If you’ve decided to turn your writing into a professional career in the digital space, you’ll most likely end up wanting to start a blog. Ideally, this is the path to take for those who want to utilize the digital realm into a medium that could be used to reach out to audiences much more conveniently. However, blogging can be used for all sorts of things, be it for passion, as a means of creative expression, or even for business. In today’s digital landscape where relevance is defined by how many people visit your blog, it’s easy to mistake a digital marketing campaign for something that “gathers all the clicks.” However, this isn’t always the case.
Digital Marketing: Is It Always About the Clicks?
The general first impression towards turning blogging into an avenue to reach audiences is that it’s always used to just get the most clicks and the most views. While this is generally true for the most part, not all digital marketing strategies lean towards these factors alone.
Moreover, despite the prevalence of a digital-based blogging industry and a shift of focus towards digital marketing, not all companies and individuals are aware of its potential benefits or can even use it to its full potential.
Smart Insights statistics from 2017 indicate that 254 of their 500 small-medium business respondents only possess basic digital marketing knowledge, despite another Smart Insights report indicating that email marketing, search management, and social media management take the bulk of marketing technology tools.
Digital Marketing: The General Types of Campaigns
Perhaps part of the reason why people tend to have misconceptions about digital marketing as a whole is because of its general “appearance.” According to Dummies, there are generally three major types of digital marketing campaigns, all of which can be outfitted towards a particular kind of digital marketing strategy. Each of these campaigns are similar with one another in terms of execution, but their goals – and therefore the intricacies behind their execution – differ.
Acquisition Campaigns: If You Need Customers, Prospects
If you want digital marketing to be able to help you lead prospective customers down the sales funnel, then you need an acquisition campaign. This is designed to create new leads and customers that can help get your blog out there. The point of acquisition campaigns, and therefore its primary objectives, are the following:
It aims to make people aware of your existence. As such, your campaign is geared towards converting casuals into prospects, and eventually into subscribers, by providing them with solutions to a particular problem.
This is done by engaging with your prospects, mostly through providing value to them. This can be in the form of educational, inspirational, or entertaining content.
Successful engagement brings in subscription, which makes prospects follow you on a social aspect, maybe through social media or even through emails. These prospects are the ones you can best hope to successfully convert.
The aim of course is to convert prospects into customers, as this signifies that you’re successful in creating trust between customers and your brand.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) can be used for these campaigns, as they aim for your blog to “rank” in Google through efficient use of keywords and creation of relevant content.
- Content Marketing is a good way to generate leads, as it can directly provide audiences with relevant content that provides value to your blog and/or service.
Monetization Campaigns: If You Want Revenue Generation from Existing Customers, Leads
If you have a business and you aim to make the most out of your revenue streams, then perhaps a blog geared towards monetization can work for you. This works if you’re selling complex services and products, or if you’re aiming to primarily earn money through the leads and customers you have. As such, here are important considerations.
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This is best used if you already have leads and customers in the first place. It’s unadvisable to use a monetization campaign for a blog or service that’s relatively new, and it’s often hard to generate leads for them.
The first half of a monetization campaign is through existing customers, as these individuals crave for something new after benefiting from your business. This is best done by providing more value and encouraging prospects to join customers who are availing these benefits.
The second half of this campaign is ascension, where customers are encouraged to maximize their spending potential by providing them with more benefits compared to other customers.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a short-term marketing strategy that allows you to get paid for getting sponsored ads on your page.
- Affiliate Marketing works best for businesses that aim to establish connections with other businesses and share profits. These tend to be used by organizations and individuals that want to help each other generate profit through promoting one another.
Engagement Campaigns: If You Want to Create Promoters, Brand Advocates
If your primary goal is to create leads and customers but at the same time build a community around your brand, then perhaps an engagement campaign can work for you. Some of the most customer-appealing companies create opportunities through their avenues for prospects and customers to interact not just with the brand, but with each other as well.
Engagement campaigns utilize an advocacy to create a uniting voice for customers and prospects to ride with. This allows your best customers to be able to recommend your business as you can provide them with a unified “vision” they can understand.
Of course, this can lead to promotion, where customers are fully encouraged to recommend your blog, product, or service because they benefited from them in some regard.
- Public Relations (PR) is an efficient digital marketing strategy for engagement, as it’s all about building public image.
- Social Media Marketing is another strategy you could use to help be more engaging with your customers as it takes advantage of your social media presence to create a “persona” for your blog.
- Viral Marketing can help create a community if used properly, as it takes advantage of existing strategies to make something “quirky” that can get to the hands of others out of sheer hilarity or uniqueness. This can create a unique “voice” or “look” for your blog.
- Influencer Marketing is similar to affiliate marketing, however instead of staying within your niche, you strike a deal with someone who can “influence” your target market. This can be in the form of a celebrity or an influential person within the niche.
A Quick Aside: A Matter of Intention
If you may notice, the digital marketing strategies suggested for each campaign type above seem to be applicable to their other campaign counterparts as well. This is because the strategies mentioned above aren’t “end-all, be-all” for the aforementioned campaigns. You’re free to mix and match these strategies depending on your blog’s overall focus, and as such careful analysis and research is needed towards choosing the strategies you want to choose. A digital marketing agency may also help lead you to the right campaign for your needs. Good reminders are the following:
- What are your priorities? If you’re aiming for a number of views and clicks, then perhaps strategies towards exposing your blog (and therefore, your brand) could work better for your needs.
- What’s your preferred medium? If you’re primarily a blog, then perhaps use strategies that emphasize details and strong points of your blog towards your niche. If you have social media platforms that aim to help your blog, then adopting a social media-focused strategy and campaign can also help.
- What’s your take on monetization? If you want your blog to be an alternative source of income, then tailor your research and strategies towards campaigns that can potentially earn you for your content. This isn’t exclusively for monetization campaigns, too, as the other two might attract prospects that can earn you money and at the same time be tailored towards the engagement and acquisition fields.
Conclusion
If you’ve decided to start a blog, wanting to make it big will turn your journey in over its head and transform it into an entirely different challenge. Based on the brief backgrounder above, not only are there different kinds of digital marketing methods, there are actually different kinds of digital marketing campaigns you could use to help improve upon your blog depending on a variety of factors. Before fully venturing over any of these specifics, perhaps it’s important to decide upon yourself the intended direction of your blog in the first place, alongside the digital marketing strategies you’re willing to use before deciding on a campaign to try.
Remember that no digital marketing campaign is perfect, and as such you may need not only good metrics and research, but also the patience and perseverance for trial and error. Planning and executing your campaigns will take time but reading this article can at least get you up to speed and point you to the right direction.
Online Impact 360 is a digital marketing agency with a strategic focus on SEO, web design, & online advertising campaigns. We help business owners, maximize their online visibility, move them to the first page of Google for their industry so consumers can actually find them when searching online.
