Making a Digital Marketing Campaign

Digital marketing or online marketing uses channels accessible through the internet, such as search engines, social media platforms, and emails. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing requires that a marketer understands customer behavior to have the right target.

Digital marketing offers various advantages to businesses, including reaching out to more global markets, lower cost, easy to track and measure performance, and personalization, among others. It favors small businesses as they can use digital marketing to create brand awareness and gain customers in the same way as big corporates. Regardless of the business size or revenue, it will be competing on the same platforms as the big businesses.

However, the success of digital marketing efforts requires that a business first create a well-thought-out digital marketing campaign. A campaign in regards to digital marketing involves executing a marketing strategy over digital channels.

Before launching a campaign, a marketer should understand their customers regarding their product or service preferences, channels to find them, purchasing behavior, and customers who are already aware of the brand. This information helps a business market to the right target audience, saving on cost and ensuring a positive customer experience.

Digital marketing campaigns are more involving, unlike traditional marketing, where a business places ads on television or billboards and waits for customer response. Digital campaigns require that a business marketer carry out proper planning by defining the campaign goals. For example, a goal could be merely to attain social media followers or build brand awareness. Establishing the goal helps in measuring the success of a campaign.

After defining the campaign goal, the next is to identify the target market to whom a business intends to reach out. Again, this comes in handy in crafting marketing materials. For instance, a marketer may segment the target audience and use different messages to fit each group.

Another important aspect of a digital campaign is to define a persona or the ideal customer. This includes defining a customer in terms of age, income, occupation, location, interests, hobbies, etc. Understanding the intended persona makes designing a product or service more accessible to meet their needs and expectations.

As a marketer continues to refine their campaign, it is important to consider the marketing budget available. This is because the budget will dictate how to share resources among different marketing channels. For instance, a marketer can set the number of people an advertisement should reach in a pay-per-click campaign depending on the available budget.

Once all the above information is collected, a marketer should also plan where to market a business. Social media has come out as an important platform in digital marketing. Social media is no longer only used to keep in touch with friends and family, but people use it to indulge in online shopping. It also helps drive traffic to a business website and collect valuable insights and data. It also provides a channel where a business can interact with its customers through chats or comments on posts. Such information is useful in adjusting future campaigns.

Instagram Advertising Tips

The introduction of social media in the digital marketing landscape has transformed the field of advertising. Social media platforms like Instagram are now at the core of most marketing schemes. Brands aiming to boost their sales can employ Instagram’s ad features to reach more customers than ever before.

Established businesses and startups are directing their advertising efforts on social media. Instagram’s business features make it one of the most popular platforms for brands to launch their digital shopping experience. Instagram ads have a significant reach of over 1 billion people.

Instagram ads are paid features that appear on users’ feeds, reels, and stories. Marked by a special “sponsored” label, Instagram ads typically include an image or video of the product accompanied by a link to the brand’s website or in-app store.

To make the most of Instagram ads, brands must know how to produce their advertising content. They need to carefully design each post based on the product they’re advertising. For example, simple in-feed ads are ideal for products that people can easily identify through a single image or video. Although Instagram allows video ads of up to 60 minutes, ideally, they should be short snippets rather than full commercials.

On the other hand, Instagram stories ads provide a more immersive experience since they appear in full-screen mode. Their design can include add-ons like stickers. Incorporating any element that adds movement is a plus. Even if the ad is not in video form, it can engage more audiences through the use of gifs. Additionally, brands can benefit from the story’s direct swipe-up link feature, which redirects users to landing pages, online stores, booking websites, or app installs.

Carousel ads are among the most versatile Instagram ads. They can appear on feeds and within stories. Their visual storytelling differs from single-image advertising since they can incorporate up to 10 images, thus allowing brands to showcase various products or tell multi-part stories. An effective carousel ad starts with a call-to-action or question to drive users to continue swiping.

With such a wide range of advertising options, brands need to make strategic decisions during their content creation process. To benefit from Instagram’s advertising potential and impact, ad design must be tailored to target audiences.

When designing Instagram ads, brands need to keep in mind that over 98 percent of users rely on the mobile version of Instagram. Therefore, creative assets must be optimized for mobile viewing. For instance, brands should film video content in vertical format with a maximum runtime of 15 seconds. The text should be kept to a minimum and, if used, needs to be legible, so large font sizes are recommended.

Despite their short runtime, videos are not necessarily catchy, and users may easily swipe and miss the ads. The first two to three seconds of the video ad must be attention-grabbing so that users get hooked and watch the entire ad.

Studies show that almost half of social media users watch videos on mute. Sound is an important factor to consider when conveying key information. Rather than rely on narration or catchy jingles, brands should prioritize visual storytelling with purposeful text overlays or captions when necessary.