Here’s 2 Things You Need to Know Before Running Your First Online Marketing Campaign

Hello, first-timer. Ready to run your first digital marketing campaign?

That’s the spirit!

But where to start? There are literally hundreds of options for running your first campaign.

You can write newsletters, boost your SEO through blogs, pay for ads, or engage through social media marketing. These are a few of the main ones, others require less. Marketing on the internet has allowed you to have a plethora of options.

So which should you choose?

Well, first of all, that’s not your starting point. 

Before you even get to that, you must first learn a couple of things that all successful marketers employ.

Start with Your Customers

Before you start picking whether your product’s ad campaign should run on Facebook or YouTube, take a step back.

Who are the people that are using your product?

Have a conversation with existing customers and perform adequate research. What do they value? What do they feel? What products similar to yours are they using and what will it take for them to jump to your boat? How did they find out about those other products? 

These questions are made with human-to-human connections in mind. These interactions and conversations can happen online or offline, your pick.

Next, you have to develop your customer personas. There is no such thing as a perfect thing for everyone since we’re all different.

So how can your marketing campaign target as many people as possible? Establish your customer personas.

These personas are characteristics of your current and potential clients.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. What are your customers’ roles? If relevant, what are their job titles? (i.e. father, wife, marketing manager, business owner, etc.)
2. Do they have the authority to make decisions? Who has the final say?

After that, identify the following:

• Age
• Education
• Industry
• Location (city, rural, suburb, etc.)
• Life/Job priorities and responsibilities.
• Problems or pain points they experience.
• What actions can be taken to solve their key problems or pain points?

You need to figure out the best way to connect with your viewers on an individual level despite addressing them as a whole.

At the end of the day, regardless of what type of campaign you choose to run, you have to set up the right systems to be genuine and create strong connections with your customers using the demographics above.

Disclaimer: These are some of the many demographics and characteristics you can use, but they should give you an idea of what to look for in your customers.

Get to know them better. The key to successful online marketing is getting to know your customers, their values, and what they resonate with. Then, it’s all choosing the right channel to address them.

Know The Path Your Customers Take To Buy From You

Marketing builds brand awareness about products and services. It allows you to engage prospects when they’re most interested in what you offer or when they don’t even know you exist!

Each type of marketing campaign you do should have a distinct way of shoving prospects into your conversion funnel and its own metrics to measure success.

A conversion funnel is one of the most important things in marketing. It is basically a shape or diagram that depicts your customer’s path to sales.

Most look like this:

This image came from this awesome 6 min read by Robin Nichols that can teach you more about conversion funnels if you need to.

Basically, a portion of your potential customers will actually become interested enough to purchase from you.

Customers leaving at each stage is normal. Conversion funnels help you understand why it probably happened and prevent it.

When creating yours (yes, you’ll have to put pen into paper with your sales team for this one, shocker!) be sure not to get too keen on the details. A conversion funnel describes a process in the general sense of things and provides a unique vision into the human-to-human relationships that your company builds with your audience until they become customers.

If this is your first time attempting to run a marketing campaign, then your prospects probably aren’t aware of you… yet!

Use your customers’ path to sales while paying attention to your company’s funnel to design your strategy and choose the right marketing medium for you!

Bottom line… You must look into many things before you even choose what type of marketing campaign you wish to run. 

If you want to learn more about how to run successful campaigns and improve your brand’s online presence, be sure to check out the rest of our blog. We post regular content regarding digital marketing, SEO, copywriting, web design, and more!

Mrkt360 is a marketing and SEO agency located in Toronto, Canada. We specialize in SEO services, web design services, social media management, and digital other marketing solutions. If you are looking to guarantee your first marketing campaign’s success, be sure to schedule a free consultation with one of our experts today!