If you want to earn more customers and grow your business, an impactful digital marketing campaign is a must. With the right strategy and tactics in place, you can build a strong brand and increase sales. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be easy to waste time and money on ineffective strategies, especially with so many tools out there—and more being released every day. Creative Repute is here to help. We’ve won several awards for our branding and marketing campaigns, having worked with clients like the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the NFL. Read on to learn about our approach and take what you need to achieve success in your own digital marketing efforts – or get in touch to collaborate on your projects.
Determine Your Objectives
Are you trying to increase brand awareness, generate new sales from existing customers, or something else? What specific ROI (return on investment) do you want to achieve? It’s important that your goals are realistic and measurable; otherwise, how will you know if the campaign has been successful or not? It’s easy to get this wrong. For example, “increase awareness of our brand across all age groups” may seem like a strong goal at first glance, but it’s not specific enough. You still need to answer questions like:
- Why do you want to increase brand awareness across all age groups?
- What are your key performance indicators?
- How will this translate into the best growth for your business?
- Are you sure there aren’t other more effective ways to achieve the returns you seek?
Instead of setting vague objectives, try to be as specific as possible so you can clearly determine when you have been successful and find strategic opportunities for growth over time. For example, “Generate $X over Y” where X represents projected revenue based on previous sales cycles and Y represents the total length of time spent running this particular campaign (e.g., two months) is a much stronger campaign goal.
Develop Buyer Personas
With a buyer persona, you can create a fictional representation of your ideal customer that will help you plan and execute a digital marketing campaign that cater to the specific needs of this group. It includes information like:
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Income level
- Education level
- Likes and dislikes
- Needs (as they relate to your product or service)
Buyer personas ensure that you’re marketing to the right people and that your content is relevant and valuable to them. For example, if a college student is looking for a new mattress but isn’t sure which one is right for them—a soft bed or firm?—this would be an important factor in their decision-making process and thus should be included as part of the buyer persona’s profile.
Conduct Competitor Analysis
Conducting competitor analysis is a crucial part of any digital campaign so you can determine what sets you apart in your market and then build upon that advantage to formulate an effective campaign.
There are many different strategies you can use to conduct a competitive analysis. A good place to start, especially in the brainstorming stage, is a SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and the goal is to take an in-depth look at your competitors, developing an itemized list for each SWOT segment as it relates to your own brand and the market at large. It’s a great way to get the ball rolling for your campaign and ensure your team is thinking about the big picture.
Next, you can go more in-depth by looking at metrics specific to your goals. For example, if you want to drive more traffic to your site, you can use SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to form a list of keywords your competitors are ranking for and look for opportunities to improve your own organic rankings.
If you aren’t sure what type of competitor analysis you should be conducting, or where to begin, our team is available to help. Contact us about your project to learn more.
Audit and Optimize Your Digital Presence
Once you’ve finished conducting competitor analysis, you should have plenty of data and ideas to guide the way your brand shows up and engages with others digitally. The first step is to take inventory of all of your current channels, including social media, email marketing campaigns, and your website. From there, you can assess how well they’re performing in terms of traffic, engagement, and conversions.
Once you have that data in hand, you can use it to determine where gaps exist between where you are and what you hope to achieve. For example, if your website has a high average bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page on your site), it might indicate that there’s something about the site structure or content quality that doesn’t meet visitor expectations. In this case, a website audit would help identify where changes need to be made so that users are more likely to stay on your site longer.
As an award-winning website design and digital marketing agency, Creative Repute can provide a detailed, comprehensive website audit for your business. We’ll look at every aspect of your site, from navigation to design and content quality, to determine how it’s performing and whether changes need to be made. Reach out about your project if you’re interested.
Maintain Consistent Branding (Earn 23% more than your competitors)
Consistent branding can be a huge asset for your company, especially when it comes to attracting new customers and retaining old ones. Inc.com reports that businesses with consistent branding earn 23% more revenue than their competitors. It’s easy to understand why this is the case. Consistent branding lends a greater sense of professionalism to your business and communicates that you value quality. It makes your business more memorable which helps build trust and loyalty.
The key to ensuring consistent branding is to have a strategic brand style guide that all members of your creative team can reference as they create print and digital marketing campaign content, from social media templates to signage design. Learn more about what a brand style guide contains and how it can benefit your business.
Form a Digital Content Strategy
A content strategy is a specific plan for creating and managing your digital content. It should generally include:
- Buyer personas. We mentioned this earlier in this article, but it’s important to mention it again here. No content strategy will be effective if it does not impactfully reach the right audience – and it’s impossible to do this without first understanding your audience. Learn more about buyer personas.
- A content calendar or editorial calendar that allows you to schedule content in advance (ensuring consistency) from social media to emails and blog posts.
- An ads budget if you plan to go this route with channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or TV advertising such as through Hulu Ad Manager.
