A digital marketing campaign is a large undertaking that requires thorough planning and coordination across teams and departments. Not only do you have people to coordinate, you have multiple marketing channels to work into your campaign schedule.
That’s why campaign planning is essential. A plan gives you a high-level view of your timeline so you can establish a solid digital marketing strategy and monitor progress to ensure work is delivered on time.
Launch and track your next campaign with ease by using our free digital marketing campaign template. This online gantt chart template will allow you to quickly create an integrated marketing plan across all your digital media.
Digital marketing campaigns are multifaceted initiatives that target your audience exclusively through digital channels. They often involve a lot of collaboration to get the campaign off the ground. For example, you may work with the following people on a digital marketing campaign:
Some examples of digital marketing campaigns include corporate rebranding initiatives, sales or promotions, and seasonal events. Of course, the types of digital marketing campaigns you employ will depend on your overall digital marketing strategy.
Now that you know what a digital marketing campaign is, let’s talk about how to build one. These 7 simple steps can help you create an integrated marketing campaign that leads you to success.
No campaign can be effective without a clear goal, or goals, from the outset. Campaign goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. For instance, “get more leads” isn’t very defined. A better objective would be to “increase paid subscription conversion by 5% in Q4.”
The campaign goal will inform the duration of the campaign, the target audience, and the best channels to use.
Campaigns are a great vehicle for honing in on specific segments in your target market. Your target market consists of a shared set of traits, behaviors, interests, and values that represent your ideal buyer. For instance, your overall target market may be 35-45-year-old software engineers who use Agile project management and primarily consume media online.
With a campaign, you want to start with your overall target audience, then drill down even further based on your campaign’s specific goals.
For instance, do you want to acquire new customers in this target market, prompt existing customers to take an action, or win back customers who have lapsed? If your goal is to prompt existing customers to upgrade, your campaign may include a trial offer on advanced features or a limited-time discount on the next subscription tier.
Now that you know your goals and who you want to target, you can identify the best places to reach your intended audience. Successful digital marketing campaigns often involve a mix of touchpoints, including web content, email, social media, and paid ads.
Use your existing knowledge of your audience to inform the channels you’ll focus on during your campaign. If you’re not quite sure, do a little research using web or social media analytics to fill in the gaps.
Are there specific pages that attract your target audience more than others? Perhaps offer a promotion there. Do they prefer Twitter and LinkedIn over Facebook and Instagram? Focus social efforts on the channels with higher engagement.
Money’s an important consideration for any marketing campaign. And figuring in financials on the front end is an easy way to please the stakeholders who hold the purse strings.
Be sure to think through any costs your digital marketing campaign may incur so you can build a feasible plan that fits your budget. Your campaign budget not only shapes your paid advertising strategy—such as which channels you advertise on, the types of ads you run, or how long you run them. It also informs resourcing decisions. Consider whether you’ll need to hire any third-party designers, developers, or content writers to get the work done on time.
A project plan is the primary tool you’ll use to communicate expectations and get work done. The more detail, the better!
We recommend breaking your campaign down into phases, then scheduling the tasks and milestones that need to be accomplished in each phase. Initial phases typically include planning, content creation, and design. From there, fine-tune the campaign work by channel. For instance, your “email” channel may involve tasks like building, testing, and scheduling emails.
Don’t forget to check team availability as you schedule and assign tasks to make sure no one’s too overloaded with projects.
Now that all of the planning is done, it’s time to get to work on your campaign!
The heart of any digital marketing campaign involves creating content with messaging and visuals that engage your target audience. Be sure to consider:
Use your fully formed plan to monitor progress on your campaign and communicate with team members on deliverables. In TeamGantt, the thin striped line that appears inside each taskbar enables you to see how tracked time compares to your plan so you can catch potential overages early.
Also, be sure to regularly track and analyze your campaign results so you can make adjustments and optimize your campaign along the way. For instance, if LinkedIn ads significantly outperform Facebook ads, consider increasing your LinkedIn advertising and decreasing your Facebook spend.
As a marketing professional, you’re busy juggling a hefty workload with tight deadlines. We’ve created a free digital marketing campaign template so you can save time building, updating, and communicating your marketing plan and see what’s done—and what’s to come—at a glance.
Here’s how to customize a digital marketing campaign plan that works for you.
Gantt view allows you to easily plan out campaign activities in a visual timeline. Think of this view as your planning BFF. It’s quick and easy to schedule project tasks and milestones and see how your project is shaking out.
If you need to make a change to your plan, don’t worry! Rearranging your plan is as easy as dragging and dropping tasks into their new rightful place.
Colors are a great way to organize, view, and filter tasks. Two helpful ways to use colors are to:
Call out key dates, deadlines, events, or deliverables in a project by using milestones. Hit your launch date or hold that important meeting right on schedule!
Get granular with your planning by using subgroups to break down your campaign by marketing channel.
Collaboration is easy with TeamGantt’s discussion feature. Post instructions, share documents, and communicate with other team members directly from a task’s comment section.
Need to report on your digital marketing campaign each month? Calendar view enables you to turn your gantt chart into a campaign calendar in one click. That makes it easy to see what’s happening at a glance and provide monthly updates to stakeholders.
Never miss a deadline with your My Tasks page. It eliminates the guesswork by bringing all the campaign activities you need to work on today into a single view so work stays on track.
Ready to plan a digital marketing campaign of your own? We’ve created a free digital marketing campaign plan template for you in TeamGantt so you can jump right in!
Customizing the template is quick and easy, thanks to TeamGantt’s drag and drop simplicity. And since everything’s online, your whole team can collaborate on campaign activities in real time.
Sign up for a free TeamGantt account today, and save time on project setup with this free digital marketing campaign template!
