Set Up Your Small Business Digital Marketing Campaign for Success With a Clear Campaign Objective

Determining a relevant campaign objective for your small business digital marketing initiative is an important first step to launching a successful ad campaign. However, it’s often a step that small business owners and marketers either forget or overlook. 

Your campaign objective is best determined early in the process of creating and organizing a digital marketing campaign, making it the first pillar of BizHack Academy’s proven Lead Building System™. When you quickly and effectively establish your marketing team’s objective for your initiatives, you ensure that your campaign is optimized for your long-term goals.

There are numerous campaign objectives a small business digital marketing campaign can use, as well as several helpful tools that aid in executing and tracking these goals. As you prepare a digital marketing campaign for your small business, you need to begin with a campaign objective. 

TL;DR Breakout Box

TL;DR: Determine your campaign objective early to ensure your digital marketing initiatives stay organized and focused.

Keep these three tips in mind as you plan a small business digital marketing campaign:

• There are several ways you can evaluate the success of your digital campaign. These include the leads and sales your campaign generates, as well as what you learn during the process. Your learnings can help you create better digital marketing campaigns in the future. 

• Your KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are determined by the campaign objective you choose. Its purpose is to mark the success of each stage of the customer journey. Use relevant metrics as your KPIs to track how well your ad is  achieving your goals. 

• Reference the Marketing Funnel alongside your campaign objective to determine which metrics you should keep an eye on as your campaign runs its course. Some of these metrics include impressions, reach, thruplays and lead form fills. 

A well-executed campaign begins with a well-thought-out campaign objective. Determine which metrics you hope to use to measure success before beginning to implement the remaining pillars of the BizHack Lead Building System™.

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Determining Your Digital Marketing Campaign Objective and Defining Success

Before you begin setting goals for your small business digital marketing campaign, keep in mind the main objectives that work best for up-and-coming companies: 

• A brand awareness objective seeks to spread your company’s story and what you have to offer the world. Its goal is to make sure more people know that your business exists and learn about your products and services. 

• A lead generation objective looks to engage your target audience and encourage them to fill out a lead form that will begin their journey as a potential customer. 

• An online sales (E-commerce) objective aims to make sales and increase revenue by exposing an audience to your product and showing them how they can purchase it quickly. 

Which of the above digital marketing campaign objectives works best for your company’s long-term plans? Once you have answered this question for yourself, you can continue drafting the overarching plans and measures for your digital marketing. 

What you learn from your digital marketing campaign is arguably more important than the leads and sales it generates.

While there are specific metrics digital marketers can use to evaluate their online ads, there are two ultimate measures that gauge success on a broader spectrum:

• The leads and sales your campaign generates give you intel into your bottom-line results. This lets you evaluate your ad simply by seeing how many prospects you engaged and how much revenue you earned. 

• However, what you learn from your digital marketing campaign is arguably more important. At the end of your ad campaign, your goal should be to extract the maximum amount of learnings per dollar spent. 

If you garner the maximum amount of learning from each of your ad campaigns, you can achieve more efficient advertising in the future. At the end of each campaign, ask yourself, “What did we learn from this campaign?” These learnings can be applied to your future initiatives to make higher-quality advertising that is more effective in achieving your goals. 

Your definition of success is determined by the bottom-line campaign objective you choose. Your campaign objective determines your KPI.  

How KPIs Interact With Your Digital Marketing Campaign Objective

There are more specific, statistical ways that small business owners and marketers can set clear goals and measure success in their campaign. One of these statistics is the KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, a metric that measures the success of each stage of your customer journey. KPIs mark the key customer journey milestones that drive a customer toward a sale. 

Your specific campaign goal should be driven by your main objective. Once you choose a specific campaign goal, your KPI will change to correspond with this goal. 

• A campaign with the goal of receiving traffic would use website link clicks as its KPI. 
• A campaign with the goal of garnering video views would measure success with video  as its KPI. 
• A campaign with the goal of lead generation would use lead form fills as its KPI. 
• A campaign with the goal of spreading a message  would use messages sent as a KPI. 

