Do you run campaigns – yes? or no?
I say ‘no’ to campaigns.
Campaigns don’t work with algorithms.
They ALSO don’t work for small businesses.
Digital marketing campaign checklist
If you think about the work involved in running marketing campaigns such as a Valentine’s day, End of Financial Year Sales or Mother’s Day, you usually need to:
- Define your promotional offer
- Develop your advertising creative
- Design a website banner and promotional pop-up form
- Design a promotional emails series
- Set-up your coupon or voucher
- Generate unique tracking links (UTMs)
- Integrate the promotion across your social channels
This process is extremely time consuming as well as a distraction from your long term growth strategy. Each time you start a new campaign, it’s like you are starting from ground zero. Algorithms need time and data to learn what variables in combination drives results for your business, your products or services.
Digital marketing campaign – monthly revenue trend
The table below is an example of a month on month revenue trend that small business experience when they do digital marketing campaigns on and off through the year to try to grow their business.
Digital marketing is different to traditional marketing
Developing new mediums to communicate has an impact on how we carry out our marketing. Traditional marketing has a number of differences to digital marketing as outlined in the below table.
The biggest differences are in the introduction of algorithms and this introduction of algorithms has evolved a new marketing approach – Always-On Marketing (AOM).
For algorithms to perform, they require an always-on-marketing (AOM) approach. Algorithms perform the strongest with loads of data, over long timeframes and are designed to drive results based on the objectives that you set.
Always-on digital marketing – working with the algorithms
The longer you run marketing in the digital environment the more effective your advertising becomes. Using the algorithms and data you can gather detailed insights about your audience, your messaging, purchase journey’s, top selling products for first time buyers – and by further optimising your marketing with the insights you continue to drive effective marketing activities.
The below trend line is reflective of always-on marketing executed. You can add campaigns to your always-on marketing. Which is recommended once your AOM is giving you a consistent ROI. Campaigns can then add benefit of extra monthly revenue if you have all of your eCommerce foundations best practices in place to maximise the campaign efforts.
There is a place for campaigns, once you have most of your eCommerce growth foundations in place. That way you are maximising your time and financial investment for an effective return. So when you are ready to add campaigns to your AOM here is The ultimate 2021 eCommerce holiday calendar for reference of events you might like to take part in.
