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While most of us dream of numbers that climb off the charts as soon as we launch a campaign, the truth is, marketing – and everything that goes with it – is a long game. Today we’re going to talk about how digital marketing is a marathon, not a sprint, and how the testing and iteration phases of digital marketing are crucial phases of your next campaign.
No great business is grown overnight, and for results that make an impact, digital marketing initiatives should follow a three-month road map model, rather than a quick, overnight effort.
At Major, we believe in growing your business for the long term. We test and iterate so we can bring quality leads into your funnel: no hacks here, just hard work.
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As a business owner, who knows their product or service better than anyone, you have a firm idea of who your ideal customer is. Maybe you’ve even developed a rough set of core buyer personas, portraits of your ideal customer. But just because you’ve got some ideas down doesn’t mean you should abandon your profiles as a long-term project.
Customer personas are incredibly important to any digital marketing strategy. They tell marketers who they’re speaking to and what those customers’ needs are. Your business might have multiple personas representing differing customer demographics and needs. All strong personas start with research and evidence to support your claims that this is your ideal customer. And that takes time.
In digital marketing, you never want to go into a question with an answer already in hand. Social media is a perfect place to start your ongoing customer persona research, and testing campaigns will give you much-needed support data to help you understand who will get the most out of your brand. Gathering information from customers about demographics, careers, pain points, interests, likes, and dislikes is a big job, but it is invaluable to all your future marketing initiatives.
Importantly, as your business evolves, your personas will evolve too. Customer personas aren’t static. This is why ongoing research and conversations with customers will help you update and continue to develop your marketing strategy.
Often, businesses think of creative as a one and done. Once it’s out there, and it’s been seen, it’s done its work. But the true labor of creative is in what comes next: testing.
When you launch creative or content into a channel, you’re just at the beginning of your learning process. There is so much to gain from monitoring how creative performs with your audience. From copy to graphics, digital marketers use audience and customer responsiveness to test and evaluate creative.
A common form of testing creative is an A/B test. In an A/B test, the audience is presented with one of two creative versions. You can perform A/B tests on just about any creative, like digital ads, site copy, and email subject lines. Digital marketers work with creatives to line up multiple variations of work. Copywriters might produce different calls to action, and designers might mock up different graphic elements. One version is given to group A, and the other version is given to group B, and then marketers collect data on performance. Which piece hit better, A or B?
It’s important to note that really accurate tests will hone in on a single element. For example, if you’re testing a landing page with different calls to action and different headers, and site B did better than site A, you won’t really know what nudged the customer in the right direction, the CTA or the header. Learning what audiences respond to takes time and data, and collecting that data is the stuff of long-term marketing strategy.
No two platforms are alike, and every campaign, on every platform, goes through a learning phase. So it follows that the results of your learning phase on different platforms will be, well, different. Digital marketers use tools and technology to assess huge amounts of data from your campaigns across social, email, search, and more. Digital marketers will run campaigns across multiple platforms and get data to see what is performing, what isn’t, and what can be updated, improved, changed, or repeated.
Your team might launch a campaign where the goal is to get first-time website visits from new users. They launch this across social and start to find that those first-time visitors are stalling on YouTube but hitting your pages via Instagram. This is valuable data. With it, marketers can assess what your challenges are on YouTube. They’ll also look at your successes on Instagram and bank that information for future campaigns. The idea is to optimize how you’re performing on all your platforms.
As with all good things, quality marketing results are not an overnight game, and at Major, we’re in it for the long haul. We approach marketing as a creative and analytical process and use data to back up our strategy. Need help scaling your brand online? Contact Major today.
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