- An SEO strategy for targeting specific keywords, building backlinks, and driving the right organic audience to your website based on the buyer personas you developed.
- A KPI report for measuring your growth across each channel. Ideally, you will check in with these numbers on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to adjust your strategy for success and ensure your team is consistently pushing for growth. Your goals can be revisited for each channel once every quarter or so.
Once you have your digital content strategy in place, and you’re starting to see traffic and conversions, you can start running A/B tests and optimize your conversion paths.
Run A/B tests and Optimize Conversion Paths
A/B testing is another crucial part of any digital marketing campaign. It allows you to compare two versions of a creative, such as email subject lines or landing pages. You can then see which version performs better in terms of clicks, views, conversions, etc. For example, if 100 people were sent two variations of an email campaign and 70 clicked through one version but only 60 clicked through the other, you can determine that the former was more impactful and use that variation in future campaigns — or test against another slightly different variation to try and improve the numbers even more.
A/B testing is also a great way to test new ideas or concepts before launching them. If you aren’t sure how a new product, service, or message will be received by your audience, you can create two versions of it, share the versions with small samples of your audience, and see which one performs best before committing time and resources to build out the full campaign. For a more in-depth method of testing out new ideas on your target audience, you can also explore running a focus group.
Invest in Help (Don’t try to do everything yourself)
Don’t be afraid to outsource things beyond what you know how to do or understand — digital marketing campaigns can be extremely complex with many different moving parts, especially as platforms, trends, and people evolve. You might be able to do some things in-house, but if you find that it’s taking away time from other important things (like customer service, sales, or product development), it’s probably time to invest in help.
Our team at Creative Repute is composed of world-class researchers, designers, web developers, and specialists, all with various culturally diverse and intimate connections to the arts. We develop and design visual campaigns for transformative brands that align with our mission to make the world a better, more inclusive place. Just as no two people are the same, no two campaigns are the same. We do not have a rigid adherence to a specific type of aesthetic, so every design reflects each individual client’s brand without a hint of Creative Repute. Our team’s diverse assemblage of detail-oriented artists works collaboratively to ensure the elements of visual design align with our clients’ ultimate goals. Explore our list of services and let us know if you are interested in working together.
Examples of Successful Digital Marketing Strategies
We partnered with Trash Academy to market their #BYOBagPHL campaign for a cleaner and more environmentally conscious Philadelphia. Trash Academy is an organization committed to ending Philly’s litter and illegal dumping crisis through creative and community-based solutions. You can view the reusable tote bags we designed for their campaign here.
“So much gratitude to Creative Repute for transforming our social media accounts. Nile and Tiffany worked for 4 months to create new content, design graphics, and boost our followers. They really put in the time to understand our organization’s mission and the goals of our social media campaign. Because of this, the photographs, graphics, blurbs, and hashtags were on point! They greatly increased our viewership both by making in-person connections at events and by consistently searching online for individuals and organizations with similar intentions.
Most importantly, Creative Repute helped us to simplify a complicated message, about the work we do and issues of environmental justice. They researched relevant news and events and lined up posts every day for 3 different accounts that were visually and verbally engaging. This work not only created much more engagement with our social media content, but also increased the amount of engagement with our website, at our events, and with our programming out in the world.”
– Mural Arts Philadelphia Trash Academy
Our design development process supports our focus and commitment to positive change. Our team reaches optimal efficiency through impact-driven strategy, dedicated project management, and thoughtful visual design expertise. The result of our collective efforts is a strategic design solution that can be scaled through mission and measured for impact.
Our team prides itself in the collaborative work we have done with political campaigns as well. For example, we designed marketing materials for Tiffany Ford, who ran for City Council in Toronto, Canada. Tiffany Ford is deeply passionate about creating opportunities within her communities to help residents grow and thrive within their city. You can view the ad campaign we designed for Tiffany here.
“A lot goes into a political campaign. My marketing machine needed a vinyl van wrap and several signage designs. The team at Creative Repute was with me every step of the way and they provided an amazingly fast turnaround. I can tell that this agency cares about their client’s success. I recommend them to everyone.”
– Tiffany Ford
Need a little help?
Creative Repute’s mission is to deliver impactful design solutions through a multidisciplinary approach to web development, graphic design, and digital marketing campaign strategies. We intentionally hire, support, and empower diverse experts who share a collective drive for positive impact and global transformation. We believe progress can only be achieved through collaboration, a shared vision, and treating each other with the utmost respect. We believe the only way we can win is to win together. Our efforts to make the world a better place are unwavering, and we are honored to design campaigns that share the same sentiment.
We would be thrilled to curate marketing materials and design a digital campaign that merges honest intent with strategic visual branding. If you are interested in receiving expert guidance in your digital marketing campaign, or you would like to learn more about what we do, please reach out to us. Or send an email to info@creativerepute.com
