3 TOP TIPS FOR ANY SUCCESSFUL DIGITAL CAMPAIGN.

What are the key ingredients for activating a successful digital campaign? Read our top 3 tips below. 

Number 1; Get your brief right 

It should go without saying that it is of the utmost importance to get your agency brief right, it helps everyone get to the core of your challenge quicker and is key to getting the messaging strategy nailed.  

State what success looks like to you, what are your KPIs, what are you measured against. 

Typically it boils down to leads or sales as an end result. 3 phases of a buying cycle (when pushing products to market online) are around; awareness / education and conversion. 

You should recognise that these 3 phases of any target audience are equally important when advertising too, and that time and budget will be needed to take your consumers on this journey. 

Points to consider when crafting a digital brief; 

• What does success look like to you?
  leads, consumers, clicks / eyeballs / sales / awareness / engagement   
• What’s your proposition?
  clearly state what you do, how you do it and who you do it for  
• What is the value to you of a qualified lead?
• Who are your target audience?
  personas help refine a clear messaging strategy  
• What does the competition look like? 
  create a benchmark / look at the best in class / spot the gaps in the market 
• Media?
  think about the channels to activate your messaging, understand how much you need to spend through paid or earned channels to hit your KPI’s

Number 2; Creative ideation and quality production  

Don’t compromise on the creative ideation and production quality.​

It’s always easy to see digital campaigns that have (and failed), by taking a quick and easy path when it comes to pumping out ‘digital creative’ comms.  

It doesn’t mean you need big production budgets, the days of big TVCs just being adapted for online are behind us: it’s more about tactical, targeted, data driven,  story telling digital creative.

An umbrella idea with content themes.  

Digital agencies will need to show how the creative idea can scale across all channels.

Live campaign ‘micro amends’ are key, the smallest changes to live ads can impact your reach and CTR, a colour change on a CTA, tweak of the hero message, swap out of a key visual – all have an impact. 

Digital agencies should only be thinking this way when it comes to ideation and execution, along with how data should play a role in targeted messaging.  

​Number 3; test, test and test again

The joys of any digital comms is that you can track engagement live!​

No digital first campaign should end with the same creative that it started with.  

To truly optimise your spend, challenge your digital agency and media partners to ensure this is baked into their way of working. Live reports / refreshed content / tailored executions / data driven creative thinking.  

Ask the question; How do we continue to optimise our creative and media once live?  

Ideas should be adaptable to this reality, which is why high end digital executions can sometimes fail in this regard (if it takes weeks to refine a bespoke piece of content in the studio, it might not be the most optimal output). 

Conclusion  

• Get your brief right.  
• Don’t compromise on creativity. 
• Test / adapt and optimise. ​ 
  

Continue to test your creative – use data to steer personalised content, make micro amends and continue to optimise.

Author; Alex Birch (Founder of Polar London)