Digital marketing campaign: 5 factors to take into account

Would you like to learn about the 5 most important factors to always keep in mind before launching your next digital marketing campaign on social media?

According to the Digital 2021 study by Hootsuite and We Are Social, in collaboration with Statista, in the year 2020, only in Mexico, $2.42 billion was spent on digital marketing campaigns. 31.3% of this spending goes on social media advertising, up 3.5% compared to last year. Both figures reflect the fact that digital marketing is a booming sector, whose growth has increased thanks to the Covid-19 healthcare crisis and digital transformation in businesses.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to make an impact with a digital marketing campaign due to the fierce competition. However, despite there being plenty of professionals specialised in digital marketing, they all have the same opportunities, and all that's needed for a campaign to be a success is to apply the right techniques. Let us explain all.

How to create a digital marketing campaign: the 5 most influential factors

Nowadays, creating and launching a digital marketing campaign on social media or Google is really easy to do. Anybody can launch their own campaign in just a few clicks. However, achieving a profitable Return on Investment (ROI) requires digital marketing experience and know-how.

There are many factors that can influence the results of our digital marketing campaigns, such as the text or images we use, and certain segmentations, such as the chosen age range or location. Here, we explain the 5 key factors that you need to take into account when launching a digital marketing campaign, regardless of the product area or goals. 

Target Audience and Buyer Persona

Identifying the target audience and buyer persona of a digital marketing campaign is the decisive factor when it comes to achieving great results. But to do this, you first need to understand the difference between the two concepts. On the one hand, the target audience is the group of people your product is aimed at, and can be narrowed down in line with sociodemographic factors. On the other hand, the buyer persona is a representation of the ideal customer, built on data obtained from real customers.

Defining who you want to reach, in minute detail, is essential. To do this, you need to pinpoint the target audience precisely, to later analyse, create and define the buyer persona. In this way, you will be able to apply segmentations to reach them in a more personalised way, thus fully optimising the campaign.

This is something that Kielh's Mexico, a major cosmetics company, is very clear on when it comes to launching its digital marketing campaigns on Facebook. In this case, selling cosmetics to the general public, without considering whether they use that type of product or not, could have a negative effect, because it's likely that a large part of the audience you reach with the campaign won't be interested in the product. In this sense, the page wouldn't receive many visits from users making a purchase, and the conversion rate would be lower.

However, Kielh's Mexico knows exactly how to segment the audiences for its digital campaigns: it launches its ads to women and men between 25 and 45, who care about their physical appearance and who have already visited their website on previous occasions. This company harnesses different creatives for each audience, in order to tailor their campaigns as much as possible, for example, tracking these women’s online activity, as well as their location, to show them similar items or ones they might be interested in based on their search history. In fact, this brand is so adept at obtaining results with their digital marketing campaigns, it is able to double every dollar invested in advertising.

The objective of a digital marketing campaign

Defining the objective of your digital marketing campaign is essential to design a strategy that will help to increase the number of conversions in a set time, secure qualified leads, increase the number of visitors to your website, boost the number of followers on social media, etc. 

Throughout an Instagram and Facebook advertising campaign for the sports brand Adidas, their goal was to increase the conversion rate. They wanted to reach potential customers and convert them to real ones. To do this, they designed a carousel ad in which the brand's most relevant products were promoted.

Through retargeting, a technique that consists of impacting users who have already interacted with the brand, Adidas displayed its ads to Mexican and Brazilian men and women who had already visited its website. With this digital marketing campaign, they were able to increase conversions by 37% using the broad audience technique, and by 28% through retargeting.

Mobile Marketing

In the Digital 2021 study, a truly astounding fact is revealed: some 95.9% of Mexican users access the Internet on their smartphone. Hence, a digital marketing campaign needs to be responsive, in other words, they need to adapt to different devices if they want to achieve good results.

Smartphones offer certain advantages and can make a good starting point. A great example of a smartphone-based digital campaign was launched by MAC Mexico for the Day of the Dead. In a Facebook ad, it used augmented reality to offer a digital makeup experience using the smartphone camera.

Users were able to apply two different filters to check what the MAC Cosmetics looked like on their own face, without the need to actually try the product. The results of this digital marketing campaign were excellent: conversions increased by 20% and they achieved a 1.5 x return on investment. 

A/B Testing

With digital campaigns it is vital to check which type of ads work best. The A/B Test is a tool that allows you to evaluate user behaviour to then optimise your ads and the company's communications strategy. 

Tecobi, a company that provides communications and advertising solutions to the automotive sector, regularly uses Facebook to attract potential customers to its dealerships. This company harnesses geolocation for its campaigns in order to display ads to potential customers located near a dealership. 

To improve customer acquisition and increase car sales, they use different versions of the same advert to analyse which option fits best in each case. Once the most satisfactory result is obtained, they continue to test new optimised versions based on the latter. In one of their recent A/B tests, they achieved a 68% increase in conversion rate and an 8% decrease in cost per qualified potential customer.

Creatives

It is essential for both the design of your ads and the accompanying text to be original and innovative. Likewise, you need to approach your audience in a non-invasive way, otherwise you may negatively affect their experience. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Telcel, Mexico's leading telecommunications company, launched a campaign to boost the brand image and achieve greater impact on its target audience. Using the motto "today we are building the future together”, this campaign sought to raise people's awareness with the aim of continuing to work together to tackle coronavirus. 

Telcel developed a series of inspiring videos that demonstrated everything their customers could continue to do throughout the pandemic, thanks to their telecommunications networks. With this support campaign, the brand value was boosted by 1.6 points among the general public.

Learn how to design a digital marketing campaign from scratch

As you can see, for a digital marketing campaign to be successful on social media, there are many factors that must be taken into account. It’s not a question of luck: behind every successful campaign lies professional research, creation, trial and error. Digital marketing is increasingly influential in markets, so the demand for digital marketing experts is also increasing. 

Would you like to create campaigns for major brands and work in the world of digital marketing? Banco Santander is launching 5,000 Santander Course | Business for All 2024. This program, aimed at those who want to enhance their business skills, has been designed in collaboration with top experts from Harvard Business School Publishing, one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world.

With this course, you will gain access to a 100% online, 9-week training program on which you will acquire the key know-how and skills to further your career. Depending on your professional objectives, you can choose one of the following courses:

• Business Fundamentals: learn the essentials of marketing, finance, negotiation and customer experience.

• Managing yourself: improve your skills in decision-making, time management and influencing without authority. 

All courses are delivered by top-tier experts and are free to participants. And you don't need to have a degree or be a Banco Santander customer. On top of that, they are available in English, Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese.

You will have the opportunity to acquire all the necessary knowledge and skills via on-demand content, virtual discussions in live sessions with mentors and learning facilitators, interaction with your peers, exercises and tools with which you can practice, then transfer the knowledge to your workplace. In addition, upon completion, you will receive a certificate from Harvard Business School Publishing.

Are you over 18 and want to develop key skills to get ahead in the workplace? Sign up for Santander Course | Business for All 2024 and whether you get it or not, remember: never stop learning.