Online marketing provides businesses prime opportunities to generate increased brand awareness and open up new channels for revenue generation on a relatively cost-effective basis compared to traditional advertising. Strategic digital marketing campaigns cannot be launched on the spot, however; a considerable amount of research and planning is necessary to ensure that your campaigns reach the best possible targeted audience. Below are three critical steps in the planning process to ensure that your online marketing campaigns have the best possible success rate.

1. Develop a Sound Strategy and Set Measurable Objectives

Before you start investing an inordinate amount of resources in digital advertising campaigns, it’s imperative to clearly define your goals and lay out a strategic plan of action. One question you should ask yourself is “what do I hope to accomplish by increasing my online marketing spend?”  Once you have a clear vision in place, your strategy will develop organically and guide your decisions in building lucrative campaigns, allocating resources, managing creative assets, etc. Determining how much of your marketing budget to allocate to online marketing in particular is very important: in some cases, investing a bit more monetary resources for testing in the early stages of your campaigns will allow you to learn what works best for your business, and in the long run, increase your return on investment.

2. Identify Your Target Audience

The success of your digital advertising campaigns is largely contingent on whether or not you are marketing to the right audience. In the research and planning stages, you need to identify the core benefits of your products and/or services to determine what type of customer would benefit the most. It can be very costly to launch campaigns based on assumptions because should those initial beliefs prove to be wrong, you might end up spending a significant amount of money marketing to an audience that is not interested in what you’re selling. It’s essential to identify the profile of the typical customer or manage small media tests to see which audiences respond best to your marketing messages.

3. Invest in Powerful Creative Assets

You can drive all the traffic in the world to your site, but if your creatives are lacking powerful marketing messages and concise calls to action, conversion rates will suffer. Developing landing pages built to convert should not be a painstaking process, but it can prove to be difficult for inexperienced advertisers without a sufficient amount of previous campaign data. One key note here is that a simple call to action is more effective than a convoluted string of paragraphs and graphics. Don’t over complicate your landing pages and banners with needless aesthetics and irrelevant content that detract from your message. Sometimes less is more.

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