Digital display campaigns have their own specific set of requirements and goals. What is a Digital Marketing campaign? How do they differ from types of marketing campaigns?
What is a digital marketing campaign?
Digital Display ads are what most of us think when we think of online advertising. They are the ads that appear on webpages and in apps. Traditionally, they are an image with test overlayed text that when clicked on, directs the user somewhere where more can be learned about the ads message. Display ads can also be animated, carousels, rich media, videos, or even interactive.
Unlike other types of marketing, digital display ads are always served in a “campaign.” Why? It has to do with the way companies get their ad to the consumer. Display ads are served through platforms that sell online ad space. Some platforms sell the ad space directly but most use DSPs.
What is a DSP?
Wikipedia defined DSPs as “A demand-side platform is a system that allows buyers of digital advertising inventory to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange accounts through one interface.”
DSPs allow companies to set their campaign parameters such as audience, types of websites wanted to serve ads to, and preferred time to serve the ad. When setting up the campaign, advertisers tell the DSP the campaign budget, the length of campaign, and how much of the budget the DSP can spend every day and/or on each specific impression. The DSP takes that information and using AI and machine learning and finds the best places to serve the ads.
DSPs have many types of websites and even other types of channels, such as, apps, CTV and OTT, and DOOH. Therefore, they give advertisers a lot of options and control when planning and executing campaigns. They make it easier to optimize a campaigns effectiveness. During a campaign, advertisers can update things like budget and audience parameters at any point. They can even black list specific underperforming websites.
Advertisers that specialize in digital advertising campaigns, specifically programmatic ads, are often called Traders because of the similarities between running a programmatic display campaign and the stock market.
What do you need to build a success digital campaign?
Step #1 – Set your goals
The first step is to decide why are you running this campaign? Answering the “why” is the determining factor for the rest of your strategy.
What are some common goals for digital campaigns?
- Increasing brand awareness
- Acquiring leads
- Driving traffic to a website or funnel
- Finding new customers
- Increasing sales
Once you have defined a goal it is important to connect that goal to specific measurable metrics. Using the SMART method is particularly effective. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. Without making goals smart, it is difficult to create an actionable strategy. It is helpful if the specific metrics you define are number based, the data you will gather (your results) will numerical.
Step #2 – Figure out the who
Targeting the right people is essential to a campaign’ success. It is important to figure out who you want to connect with. Is the target for this campaign a current customer? Are you looking to expand your customer base? Looking at your campaign goals should help you to find your target audience. The more information you can connect with your target audience the better. Many people find having a buyer persona helpful. A LookALike report may also be help because it can help you find which demographics to target.
Audience data is the foundation to all successful marketing campaigns. However, it is especially important for digital campaigns because digital advertising platforms require audience parameters in the campaign set up.
Step #4 – Message
What is the message of your campaign? Look at your campaign goals and audience to find the tone and messaging of your campaign.
Questions to ask yourself about campaign content:
- What tone of content does your target audience respond to? For example, can your tone be informal?
- What call to actions are going to be effective in reaching your campaign goals?
- What ad sizes are you going to use? How much space are you going to have for words?
It’s especially important with digital campaigns to have a clear CTA. With social media or multichannel campaigns, CTA can be more complicated or subtle. All of the elements of the campaign can have different CTAs. However, with a digital campaign, with your CTA needs to be simple, clear, and direct. Space is limited and many digital display sizes are small, so CTAs need to be concise and easy to read.
Part of planning your messaging is choosing where people will land when they click your ad. The messaging (and imagery) of your ad should match the follow through. Although a digital ad can direct people to just about anywhere, most campaigns utilize landing pages.
Landing page a term that gets used a lot, but often people use it incorrectly. It can be easy to assume that any page a visitor lands on would be a landing page buts it’s actually a lot more specific than that. One person illustrated it this way: You could use a baseball glove to retrieve a hot dish from the oven, but that doesn’t make your baseball glove an oven mitt. So just because someone lands somewhere doesn’t mean that it is a post-click landing page.
What’s a CTA?
CTA stands for call to action, and it’s the part of a webpage, advertisement, or piece of content that encourages the audience to do something. The CTA is what helps a business convert a visitor, or reader into a lead. Which ultimately is the goal of any marketing campaign: guiding your audience so they eventually make a purchase.
Call to actions can take a variety of forms as they fill many roles. They all however, prompt action. For example: Sign up. Subscribe. Try for free. Get started. Learn more here.
What makes a landing page special? A landing page is a dedicated stand-alone webpage, created to convince the visitor to accomplish a single action. What is the advantage of separating your landing pages out to specify a single action? Research has shown that companies using 40 or more single action post-click landing pages generate 120% more leads than those using less than 5!
Step #5 – Plan out the when
Part of what makes a campaign a campaign is that there is an order of operations; series of steps. The next to planning a successful campaign is to figure out the flow.
Unlike some other types of marketing campaigns, having the flow and specific timing set up from the start of the campaign. Why? The duration of a campaign is required information for digital advertising platforms. It’s also required to have the destination for ad clickers locked in during campaign set up.
Have you ever created a digital display campaign?
