5 Steps for a Successful Digital Campaign
In order to create a successful digital campaign, you need to manage and execute an array of moving parts. Once you’ve found your audience and defined your goals, you need to create ads that expand your brand story and drive customers through the ever-important sales funnel. We know it can feel like you’re scaling a mountain at first, but with the right strategies and tactics you and your marketing team can achieve success you never thought possible.
Here’s a closer look into the success we achieved with Pact on a recent campaign. We hope these five steps provide better insight into the important elements required to create an amazing campaign.
Create a Great Brand Story
It’s important for your brand’s identity to be unique. Your brand story should tie into all your marketing efforts, making you distinct from your competition. Pact, for instance, has dedicated their business model to maintaining conservation and eco-consciousness, which helps set them apart from their competitors in the apparel industry. With this strong foundation, you can build authentic marketing strategies that fans can get behind – and you’ll quickly create a connection that drives buyers through your sales funnel.
2. Leverage Marketing Tie-Ins
Now that you’ve got your brand story dialed-in, it’s time to figure out how you can leverage events, PR, and marketing tie-ins. One of the easiest and most effective ways to do this is to take advantage of holiday sales and build an ad campaign promoting them. Whether it’s Christmas, Labor Day, Black Friday or any of the other major annual shopping holidays these promotions almost always result in increased ad performance and in turn, higher sales.
Pact very effectively positioned themselves as an environmentally-friendly brand, which put them in an excellent position to advertise a promotion on Earth Day. They created several landing pages, each dedicated to one facet of their environmentally-conscious and ethically produced ethos and promoted each with dedicated creatives to further optimize for performance. The tie-in was a no-brainer that created immediate connection with consumers that reflected in their final performance metrics.
3. Utilize a Full Funnel Marketing Approach
We continue to emphasize a full-funnel approach for campaign success – and Pact understood this loud and clear. We worked closely with them to tie targeting and creative strategy to each step of the funnel, providing headlines to match the tone for awareness, consideration, and action. We made sure each step of their sales funnel was covered and the incredible results speak for themselves.
Tip: Don’t ignore your top of funnel, because nobody will click that buy button unless they trust that you’re a reliable company. The top of the funnel is where you convince them of your reliability and trustability.
4. Drive it Home with Incentives and New Customer Discounts
Now that you’ve covered your top of funnel, it's time to give your action stage some love. Pact convinced new customers to convert by giving them a time-limited discount code that tied in with their strong brand message. Over Earth Day weekend, for instance, you got an extra 20% off your purchase. We retargeted this discount to people who had already interacted with the brand, connecting with fans who knew and trusted Pact and their eco-minded message. These little incentives were a massive success and people were buying Pact products like crazy.
Tip: Consumers are smart and they can sniff out brands that are full of empty promises. However, if you convince them that your brand is legit at top of funnel and then provide them with a little extra push (a.k.a., discount) at the conversion stage, they will respond positively and your campaign will be successful.
5. Shoppable (and Thoughtful) Landing Pages
Don’t confuse a landing page with your home page. A landing page is where you send your customers after they click on your ad, and it needs to relate directly to the content in the ads themselves. Say you’re a home goods brand and you ads speak about your new mattresses. You wouldn’t want your readers to click on the ad and go to an obscure home page showcasing all your products. Instead, you want to drive customers to a mattress-specific landing page that highlights all the amazing features around the mattress.
Pact designed several unique landing pages - yet they had design continuity between them. Each felt like a distinct piece of the Pact experience, all offering strong content to people who clicked on their ad. For example, one landing page discussed how they conserve water and how that impacts the environment. Each page was beautifully designed, shoppable, and played into a full-featured campaign that offered a customer something worth clicking on with every ad they encountered.
Tip: Be mindful with your landing pages and make them worth the customer’s time and clicks. They are not simply a middle step or hurdle between you and your customers, they are your chance to make a first impression. Make it beautiful, make it smart, and make it shoppable. Combine these ingredients and you’ll sell more products than you ever imagined.