Building Campaign Strategy
What is Performance Marketing Campaign Strategy?
A performance marketing campaign strategy is the overall plan for your performance campaign. It should consider your target audience and include your approach, the actions you will take and your campaign goals. This strategy needs to be realistic, achievable and practical, based on your budget, available resources and business objectives.
Establishing a Goal
Before one can measure the success of any campaign, it’s important to establish the campaign goals. Whether generating brand awareness or selling products, setting goals prior to launch is the very basis of performance marketing.
Many ad platforms require one to establish goals before creating ads or setting up campaigns. The campaign goals determine where the ads are shown, who they’re shown to and other factors vital to success. The most popular performance marketing goals are:
Traffic The Traffic objective is designed to drive people to your website or app or chat conversations where they are exposed to the product or services the advertiser has to offer.
Retargeting Retargeting (also known as remarketing) objective helps the advertiser to target their own visitors or customers and serve ads on different websites, apps, social media etc. to bring them back on their platform and push them to complete conversion. The advertiser targets either to the visitors who have shown interest in any product or services on the platform but didn’t complete conversion or to the customers who are no longer active on the platform to make them aware about the new products and services.
Lead Generation Lead generation objective is the marketing strategy of stimulating and capturing interest of the users in a product or service and storing their contact information for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline. Later allowing the advertiser to nurture the captured users until they’re ready to buy.
Conversion Conversion objective helps the advertiser to focus only for the users who can take the desired specific actions on the platform such as purchase, adding items to cart, subscription, start conversation etc.
ROAS/Sales A sales goal enables the advertiser to focus on the total revenue generated through the campaign and measure on the total ad spends to get the ROI (Return on Investment/Spends).
Once you have established your campaign goals, you can use ad platforms to create campaigns that target those specific goals.
Choosing the Right Audience Targeting
Knowing and understanding the target audience is one of the most important things in performance marketing. It guides campaigns to only those people who are interested or potentially interested in the products or services offered by a specific company. The more accurate a target audience is, the better a company can advertise and market to this population, and the more conversions it will experience. With specific targeting capability the advertiser not only increases the conversions but also saves a lot of ad spends by not targeting the wrong population and thus improving the ROI.
Targeted marketing develops an understanding of a consumer’s behavior. Some people make impulse purchases, while others try to understand the purchase or justify it for a longer time before becoming a conversion. Understanding the interests and behavior of customers and potential customers allows businesses to better target them.
Read More: Knowing Your Target Audience in Digital Marketing
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is the process of researching and analyzing the marketing strategies of the companies operating in a given market.
The competitor research casts light on what other brands in your niche are doing to acquire and retain customers. The analysis evaluates as many factors as possible to bring insights into what drives traffic to your competitors’ pages and leads to their ads. It highlights the gaps and estimates your potential and opportunities to fill them. Following are the steps for competitor analysis-
Identify Competitors
Benchmark Competitors’ with yourself
Evaluate Competitors’ Ads & Content
Map Out Challenges and Opportunities With a SWOT (Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis
Compile your research together and draw out inferences
Read More: Competitor Analysis in 6 Steps: Tools + Free Template
Choosing the Right Channel
After understanding your primary objectives, audience and competitors. You should select the proper channels you can focus on. However, it’s important to understand that certain channels will not be suitable in the initial period and may work-out as you scale. To understand this in detail we have covered each performance marketing channel in the further sections.
Curating Creatives that Drive Action
Attention is the one of the most valuable things a consumer or social media user can give your business. It’s also the prerequisite for getting followers, generating awareness and making a sale or conversion.
The ads we put in our campaign is one of the most important factors which decide the overall performance. The impact of ad creative might just be a bit bigger than anything else. Make one that stands out, and you can appeal to the audience you didn’t even think of. Hence it becomes very important to understand that the process of creative development is iterative in nature and should always update with newer practices and design disciplines. However, development of each iteration should go through a series of basic steps so that results obtained are progressive. Following are the steps-
Research Any strong creative or content delivery is not possible without good research. A strongly researched creative will have a lasting impact on the end user and this in-turn will help in boosting the final conversion.
Ideation - A good research should always be followed with a better ideation process. With proper brainstorming you can unlock all the possibilities for an iteration and develop a more refined creative in the end.
Documentation It’s important to incorporate learnings from previously designed creatives. These learnings can help you ahead in developing better creatives which convert more users and have a higher attention grabbing capability.
The three key secrets to every successful ad are ad-copy, ad-creative, and ad-targeting. Make them on-point and you’re winning for sure.
Following will cover the best practices you can follow to make an attention grabbing, head turning ad creative:
There are 2 parts of an ad:
Visual Element: This consists of media like images, videos and HTML5.
Images ad: These can be in the form of a single (static) or multiple (carousel). A third form can also be GIFs which are not static in nature. Each type can be used for a different purpose from highlighting a single feature or offer via a single image or multiple products by a brand (multiple images).
Video ad: A video ad is the most popular form of ad format on most social media channels as it grabs a lot more attention. It comes handy when you are describing a process, a gameplay or showing a tour of an apartment or shop. Due to the extra element of a background sound and music videos tend to pull users attention the most.
Textual Element: Comprises the post copy, headline and CTA.
Post copy: This is the caption of the ad that describes the ad. You could add details about your product or service and also add a URL to the platform.
Headline: This is a short phrase at the bottom of the image or video and is usually action-oriented. It tells the user what your product or service does.
CTA button: This is seen with messenger or lead generation ads that directs people to the next step which could be filling out a form or sending a message
Some best practices recommended for ad creatives:
Split test your ad creatives
Know your target audience
Use emotional comfort or hooks
Add a CTA in the image in addition to the button
Make your images or videos stand out
Clutter-free ad design that is unambiguous
Address your audience's hurdles
Landing page should be consistent with ad
Profit from colour psychology
Cultural relevance
FOMO and urgency
One ad, One message
Note - All advertisement channels tend to have certain predefined guidelines for their creatives and ads. These guidelines must be adhered to strictly as not following them poses a risk of your ads being flagged or event account suspensions. One must carefully note these guidelines and develop creatives in accordance with them. These guidelines can also vary according to the demography, region and other targeting specific variables. Good Read: How To Make Effective Creatives For Digital Ads
Campaigns Set-up & Launch
A digital marketing campaign is a strategic online marketing effort that’s executed to achieve a specific goal. Usually, the end result will lead to greater brand awareness, more traffic, improved conversions, or more revenue.
The purpose of planning out a digital campaign is to help you articulate who your audience is, what goal you want to achieve, and the process you’re going to take to achieve that goal.
These are the 10 steps for building a successful performance marketing campaign-
Set your marketing goals
Identify your target market
Carry out a keyword/topic research
Do market research and competitor analysis
Choose your delivery channels and set your budgets
Create your content assets
Run pilot campaigns first
Monitor the campaigns and analyze their performance
Allocate more budget to profitable activities
Set up remarketing campaigns
Read More: How to Launch a Digital Marketing Campaign (10 Steps)
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