With so many digital marketing mediums available these days, such as Google Ads, it's difficult to know which channels to use. This step-by-step blog post by former Googler & Google Ads Expert Ben Tennant will help you to craft a solid digital marketing brief.
A solid marketing plan is an essential part of your digital strategy. Each digital marketing channel has it's own features, meaning it can also be very time consuming ensuring everything is correct. A poorly setup marketing campaign means you could be losing money. Everything must be right from the very start, beginning with the brief.
If you're looking to increase sales or lead generation on your website, an effective digital marketing strategy is the way forward. As a Google Partner ppc agency in Manchester, we are used to running highly successful PPC marketing campaigns and crafting digital strategies.
To ensure a marketing campaign has a high chance of success time after time, strong foundations must be laid from the start. Whether your target audience will be reached through Google Ads, or whether you use social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn for your product or service, a solid marketing plan is essential.
A key decision is to evaluate building an in-house marketing team versus using a digital agency or a freelancer to help market your product or service.
Whether your business manages all marketing campaigns internally, already outsources to an agency or is looking to use a new agency partner, you need a brief. A good digital marketing agency should:
Working with a digital agency on your campaign provides a vast range of expertise that cannot always be attained through hiring staff internally.
Usually, you will be paying a digital agency a similar figure to having an employee. However, you would gain the added advantage of having a whole agency team at your fingertips.
An experienced marketer will save you countless hours of time, because frankly we are more efficient & we can get the job done way faster!
Here's my top steps for crafting your an effective digital marketing brief to market any product or service, and give your digital agency the information they need to smash your goals. If your website needs attention, we also created this post on writing a website brief.
So without further ado, lets look at he process of thow to craft the best possible campaign!
First, when creating a digital marketing brief, you need to decide on the main marketing objectives. What things are you looking to achieve with your strategy? What do you want? Will there be more than one goal or do you want to focus on one or a few areas? Whatever you do, Offer your agency all the information they might need to get it right.
Now you have decided on your digital marketing goal or goals, the next step in the process is to consider your budget. In summary, your budget must be realistic and in line with the digital marketing objectives and gross annual revenue of the company.
You shouldn't be afraid to pass this information on to an agency. You woudn't go into a car showroom without at least revealing a ballpark budget, if you expect them to help you find the right car.
The things to consider when allocating a marketing budget are:
If you are not well known or highly established, the general rule is that the business will need to invest more to gain traction and increase market share. If your company is a clear industry leader, the budget you use may need to reflect this standing so the current market share is, as a minimum, maintained.
A specific way to work out a budget based on business size is to consider investing a minimum of 10% of gross revenue for small/medium business and a 5% minimum for an established company.
If you already know your customer lifetime value, then happy days! You already know how much can be invested in marketing to gain one new customer. If you don't have this information it would be prudent to get it. Work out the net profit gained per additional client or sale and how long your business keeps customers for.
This will give you the net profit lifetime value of an average new customer. By knowing what a new client or sale is worth to your business and how many additional customers you need for your marketing goal, you can calculate how much you need to invest on your campaign to hit your goal(s).
Different marketing platforms have different costs. A campaign on Google Search Ads can cost more than Facebook Ads and other social media platforms, However, the goal(s) might not be achievable through social media platforms such as Facebook. This all needs to be part of the strategy.
There needs to be a consideration regarding the pricing of the platform you plan to use. How much competition does your business face on Google, social media, Facebook, LinkedIn or email marketing? Try to provide this in your brief.
Whether it's 1 country or 100 countries, you need an effective plan. If targeting an entire world of customers with your digital marketing campaign, then the budget will need to be on a global scale! One thing to consider is the size of the audience within the target geographic area.
For example, marketing to the UK and USA may hit an audience of 392m people online, where marketing to only London could hit an audience of just 8m. So start locally and then provide in your brief a realistic budget based on the size of your geographic area.
Marketing impression share, especially with Google Ads - Impression share is calculated by looking at how many times your ad could have shown based on the search term volumes.
You are losing out if your keywords could have been triggered 1,000 in a given day, but your budget only stretched to show ads 500 times in a day. You need to get a high impression share to ensure you are not missing out on potentially valuable clicks to your business.
Impression share budget calculation -If the average cost per click for your keywords is £4, the expected
As a result, a budget of £200 per day would give you maximum coverage. This ensures you stand a great chance of your ad showing each time your keyword search terms are triggered.
let's start by looking at the USP of your business. This is what will make your marketing campaigns stand out in a crowded marketplace, so it needs to be included in your brief.
You must consider who your main competitors are and focus on what you do best. Whether it be price, quality, level of service or a unique offering, it needs to be shouted about from the rooftops! We kind of get it that there may not be one single thing, especially if your business is similar to others, but most of us usually have a few things we do well that we can shout about.
The key to writing a digital marketing strategy is to know the target audience for your business. Does the product/service appeal to men who have an interest in fashion aged 25-34, or is it more likely to be women with an interest in gardening aged 45-54? Knowing your target demographic allows for more focused marketing.
Get to know your target audience. The most powerful tool in digital marketing is your audience. Being able to audience target specific demographics, interests, purchasing intent.
A good marketing agency will look at your specific business process, and your existing google analytics to formulate custom audiences which will generate traffic that lines up with your marketing goals.
Every investment must be measurable against specific, achievable goals. Have KPIs that will add value. Always include KPIs in the brief, so these goals can form part of your marketing plan.
Start by working out your goals. What would class as a conversion? Online conversion is not always a sale, it could be downloading a document or signing up to a newsletter.
Other KPI considerations such as exposure volumes, traffic volumes, website bounce rate, the conversion rate are a key part of the process.
Set a timeline in the brief for goals to be achieved. Good digital marketing is highly measurable and can be tweaked & optimised regularly. However, digital marketing should be seen as a long term investment.
Campaigns can take up to 3 months to yield returns depending on the industry and length of a conversion path. Some are highly effective and get going straight away, but understand, it can be a process.
You may realise you probably need help with formulating a digital marketing brief! Now is the t
Whatever decision you make, each option has its own merits and all will likely return different results. It is not easy to decide on the best solution to achieve the business' goals. Working with a Google Partner agency can yield the best results if you want to get ahead of the competition with a powerful online marketing strategy.
