Predicting a successful digital marketing campaign is not a rocket science. There are clues that you are going to do well if you follow these simple rules.

You have taken time to study previous mistakes.

Avoiding mistakes completely is impossible, but learning from mistakes is something you should get used to. Using data and analysis can help you understand what went wrong the last time and how to improve your campaigns. You can adopt the successful things and exclude the not so successful ones.

 You are meticulously testing.

There is no way that you can improve if you do not take time to test and explore variations of your ads, pages and keywords. Everything can be tested. What is important is that you carefully track results and measure. Always make sure you have a statistically big enough sample before you take a decision. Online A/B testing tools can help you do this.

You keep track and write all the changes you have done.

Relying on your memory does not really work – there are so many details you would like to remember, that at the end you are confused. You might be wondering what is happening with your results and be completely ignorant to a small change you did long time ago which is making all the difference in performance.

You are receptive to innovation.

In my last few articles, I mentioned some of the new ad types announced By Google in the latest Keynote speech. Early adopters tend to get competitive advantage with new ad formats. These are opportunities to learn and to increase the influence of your campaigns. Adopting innovation is crucial for your marketing to stay relevant in the digital age.

You have a plan.

Having even the simplest plan puts you ahead of the game compared to thousands of others who do marketing with unclear goals and a reactive approach. The difference between and advertiser who plans and executes according to plan and the on that doesn’t is enormous. Planning helps you allocate enough time for your creatives to be perfected by the designers. It helps you focus your efforts and money on the right time periods, so that you can gain the maximum of them.

You use maths to take decisions.

Digital marketing is a numbers game. It is easy to estimate outcomes by using simple calculations. There are actual formulas you can use to calculate the highest cost per click you should pay to stay profitable. You can use simple metrics like conversion rate – how many people coming to your website from an ad become subscribers, for example. Taking information like revenue and profit margin can help you connect your business goals to your marketing. I recently shared a YouTube video on how to calculate profitable maximum cost per click for your ads.

You think about the whole picture.

Working in marketing can become a tunnel vision experience, especially if each member of the team is focused on a single channel. Missing the full picture is very easy and over focus on one area can cause mistakes. To the customer emails, TV ads, website and event organization represent the same brand. Therefore, consistency across channels is very important. For marketers, the understanding of the full picture – how every channel affects the other is crucial for making good decisions.

You stay away from last click attribution.

In today’s world, a customer has a much longer and more complicated journey from researching to buying a product. There are a lot of steps on the way – online and offline which determine the outcome. Only focusing on the channel or campaign which brought the final sale can be misleading. Very often the customer journey started much early on. To justify channels which are not directly responsible for a sale, you must look in analytics and try different ways of attribution. In his way, you can understand how your customers interact with your brand and give the right amount of credit to each of the channels which touched the customer in their journey.

You invest in each part of your funnel.

Imagine the way people interact with your brand as a funnel. There is a great framework by Google called Think, See, Do, Care. Each of these words represents a different stage of interest your customers are on. At each level, they leave different clues which you can pick up with your campaigns and target. A lot of business focus way too much on the last part of the funnel, because it is easy to connect the dots. Someone called the business and made a purchase – let’s make more people to call us! However, before this took place there were many micro moments which happened beforehand which all influenced the buying decision. There could have been an email, or a small video, or a handwritten note in the mailbox. Investing brand awareness in the top of the funnel – the place where people with vague interest in the product are, is as important as driving action and encouraging consideration.

You focus on quality and frequency.

There is the dispute of whether you should focus on quality or quantity of your marketing activity. Quality is important, but so is frequency of interactions. A sale occurs typically between the 6th and 12th interaction with a brand. To push a prospective customer to engage more than six times with your brand you must use frequency. Remarketing campaigns, emails, content and social posts – they all work together to keep reminding of your existence. Remember, people don’t buy for three reasons – they don’t know you, they don’t trust you and they don’t like you. Each of these can be eradicated with enough frequency of interactions.

If this is not enough for you, I have one bonus rule, which I think a lot of marketers underestimate – making sure your online experience is suited for mobile users. Nowadays there is a strong shift from desktop to mobile devices. Mobile devices used to have just a fraction of the online traffic – now it is almost 50% and more than 50% in some countries. Making sure your website is mobile optimised and has a high loading speed is not an advantage, but a necessity. You can check one of my previous articles about the AMP project of Google and how to get started with Accelerated mobile pages.

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Till next week!