Five Ingredients of a Successful Paid Digital Campaign.

Behind every successful advertising campaign is a strategic blend of data and other inputs. The best digital strategists and communicators don’t just focus on one element of a campaign—they take the whole picture into consideration.  However, not everyone is a digital strategist. Maybe you’ve just heard digital advertising could be a valuable addition to your communications strategy, or maybe you just want to expand your communications capabilities to prepare for a future campaign opportunity. In any case, you should ask yourself these five questions before launching a digital campaign. Knowing the right questions to ask, and how to answer them, can be the difference between a mediocre campaign and one that surpasses both you and your clients’ goals.   1. Who is your target audience? Your target audience refers to the demographic information and behavioral attributes that define the segment of people you’re trying to reach. The more details you’re able to collect for this group, the more targeted and optimized your overall audience will be. Also, note that every digital ad platform translates to your target audience differently. For example, Facebook targets broad demographic categories while LinkedIn targets specific companies, job titles, and alma maters.   2. What creative elements do you have access to? Campaign creative elements comprise every type of material that is used to generate a lead within the advertisement itself. Some examples include brand guidelines, headlines, keywords, fonts, design elements, descriptions, and any calls to action. Often, it’s the pre-approved creative elements that can dictate the type of ads that you are allowed to run.  As seen below in the next question, creative specifications and measurements are a crucial part of creative consideration as they can drastically affect what you’re able to fit onto the visual element. As such, it’s recommended to always have your specs in hand before ideating on the campaign’s creative elements.   3. What call to action will best drive people to your website? A call to action embodies the ultimate purpose of the ad—what are we asking the audience to do? Specifically, a call to action can be an image, button or text that is intended to prompt users to perform a specific action like clicking on a link. Once again, the type of call to action you need will help to determine the type of advertisements you will create and run.   4. What are the goals (or KPIs) of this campaign? Key performance indicators (KPIs) are meant to demonstrate how effectively your campaign is achieving key business objectives via specific metrics. The metrics utilized are entirely dependent upon anything from what the client may desire to the final goal of the campaign. But by ensuring the SMART tactics (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) are integrated into this process, you can be assured that the KPIs will serve as a strong guidepost for how well the campaign is performing.    5. What is your budget? The budget is one of the most important but changeable variables of a digital campaign. A key tactic that can help determine a “ballpark” number when there is none is to think in terms of the time frame for a set campaign. For example, would the budget more likely be $5k/month or $4k for the entire campaign? This will give your account teams a more realistic framework to work with when coming up with a viable digital strategy.   Finally, the more campaign variables you have this precise information for, the more integrated and robust a campaign you will be able to run. By establishing these questions for your teams to ask the client ahead of time,  you will be able to use their answers to set up your digital team for success.