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Digital Campaigns 101: Our PLOR Methodology Will Work for You
Planning a multi-platform marketing campaign can be a difficult & daunting task. Knowing your audience and available resources, as well as sticking to a well-developed strategy will help any digital marketing campaign go from worst to first. Utilizing the CCH Marketing model and process may help you to better comprehend what it takes to make successful campaigns tick.
Let’s look at the steps of the Planning, Launching, Optimizing & Reporting (PLOR) process we have developed by using a recent Orlando Health Sports Medicine Digital Campaign as our example. There are many pieces to a digital campaign PLOR puzzle, including: budgets, target audiences, keyword lists, creative assets and even ad copy. All of these are as important as the next, meaning no step in this process should be overlooked.
1: Planning
Taking a genuine interest in understanding and knowing your audience probably makes the biggest impact on whether or not your campaign will be successful. A second component to success is understanding the content with which your target audience will engage. This stage is augmented with recommendations developed by our team and approved by clientele.
In the case of the Orlando Health Sports Medicine campaign, being the majority sponsor of Orlando City Soccer Club allowed us to design a campaign that incorporates players, color schemes and additional OCSC branding. So, what does this have to do with our audience?
According to this recent study:
- 57% of MLS fans are women
- 59% are under age of 45
- 64% of MLS fans responded via internet rather than landline to respond
- Almost one-third of soccer fans — 31 percent — consider themselves “event seekers”
Knowing this, we’ve found that our campaign should be received well with our target audience in the Central Florida area, which is
- Men & Women (Women more likely to make household health related decisions)
- Ages 25 – 50
- College Educated
- Interests: sports, sporting events, exercise, fitness, health, sports medicine, sports injury
2: Launching
The launch is driven by the directions laid out in the final recommendation, and supplemented with creative material and budget. In this case, the client’s internal design team supplied us with properly formatted creative to match the tune of the campaign based on our audience research. They gave us strong and clear CTA’s, associative branding and they even sprinkled in a few of the players to draw audience interest. This creative gave us an edge because it was tailor-made for our exact audience.
A note on ad copy: it’s deceiving. We all know this. Just because something sounds good doesn’t mean it’ll fit your platform’s word count.
Just because something fits the word count, doesn’t mean it’ll “comply with Advertising Policies”. Once you jump through all of those hoops, you still cross your fingers and hope that people respond to what you’re paying to show them.
That is the gist of our game, after all. There’s tons of literature on how to write ad copy, so I’ll spare you the time. It is important to know that ad copy really does affect the success rate of your campaign, which are measured by your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Take the time to write ad copy from the point of view of your consumer. They’ll appreciate you for it, and respond accordingly.
Being that OCSC is a crowd favorite, we saw it in the best interest of the campaign to ride that wave. We knew that using any social or digital marketing platform would bring results, so we launched our multi-platform marketing campaign using Google Adwords Search Network & Display Network, Facebook Newsfeed Ads and Twitter Website Cards. For the sake of time we will focus this discussion on the Google Adwords Search Network.
3: OPTIMIZING
It’s considered best practice to have KPI’s in place upon launching your campaign. This will give you a clear benchmark when the time for optimization comes. Optimization is inevitable, because every campaign can improve– you should operate with this assumption.
Typical KPI’s include industry standard Click Through Rate, Cost Per Click, Conversion Rates, Cost Per Action and Impressions just to name a few. You should familiarize yourself with these, as these indicators should give you an idea of your overall rate of success of the campaign. At CCH, our general rule is to outperform “industry standards”. Optimization allows us to achieve this because we can evaluate the campaign once it’s in market and then make educated changes that better align with our planning process.
4: REPORTING
Reporting is detailed, transparent and easy-to-understand communication of the success or failure of your campaign. Without this type of reporting, clients cannot determine whether their campaigns are improving or getting worse. Being able to calculate the ROI is paramount.
Knowing this, we take our analytics from our source (usually Google analytics with a combination of social media analytics) and process these numbers in a way that shows our client exactly what their investment is producing. We have found that converting numbers to a visual, easy to read graphic report will translate the successes of our campaign easiest.
Remember that month to month reporting is very important, but month to month swings in analytics don’t typically dictate success or failure. Sticking to your initial marketing plan gives you benchmarks, guidelines and most importantly, room for growth and improvement. If your reports are not demonstrating the numbers you anticipated seeing, it is time to make a change in your campaign. It is possible you need to alter creative, change your targeting, alter copy, or identify another issue.
Overall, the PLOR method we established here at CCH Marketing is designed not only to simplify the process for our analytics team, but also to clarify our route for our clients. The methodology allows us to set a clear path to follow, yet leaves room for edits to the campaigns where they are needed. With successful implementation, the system should provide for exceeding industry standards, a quality ROI, and satisfied clients.
