Executing Your Digital Marketing Campaign

March 23, 2015/luke

Now that we’ve covered how to prepare for your marketing campaign – setting your budget expectations, determining your goals, investing in some tools and building landing pages – it’s time to optimize and execute.

Get Started

You’ve dedicated your resources, you’ve determined what your goals are, and you’re ready to hit the ground running. So, without further ado:

Do it.

You’re ready. Jump in and get your feet wet. Start your engines. We could probably go on forever with these cheesy idioms. Get off the ground. Get the ball rolling.

Measure it.

To ensure you’re making the most of your budget, pay close attention and always be measuringyour successes and failures. How does your campaign advance or detract from your Key Performance Indicators? Are your tactics working?

Recalibrate it.

When starting, you couldn’t have possibly known exactly how your digital marketing campaign would go. Maybe you were wrong about your target audience, or maybe you didn’t have data on them yet. Either way, now that you’re operating in the wild, it’s time to take a hard look and understand what needs more attention, what creative needs redo-ing, what’s working and where you can apply that in more places.

Re-allocate.

No business wants to spend money where it’s not working – especially not startups with somewhat limited resources. If you really want to bootstrap, cut what isn’t either a) boosting awareness of your new brand or b) bringing in a return. Keep in mind that many channels may take time to show real results, so don’t get trigger happy! To really be able to understand this, you should focus on attribution.

Let’s Talk Attribution

When we talk re-allocating your budget, you’ll first have to think about how you’re determining which channels add value.

Consider Multi-Channel Attribution

As your campaign gets underway, your thoughts may begin to drift to sales and conversions. Since measurement and recalibration is so important as you maximize your startup budget, understanding which channel is working best for you is key. That’s where attribution comes in. Typically, the go-to is Last-Click Attribution (which can be best), where the last channel that the buyer was exposed to typically gets credit for the sale. This attributes 100% of the customer acquisition value to that final channel, and allows you to measure how good that one channel is at driving conversions. It may tempt you to cut everything else out and focus on that one channel. This isn’t always the best way to measure success – while last-click can be useful for many, you risk losing what made that first channel so effective in the first place – the lead up, the journey, the supporting factors.

Keep in mind that sales cycles can be long, and the key might just be to stay top of mind – via social media, retargeting, paid search, and a number of other tactics.

Look At Every Contributing Channel

Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling illustrates which channels are best at driving qualified brand awareness. As a startup, you are likely both trying to drive conversions and become a household name. Last-click attribution won’t necessarily tell you all you need to know about your brand awareness campaign, or even how well your combined efforts are doing when it comes to driving conversions. You can simply log into your Google Analytics dashboard – the overview will tell you how many different channels are being affected by your marketing, and a deeper dive into your Multi-Channel funnels report. This will allow you to determine what channels are driving the most brand awareness – what channels are drawing people in – what channels are pushing people further down the sales funnel. That last click is important, but for you as a startup, arguably not so much more important than the first channel to catch your customer’s eye.

The Google Analytics Model Comparison Tool allows you to assign credit to important touch-points throughout the customer journey, making it easier than ever to use Multi-Channel Attribution to assess your efforts. If anything about Multi-Channel is helpful, it’s that this type of modeling allows you to forecast the point of diminishing returns more precisely. At Lead Horse, we use Kenshoo; specifically, to understand detailed attribution. Plus, the advanced forecasting allows us to see how our ads might perform in the future, and when we’re approaching that point of diminishing returns. This way, we can proactively keep our efforts fresh, dynamic and most importantly, effective.