Ultimate Digital Marketing Campaign Template For 2015

A tem­plate to help improve your email, paid search, organ­ic search, social, and con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts.

Danny Goodwin By Danny Goodwin from Momentology. Join the discussion » 1 comment

It’s a new year, so we’ve devised the ulti­mate dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate to help you devel­op your 2015 strate­gies for paid, earned, and owned media. The suc­cess of your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy depends on your prepa­ra­tion upfront. Start with fresh look at your KPIs, your under­stand­ing of audi­ence, and the tools you use to track site activ­i­ty and con­ver­sions. Then imple­ment stream­lined tem­plates to improve your email, paid search, organ­ic search, social, and con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts.


Create Or Fine Tune Customer Personas

Before you can “talk” the lan­guage of your cus­tomer through your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, you have to know who you’re talk­ing to. Per­sonas are a gen­er­al­ized rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your ide­al cus­tomer, made spe­cif­ic through a sketch of their fic­tion­al sto­ry.

If you already have devel­oped buy­er per­sonas fine-tune them through new research or what you’ve col­lect­ed over since the last time you gave them a fresh eye. Be sure every piece of mar­ket­ing col­lat­er­al you cre­ate in 2015 speaks to a spe­cif­ic per­son­a’s goals, behav­iors, and con­cerns.

Flesh out each cus­tomer type­’s per­sona by defin­ing the fol­low­ing (cour­tesy of Hub­Spot):

  • Per­sona name.
  • Back­ground: Job, career path, fam­i­ly.
  • Demo­graph­ics: Gen­der, age, income and loca­tion.
  • Iden­ti­fiers: How would you rec­og­nize this per­son if they were described to you, such as their demeanor or how they pre­fer to be com­mu­ni­cat­ed with?
  • Goals: Their pri­ma­ry goal and sec­ondary goals when engag­ing with your brand.
  • Chal­lenges: The pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary issues they face that keep them from their goals.
  • What you can do: What you do to help him or her achieve their goal and over­come their chal­lenges.
  • Real quotes: Assem­ble these from “real world” exam­ples of this per­sona.
  • Com­mon objec­tions: Rea­sons cus­tomers matched with this per­sona have passed on your ser­vices in the past.
  • Mar­ket­ing mes­sage: How you describe your solu­tion in rela­tion to their goals and chal­lenges.
  • Ele­va­tor pitch: The briefest pos­si­ble expla­na­tion of what you can do for them.

Include these ele­ments in your per­sona tem­plate, along with a pho­to of a real cus­tomer who fits this per­sona, and then fill out the tem­plate for all your com­mon types of cus­tomers.

Establish KPIs To Track For Your Business

Key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors mea­sure the health of your busi­ness and mar­ket­ing. When decid­ing your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing KPIs, fol­low this five-step mod­el designed by Google Ana­lyt­ics evan­ge­list Avinash Kaushik:

  1. Iden­ti­fy the busi­ness objec­tives up front. These are estab­lished by senior exec­u­tives.
  2. Iden­ti­fy crisp goals for each objec­tive. Mar­ket­ing man­age­ment con­tributes to this con­ver­sa­tion.
  3. Iden­ti­fy KPIs that align with above goals. Data ana­lysts and mar­keters lead this step.
  4. Set tar­gets for each KPI, set­ting the para­me­ters for suc­cess.
  5. Iden­ti­fy the seg­ments of peo­ple, behav­ior, and out­comes on which suc­cess will be ana­lyzed.

Create A Custom Dashboard In Your Analytics

Have you set up a cus­tom dash­board in your ana­lyt­ics yet? As part of your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate, you should con­sid­er an ana­lyt­ics tool, at the very least, a free one like Google Ana­lyt­ics.

How­ev­er, out of the box, these free tools are gener­i­cal­ly set up, and should be cus­tomized to your mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence. With sev­er­al cus­tom dash­boards to choose from, and up to 12 “wid­gets” on each dash­board in Google Ana­lyt­ics, your data dash­board can tell you the sto­ry you need to track when your vis­i­tors come to your web­site.

An easy-to-use wid­get in Google Ana­lyt­ics lets you place met­rics, pie charts, time­lines and tables with­in a cus­tom dash­board. This is great if you reg­u­lar­ly look for your top traf­ficked pages or check your top traf­fic week­ly. So stop dig­ging around Google Ana­lyt­ics for what you need, and put this info front and cen­ter in a dash­board. You can start with Google’s help arti­cle on how to cre­ate and cus­tomize dash­boards.

Pick A Tip To Send Better Emails Every Time

If you have a cus­tomer’s email, you have the pow­er to give them the right offer for the right prod­uct at the right time. This is not a pow­er to be abused. Cus­tomers are quick to unsub­scribe or mark as spam, which caus­es your brand to lose its direct line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in an instant.

Fol­low these tips from Vero to make your email mar­ket­ing pro­vide more val­ue to its recip­i­ents in 2015; every email you send should accom­plish one (or many) of the objec­tives on this list:

  • Offer ear­ly access.
  • Enter them into an exclu­sive club.
  • Announce stuff, and give them an advan­tage.
  • Pro­vide social proof.
  • Include a down­load.
  • Ask them to do some­thing “next”.
  • Offer a refer­ral code.
  • Make your CTA a but­ton.
  • Say “hi” if it’s been a while.
  • Jump on trends and cur­rent events.
  • Pig­gy­back off the pow­er of your brand part­ners.
  • Help them devel­op a con­ver­sion habit.
  • Tell them some­thing per­son­al.
  • Give them some­thing to show you care.
  • Give them some­thing to make them smile.
  • Gam­i­fy their inter­ac­tion with you.
  • Ask for feed­back.

