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 its own features, meaning it can also be very time-consuming ensuring everything is correct. A poorly set up 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:
- Stop money being wasted on existing campaigns
- Increase business sales revenue.
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 have 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!
What Is Required To Create An Effective Digital Marketing Brief?
Here are my top steps for crafting 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, let’s look at the process of how to craft the best possible campaign!
Set Clearly Defined Digital Marketing Goals
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.
- Sales – How many sales are you looking to gain?
- Lead Generation – How many leads are needed to achieve the goal – What is your standard lead conversion rate? What new client capacity do you have? Is it a B2C product or B2B service, and so on?
- Awareness – How many target customers do you want your brand to be exposed to? Ideally, all marketing campaigns need an element of brand awareness to promote products and/or services to a new audience.
Digital Marketing Budget
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 wouldn’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:
The Business Standing Amongst The Competition.
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 businesses and a 5% minimum for an established company.
What Is A New Customer Worth?
If you already know your customer’s 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.
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 in your campaign to hit your goal(s).
Which Marketing Platforms Should I Use?
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.
Targeted Geographic Area
Whether it’s one country or 100 countries, you need an effective plan. If you are 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, whereas 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.
Impression Share Consideration
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
- 1,000 impressions x 0.05 = 50 clicks per day
- 50 clicks x £4 per click = £200 daily budget
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.
What Is The USP Of Your Business?
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.
What Are Your Target Audiences Interests?
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, and 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.
What Does Success Look Like?
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
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.
What To Do Next?
You may realise you probably need help with formulating a digital marketing brief! Now is the t
- Hire internally to manage your digital marketing campaign?
- Integrate with a digital Google Partner agency team?
- Work with a freelance specialist.
- Try to do all digital marketing activities yourself?
- Use a variety of the above, side by side?
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.
