6 Tips to improve your digital campaigns

As marketers, we frequently launch many different campaigns on a daily basis, including blog posts, newsletters, ads, social media posts, magazine articles, offline campaigns, etc. Clearly, not all of them are effective, but that doesn’t mean we are doing it wrong!

One of the first steps in launching a marketing campaign is to analyze the target audience to determine their communication styles, the types of material they consume, how they consume that information, and how they relate to their environment in order to provide the right content.

Even with the necessary analysis and hours of research, campaigns might fail. Of course, without failure, there is no victory! As the famous saying goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Trial and error have to be set in stone in order to achieve success by finding profitable, sustainable channels and campaigns over time, and it’s not going to be easy!

So, what can you do to get closer to your objectives and find the communication channel or channels that convert the best?

We’ll give you some tips to start working on, so you can nail it over time:

1- Set realistic goals 🎯

This is a common mistake: we frequently do not give enough time to campaigns in order for them to produce results.

Did you know that it takes at least 6 months to determine whether a social media plan is effective or not?

We are all prone to making mistakes and canceling good strategies prematurely, especially if we don't know how long it will take for the chosen channel to validate a strategy.

You can find articles from experts sharing what they think is the average time to get your channel performance to its potential. Some nice channels are Neil Patel Twitter or Guy Kawasaki Twitter, but feel free to seek out other points of view to help you with this topic. 

As previously stated, the best thing you can do is to run tests for a reasonable amount of time. For example, an email's performance can be known in a week, and if you wait longer, the results won’t probably change significantly, but an email’s performance doesn’t compare directly to a post on LinkedIn. They are different platforms with different interaction rates and audiences altogether.

2- Check the dayparting 🎉

That’s a funny word! The dayparting normally applies to ads, but we can export it to general campaigns. It is the programming grid of your ads when we send or show them.

Did you know that it works better to publish content on LinkedIn from Tuesday to Thursday, either early, mid-morning, or early afternoon and the best time is Tuesdays between 10 and 11 a.m. (according to a HubSpot study), whereas on Twitter they recommend publishing between early in the morning on weekdays, ideally, 8 a.m. on Mondays and Thursdays, according to Hootsuite’s data.

So, here are our tips to find our dayparting time:

1- Listen! 👂🏼 Research market trends and what experts have to say. 

2- Watch! 👀Examine your objective and target audience, profile them, and determine who they are.

3- Ask! 🗣 Get in touch with your target audience. This can be complicated, but as we are going to provide them with good content, they will undoubtedly welcome surveys, or they will at least be open to being asked beforehand what works best for them. 

4-Test! 💪Test and test again until you have enough data to validate your hypothesis and choose the ideal days and times to send your communications.

3- Listen to your customers

This is related to what we just discussed. We should always know what content we can provide to our target audience.

Everyone is talking about inbound marketing and applying marketing strategies that offer added value, but it must provide genuine value, and the campaigns we run must reflect that.

You can undertake active listening by directly asking your consumers what they want through surveys, calls, in-person meetings, and so on; or passively listening by monitoring how they engage with your material, other content they may be consuming, trends, and news.

For this passive search, you can utilize tools like Google Keyword Planner, which allows you to search for keywords. Also, there are tools that allow you to find the most searched questions related to a keyword, so you can get inspired to create new content, such as answersocrates.

Buzzsumo is another very useful tool to identify trends. However, all these tools will not allow you to filter by your target, so you’ll need to cross strategies. 

4- Analyze the competition 🔎

Take a look at how your competition is doing it. Analyzing your competitors will provide you with a better understanding of your market, but be careful because they could be using the wrong strategy!

To analyze your competitors first, confirm that the target is the same, and then see how they position themselves. The goal here is to inspire you to develop your own plan, not to imitate it! To learn from their failures, create opportunities, and improve ourselves.

We use Semrush for this type of analysis because, although it is an expensive tool, it gives very useful information on the competition's traffic, the number of keywords they rank for, their most searched keywords, and the paid traffic their ads are driving. We can also use more affordable tools such as Follow.net.

5- Seek mentors

There is power in numbers! Especially if you work for a small or medium-sized business. If you work in a small marketing department with limited resources, you can look for groups that can help you meet other businesses in your community and build relationships with them.

There are other platforms that allow you to discover mentors to assist you with specific campaigns, questions, or guidance. Some are paid, but there are some free groups, such as 6sense, which meets every Friday to debate subjects selected by the community of marketers.

6- Make use of productivity tools 🏆

It may sound cliché, but finding tools that allow you to spend time improving your efforts and looking for fresh options instead of losing time doing things computers can do faster is critical to campaign success.

So, you need to identify tools that motivate you while also allowing you to streamline your activities so you can spend more time on what really matters.

We can find different tools:

• Evernote: to save interesting articles and take notes.
• Semrush: to effectively analyze the competition, keywords or backlinks.
• Hubspot or Mailchimp: to automate email marketing campaigns.
• Hootsuite: to post on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn from the same panel and schedule them in advance.
• Gretel: to be able to find relevant data and campaigns that are not reaching the expected goals without having to spend hours analyzing data or reviewing the different platforms.

We hope these tips will help you improve your digital marketing campaigns. Nevertheless, you should also prioritize saving time and energy to make the necessary changes and have the patience to let the campaigns do their job!

We will get deeper into the best marketing tools to improve productivity in the following articles!