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Identifying Channels for your Campaign

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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Channel strengths and weaknesses

Each channel has its own strengths and weaknesses, benefits and costs, freedoms, and limits, and should be scrutinized carefully to understand how it will or won’t improve your campaign strategy. When you begin with your objectives and choose the optimal channel mix, you should identify the creative formats required and make sense of the value of production for these assets in relation to media costs. This is a good way to understand what media choices you need to produce for the best outcome.

Social

Choose social channels that are used by your customers and use paid social to drive reach and frequency of your ads and content to raise awareness and drive customer engagement and retention. Social can drive some direct conversions but social tends to have more of an assisting role in driving sales though it can sometimes directly drive sales of low-cost products. In most cases, awareness and engagement metrics are best suited to measuring the success of paid social with assisted conversions showing how it impacts on conversions, sales.

Display

Display placements on websites that are used by your target audience or target, retarget specific audience groups on multiple websites to drive awareness of your product or service. The success of display is best understood in terms of how effectively you can reach your target audience and serve your ads enough times that audience recall of your offering increases. Reach and frequency metrics are best suited to measuring the success of display campaigns while assisted, post-click or post-impression, conversions can illustrate display's impact on sales.

Paid search

Paid search, or PPC, keywords that are used by your target audience to buy products. Organize your keywords into ad groups and campaigns with compelling copy and ad extensions to encourage clicks from searchers who are actively interested in your product or brand. Google is the most widely used search engine but adding Bing or Yahoo along with any other search engines to your plan can open up your search activity to different types of searchers and drive incremental opportunities. Total sales, leads, cost per sale, conversion rate and other conversion metrics are best suited to measure success for PPC.

SEO

Choose to optimize the non-paid aspect of your search activity by ensuring the technical features of your website are working efficiently, particularly, in terms of load speed, mobile friendliness and limited or no broken links. Ensure the content you create contains frequent but natural use of search terms and phrases that your target searcher might use. Quality and well distributed content will accrue links from websites. Link building from quality websites will increase the visibility and rank for your website over time. Organic search drives most clicks on desktop devices and is considered more trustworthy than paid search by many searchers. PPC will drive more clicks on a mobile device, as it takes a few scrolls to get past the PPC results to the organic results below them. PPC and SEO, ideally, work together to try to capture as many searches as possible. Metrics used to measure the success of the SEO activities include conversion metrics, total sales, leads, conversion rate, and when assessing blog engagement, use metrics like repeat visits, average time on site, traffic levels to understand the value of SEO.

Email

Choose the email channel to drive retention of customers by engaging your mailing list. Those on your mailing list are ideally engaged with your brand, that's why they signed up. Distribute content to engage, special offers to entice and build customer loyalty over time. Use marketing automation to automatically email content to different persona types which you have defined at key times – as such, they will be best received and consumed by the audience. Be mindful of GDPR compliance when undertaking an email program. It is important to realize your retention objectives with email and measure success by looking at open rates, email click rates, mailing list growth, repeat visits, and higher lifetime customer value of mailing list subscribers versus site average. Email can directly drive conversions and, depending on the type of email program, this metric can be used to measure success, but for the most part, email drives retention.

Content

Finally, content marketing types can resonate with your audience and be distributed on the most appropriate channels to deliver on your objectives. Content marketing will feature in all aspects of digital marketing from videos to blogs, copy and whitepapers. Repeat engagement of content will have a positive effect on customer engagement and retention. It can drive awareness and assist in conversion activity. Content can be measured in terms of how it impacts the channel on which it is distributed, for example, engagement rates on social media, conversion rates is SEO and so on.

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Please note that the module slides are designed to work in collaboration with the module transcript document. It is recommended that you use both resources simultaneously.

Digital Marketing Resources:

Jessica Preddy

Jessica is a consultant with experience in marketing and an in-depth knowledge of the latest marketing techniques. Her previous roles have included working in a marketing agency and numerous customer-service-facing positions that have given her exposure to a wide range of customers and clients.

The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful. While relevant to this module, you will not be assessed on this content.

You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library

    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

    Digital Marketing Strategy
    Jessica Preddy
    Skills Expert

    This module identifies the core components of an effective digital marketing strategy and explains how to develop an effective budget plan and measure the ROI for digital activities. It covers how to set clear and actionable objectives and measurable KPIs as well as the key research activities to undertake to guide channel selection and messaging. It also explains how to develop a creative strategy based on campaign research to engage an audience and deliver on campaign goals. The module concludes by explaining how to execute a digital marketing strategy supported by a channel plan, a paid media plan, a campaign action plan, and succinct strategy documentation.