In our last entry, we went over how to run a digital marketing campaign for branding. If you haven’t read it, we highly recommend that you check it out first. Once your branding is strong enough, businesses can start focusing more on promotional campaigns that could bring more sales.

In this article, we will go over how to prepare, launch and monitor a successful sale-centric digital marketing campaign.

1. Objectives

Before doing anything, it’s best to have a clear goal, or a SMART goal. Once you have defined your goal, it would be easy to set the budget.

Digital marketing can achieve a lot of purposes: data collection for remarketing, increase engagement or website traffic. All of the above can increase your sales in their own way. You can decide which way to go based on your past data and insights.

Here are additional terminologies that you should understand before deciding the campaign budget.

• Action: includes inbox message, comment, like, click – basically any interaction between viewers and your ads.
• Cost per action: you can calculate the average cost for each action using this formula: budget divided by total number of actions.
• Lead: the information a customer shares after an Action. This can include name, phone number, address, email… All leads need to be dealt with immediately for maximum conversion chance.
• Cost per lead: average cost of each lead.

Cost per sale: This is the most important figure you need to track. You can set your campaign budget according to this formula (budget = cost per sale x targeted sales)

2. Preparation

Picking the right target audience is the first step to a successful digital marketing campaign – just like people said – right people at the right time. If you haven’t decided on a target audience, you need to start researching and drawing from your own or others’ experiences. Demographics and locations are a good place to start. What truly separates a good marketer from a great one is the ability to utilize the understanding of human’s psychology innovatively. For example: Instead of just targeting people who show interest in weightlifting, a gym marketer can widen the circle by targeting people who recently seek to pursue healthy lifestyles, or people who are trying to becoming a healthier person.

Once you have a clear view of your customers, it times to put that into the content. It can be anything from pictures, video to articles about your product. Whatever it is, you need about 20 variations of them for testing purposes. More content equals more data, which means more analysis and more insights.

Don’t forget to fine-tune your company process. Customers who decided to give your company a try after seeing your ads can easily change their mind if your customer service is bad. Long response time, inefficient logistics or terrible consulting are all sale-killers that you need to avoid.

3. Timing

In a typical product life-cycle, it is a good idea to run sale boosting ads during new product launchings, promotions/discounts opportunities or events for loyal customers. Holidays like Christmas, New Year Eve, Black Friday, Thanks Giving are also ideal for advertising time. Despite a steep increase in the price for ads at this timeframe, businesses should still consider running ads due to the high demand for shopping.

Here is an extra tip: the last week of the month is also a great time to run ads. Your customers are about to receive their salary, which means they are also thinking about their next-month purchases.

4. Content and design

Customers only have 3 seconds of focus while surfing the Internet, so digital ads need to satisfy the 3S criteria: short, sweet and straight to the point. The same rule applies to the video format; you have 3 seconds to catch their attention.

Effective advertising content can only be made by combining art with science. Art is when you have to draw out (all puns intended) their internal struggles, which your products/services can help ease, within the minimum number of words. Science is when you have to research and incorporate specific keywords to boost your content’s visibility.

One last thing, knowing how each advertisement platforms display content is crucial. Facebook will put your text before pictures while Instagram is completely opposite. Find a way around these formats and your ads will instantly pop off.

5. Digitals marketing channels

If you don’t know which digital marketing channels to focus, you can start by looking at your objectives.

• Facebook Ads: great for creating direct interaction between sales and customers (like leaving a message to the page) or draw them to the campaign landing page.
• Google Ads: promote a specific keyword (if your products/services are trending) or draw them to the Google shopping
• Instagram and TikTok: more suitable for young audiences but still relatively new for Vietnamese marketers to fully explore.

6. Measure

A good digital marketer always finds a(nother) way to optimize the ad campaign. Spending your time to go over these statistics is a good start toward learning more about optimization.

• CTR: represents how many people have clicked on the ads. You can start monitoring this number when the ads have at least 2,000 clicks. A 5% CTR is considered normal for most businesses. If it’s lower than 5%, it is time to (drastically) change the content.
• Frequency: is the number of time a single customer see your ads. Imagine seeing ads for shoes that you really want. Your eyes linger on it, and the next thing you know, it just won’t leave your newsfeed for a whole month. This is a great way to stay on your customers’ top of mind. Be cautious and switch your contents when the frequency is too high, yet the sale remains static.
• CPM: is probably the most important number to monitor. A rising CPM either means a decrease in engagement, reach or an increase in cost. Both of which are bad news.

At the end of the day, the effectiveness of any digital marketing ads campaign lies in the number of inbox messages, leads, and, obviously, revenue.

To make the most out of digital marketing, the executive has to keep trying new things, learning from said trials and looking for ways to optimize the content. For businesses, especially those that are budget conscious, digital is definitely a marketing channel worth the investment due to its superb reach and accurate targeting system.

That is easy to say, but the catch here is how to run the campaign effectively without stumbling on unfamiliar technical problems. A smart choice for brands is to work with digital marketing agencies for delivery of a fruitful campaign. EloQ Communications has profound experience in running digital campaigns. Our in-house experts are confident in assisting to achieve their objectives with meaningful number.

Written by Scott Nguyen, a PR & Communications Manager at EloQ Communications. A firm believer of broad knowledge, Scott has spent a lot of time venturing the communications industry. During his course at EloQ, Scott has successfully guided his team and delivered fruitful campaigns for the technology giant Grab, the luxury automotive Ferrari, and many more.