4 Things to Understand Before Starting a Digital Marketing Campaign

Digital marketing in this age and era is extremely important because the world is rapidly shifting from analog to digital. Most people have access to internet channels and social media – and people are consuming digital content more than ever. For traditional marketers, it is very important to adapt to digital marketing medium. Before you start marketing your service or product, you must plan and understand the following digital marketing framework.

1. Understand Your Business: Understanding “what” you are marketing is the start of your journey. It is very important to know what you are marketing. In most cases, you are marketing a business or a product of a business. A good marketing plan starts with understanding the core components of a business. Those components are revenue of the business, cost of the product or service, what is the product or service and finally who are your customers. Another core component is to formulate a value proposition. A value proposition conveys what you are selling, what the benefit is of using it, who the target customer is and what makes your offer unique and different from competitors. It helps you understand what you are trying to achieve for your business.

2. Know Your Customer: If you think your customer is everyone, you are making a classic marketing mistake. When you market to everyone, you market to no one. The reality is your business has a single type or few types of customers, but certainly not everyone. That’s why it is important understanding exactly who your customer is. To understand your customers, you have to understand their emotions. And the only way to understand your customers’ emotions is to create an empathy map. Most digital marketers use market research, data, the combination of interviews and visiting your customers’ environment to create empathy maps. Empathy maps have four quadrants broken into – thinking, seeing, doing and feeling. You can then use empathy maps to create target personas. A persona is a fictional character that summarizes and communicates the key characteristics of your target customer.

3. What Are Your Channels: Marketers used to concentrate their efforts only on a handful of places like TV, Radio, Print, and Billboards to reach their customers. Thanks to technology, there are now thousands of places to reach your customers. There are four kinds of digital channels that digital marketers can use. They are Broadcast Channels, One to One channels, Search Channels, and Social Channels. Broadcast Channels are places online where people pass by – like the ads you see on a website. Let’s take an example of an ad you see on the CNET’s website. It gives the marketer an opportunity to reach you, even though you didn’t visit the website to see an ad. One to one channels are more direct and intimate. Examples of one to one channels are email or text message you get. It gives the marketer an opportunity to speak directly to you and no one else. Advertisers can use services like Mailchimps or messaging applications like Facebook Messenger to reach directly to you. Search Channels are search engines or search function on a website where marketers optimize keywords to reach their customers. Example of search channels are Google, Bing, Yahoo and search function on a website like Amazon or iTunes. Finally, Social channels are the word of mouth of the internet. Social channels are where a group of people gathers and share information. Marketers use social channels to get a conversation started about their product or services. Examples of social channels are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest or LinkedIn.

4. Understand What You Want to Achieve: If you don’t know where you are going, chances are you will never get there. All marketing needs is a marketing objective. A marketing objective is what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. Ideally, your marketing objective should be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-phased. The smarter your marketing objective the more easily you