Small business marketers can also cater their KPI to the marketing channel they intend to use. This method can be effective, since the platform you use to put your digital marketing initiative into motion has a significant impact on how audiences receive it . For example, if your marketing channel is email, your KPI would likely be click-throughs. If your marketing channel is a landing page, your KPI would be lead form submissions. 

Take your digital marketing campaign objective and marketing channel into consideration when planning the long-term impact of your digital marketing initiatives. 

KPIs flow from overall business strategy to individual real-life campaign results. Supporting metrics feed into and augment the KPI. Here are some examples of this:

• If your marketing channel is email, your KPI would likely be click-throughs, but your supporting metrics would be total sends and opens. 

• If your marketing channel is a landing page, your KPI would be lead form submissions, but your supporting metric would be page views and time on page. 

• If your marketing channel is a flyer, your KPI would be phone calls, but your supporting metric would be number distributed. 

These metrics give small business marketers the ability to receive comprehensive intel about the success of their campaign and evaluate it on a variety of fronts. 

Important Metrics to Leverage

As you determine your KPI, it’s important to have a holistic understanding of the metrics available to small business marketers for campaigns. The Marketing Funnel illustrates a variety of statistical tools that marketers can use to track the success of their campaign. 

There are several important metrics to consider:

• Impressions track the number of times someone’s eye lands on your ad. This metric does not mean very much in terms of the overall success of your campaign, because even if someone sees your ad, it doesn’t mean they watched your video all the way through, clicked through to your website or engaged with you in some other way. Many advertisers get an average of 100 impressions per 1 video view or thruplay—a 1% margin. 
• Reach refers to the number of unique users who actually see your ad. Sometimes, an ad will show up multiple times for the same person. When this happens, only one reach will be recorded, while there may be more than one impression for this individual. 

For example, a person in a car can drive past the same billboard two times a day as they drive to and from work. Each time they see the billboard, that is one impression. However, since they are only one person, these interactions constitute one reach. At the end of the day, the marketer can record that they received two impressions and one reach.

• Frequency is determined by dividing the impressions of an ad by its reach to get an average estimate of how often an individual is seeing it The frequency of an ad is always more than one, which isn’t a bad thing! If a user is within the right target audience, you want them to be exposed to your ad more than once. It can take several impressions before the information sinks in. 

Note, however, that your frequency should preferably stay in the range of two to four. After the fourth time a user sees an ad, positive results tend to deteriorate. 

• Thruplay is the metric that describes how many people watched your video through to the very end. This metric can be tracked differently on Facebook if your video is long. At BizHack, we recommend that small business marketers aim to create a video ad that is rather short. Anything over 15 seconds is considered a thruplay, so if your video is 1-2 minutes long, you may be receiving high thruplay levels when users aren’t actually receiving all the information you intended them to. In these circumstances, a percentage viewed metric may be helpful, but shorter videos tend to pack more of a punch. 
• Link clicks refer to the traffic your ad generates when users press a button or click a link to visit your website from the ad. This metric works well when your campaign objective is to boost brand awareness and increase traffic to your website. 
• Lead form fills tracks whether ad viewers fill out the form that is on your landing page. These forms are primarily used in campaigns with a lead generation objective, and Facebook Business Suite users can create a landing page and lead form inside Facebook to suit this goal. 

Match Metrics to Digital Marketing Campaign Objectives

Many make the mistake of setting one objective for their campaign and then measuring its success using a metric that does not accurately reflect the progress made toward this goal.  For example, a video views objective for your campaign won’t generate sales, so you shouldn’t measure the success of a video views ad based on how many people click through to your website.

As a small business marketer, you can customize your campaign objective to fit your company’s long-term plans and goals. Put simply, your digital marketing campaign is meant to serve you. 

As you prepare to launch your digital marketing initiatives, make sure to stay focused on future goals and have a clear vision for what you hope to achieve. Without these preemptive steps, you will likely commit random acts of marketing, which will rapidly undermine your implementation of the remaining Six Pillars.