Optimize PPC With This Campaign Management Template

A PPC mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate can be devised in a spread­sheet that helps you orga­nize your search ads for all your cam­paigns and ad groups. You can keep track of your Google AdWords and Bing Ads in a sim­ple Excel spread­sheet for col­lab­o­ra­tion, record­ing for each:

  • The tar­get mar­ket or per­sona.
  • The key­word.
  • Ad mes­sag­ing: Head­line.
  • Ad Mes­sag­ing: Descrip­tion line 1.
  • Ad Mes­sag­ing: Descrip­tion line 2.
  • The des­ti­na­tion URL.
  • What ad exten­sions you’ll use.
  • If the land­ing pages have been opti­mized with key­words and for con­ver­sions.

Perform An SEO Audit With This Template

Start your 2015 dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paigns with a clear diag­no­sis of the health of your site. SEO audits come in many forms, but here’s a sim­ple check­list you can use as a base­line.

Start by first per­form­ing a crawl of your site to col­lect the fol­low­ing data with­in a spread­sheet for every page on your web­site. Pri­or­i­tize the fix­es you’ll make based on the val­ue of the pages on your site (start­ing with the most valu­able in terms of traf­fic and link equi­ty, and work­ing down the line).

You’ll want to look at:

  • The cur­rent state of your meta data and head­ing tags.
  • Any errors, redi­rects, or URL issues occur­ring.
  • The state of your robots direc­tives and canon­i­cal tags.
  • A pic­ture of the file size and image sizes on your pages, and mak­ing sure they aren’t con­tribut­ing to slow page load times.
  • Iden­ti­fy­ing any dupli­cate con­tent and anchor text to note.
  • Under­stand­ing your back­link pro­file by view­ing your exter­nal links and inter­nal links, and get­ting a pic­ture of your fol­low and nofol­low direc­tives.

Oth­er basic SEO areas to look at:

  • If you haven’t already, reg­is­ter your site with Bing and Google Web­mas­ter Tools.
  • Install an ana­lyt­ics pro­gram if you don’t have one (see the sec­tion on con­fig­ur­ing cus­tom dash­boards above).
  • Ana­lyze the URL struc­ture inter­nal­ly, like how your direc­to­ries are set up and the URLs are named – is it orga­nized?
  • Every page should have unique and rel­e­vant con­tent for your tar­get per­sona, in sup­port of the pur­pose of the page, includ­ing impor­tant key­words when nec­es­sary.
  • On-page opti­miza­tion should also take into account the appro­pri­ate use of head­er tags and image file names.
  • Val­i­date your page’s code with the W3C val­ida­tor, a gold stan­dard in crawlable code.
  • Improve page load speed with avail­able tools.

Design Graphics And Infographics With This Go-To Template

Visu­al imagery is vital to every mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty, from web­site and blog con­tent to paid and organ­ic social media posts. Not every­one has to be a design­er, but know­ing the guide­lines of good design, and know­ing the ide­al dimen­sions and specs for images on every chan­nel, you can add visu­al piz­zazz to your con­tent across the board.

While many social net­works have set their best prac­tices for image size, some design­ers have test­ed them out and come up with their own ide­al specs. Check out these tips from design­er Dustin Stout:

  • Land­scape images: 1280 x 720 (Google+, Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn)
  • Por­trait images: 735 x 1102 (Pin­ter­est, Google+)
  • Square images: 900 x 900 (Insta­gram, Google+, Face­book)

Create Content Briefs To Manage Content Better In 2015

Keep your con­tent orga­nized, and cre­ate a bet­ter end prod­uct in 2015. Check out these tips via Hub­Spot on how to man­age con­tent cre­ation through con­tent briefs. Cre­ate a cov­er­sheet for the author and edi­tor to fill out the fol­low­ing info for every piece of con­tent as well:

  • Title or top­ic of the con­tent
  • Descrip­tion of details to be cov­ered
  • Key­words for the top­ic
  • Tar­get audi­ence or per­sona
  • Call to action or point in the fun­nel
  • Author
  • Due date and pub­lish date

Publish To Social Media Efficiently With A Schedule

A tem­plat­ed pub­lish­ing sched­ule is your friend in the fast-paced space of social media. If you can pre-sched­ule (and set to post) your con­tent for Face­book, Twit­ter, Google+, and LinkedIn ahead of time, you can get bet­ter dis­tri­b­u­tion of your con­tent at the right time.

To cre­ate a sched­ule for your social media pub­li­ca­tions, use an actu­al cal­en­dar to map out updates and posts for Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, and Google+ by date, time, tweet copy, char­ac­ter count, link and media assets. You’ll also want to cre­ate and track any cus­tom URLs for all your social media posts on your sched­ule.

In clos­ing, think­ing through your KPIs and audi­ence per­sonas at the start of a new year is a good prac­tice to re-cal­i­brate your mes­sage for the needs of your cus­tomers. And with a frame­work for orga­niz­ing every chan­nel through a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate, you’ll find your efforts bet­ter focused and hav­ing greater syn­er­gy.

Hap­py imple­ment­ing, and hap­py New Year!


Did we miss any­thing? Tell us what you would add to the ulti­mate dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate for 2015.

Danny Goodwin

Written by Danny Goodwin

Managing Editor, Momentology

Danny Goodwin is the former Managing Editor of Momentology. Previously, he was the editor of Search Engine Watch, where he was in charge of editing, content strategy, and writing about search industry news.

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