compelling ad content

Content that grabs and holds attention lies at the heart of any successful digital marketing campaign. By creating content that is not only engaging but also relevant to the needs of your audience, you can capture their attention and scale meaningful interactions by finding what works and doubling down.

The type of creative used will depend on what your campaign is promoting. For example, if you’re building a campaign to promote a new surf brand it would make sense for the creative to be an engaging video, utilising the surf environment as an opportunity to make a video that’s eye catching and engaging. If the task was to run a campaign for a furniture company, then the creative on the ads may be single images or carousels. 

Using your content to appeal to your audience’s behaviours and interests and provide valuable insights can position your brand as a credible and trustworthy business. Compelling content evokes emotions, sparks conversations, and drives conversions. 

5. Set strong KPIs

Establishing a thought-through timeline ahead of the campaign will allow you to set KPIs (key performance indicators) at milestones throughout the campaign to measure success. For example, ‘1000 clicks and 150 conversions by the end of week 6 of the campaign’.

Using your timeline in this way will keep your mind constantly switched on to whether the campaign is meeting its expectations in terms of performance and if not, what needs to be done to improve it. 

6. Track and analyse the results

By analysing the data your campaign brings in daily, you can monitor key performance indicators that inform your campaign strategy, such as conversions, CPC (cost per click) and CTR (click-through rate).

Analysing this data allows you to make informed decisions and identify areas for improvement. As your campaign progresses, your tracking data may show that certain audience groups, demographics, and locations aren’t performing as well as planned.

Excluding underperforming audience segments will optimise the campaign by showing the ad to a higher percentage of users likely to convert. 

For example, when setting up the campaign I’m running for our biotech client, I started with five different ad creatives with the intention to end the campaign with only the top performing two or three still running. Currently, three of the five ads continue running. The other two were turned off earlier in the campaign due to not getting as much engagement as the remaining ads.

However, don’t make changes any more than once a week unless absolutely necessary. Allowing your campaign to run as uninterrupted as possible helps with its overall performance as the platform will have time to learn from data and optimise itself. 

Staying flexible will make the difference between your campaign being successful, or stagnating and falling by the wayside to other, more relevant, more engaging ads.

Need help building your campaign?

Building a successful digital marketing campaign is never going to be easy, but with a comprehensive understanding of the main elements, you can pave the way for consistent impactful results. Stay alert, and listen to the numbers.

Get in touch to talk about your next campaign.