Building a Dynamic Digital Campaign
April 18, 2018
At Madden Media, each digital marketing component we provide for our clients has a purpose and strategy behind it. Components fit together like pieces of a puzzle, building to create a comprehensive campaign that will drive visitors closer to booking their vacation.
Website
Your website is the foundation of your marketing campaign. It has to deliver on the promise to consumers of what’s being advertised. You need to send interested readers to compelling landing pages that reflect your branding and offer relevant and engaging details about your destination. Not sure what you should shoot for? We think a few of our partners have really easy-to-navigate websites with engaging landing pages that are not only informative, but also inspiring. Take a look:
Experience Columbus won the Skift 2016 Award for Best Website
Outer Banks of North Carolina won an Adrian Award, Gold in the category Tourism Website
Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing
Once you have a fabulously designed site where visitors can easily explore all the amazing options available to them, it’s time to integrate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) into your mix to bring in highly-relevant site traffic. SEO works behind the scenes of your website, harnessing strategic keywords and relevant content to move your site organically closer to the top of search engines like Google and Bing. Ensuring that your site’s code and structure delivers an optimal user experience, and that the content is original and engaging, will help your site move past the competition in search results.
SEM allows you to market to consumers at the exact moment they’re searching for keywords relevant to your brand and deliver them the content they desire.
SEM allows an advertiser to bid on keywords valuable to their business, serve custom ads, and compete with other advertisers on a cost-per-click basis to earn clicks to their website. SEM allows you to market to consumers at the exact moment they’re searching for keywords relevant to your brand and deliver them the content they desire.
Content and Display
You’ve heard it before, but it still rings true…Content is king. No, we don’t mean the traditional content of “what to see” or “where to stay” that most destinations use on their sites. This information is certainly important to help visitors learn more, but we encourage our clients to take it a step further to create an emotional connection with immersive stories written in such a way that the reader can imagine themselves in the destination. But it doesn’t just include a content plan and stories that live on your site waiting to be found. We recommend proactive distribution on popular news, lifestyle, and social media websites which drives new, potential visitors to the stories on your website.
Display Ads can play a valuable role in building awareness about a destination, offer, or event. Not only can these ads improve brand recognition and bring new visitors to your site, but also can be used as a strategic follow-up to those who have already been there—“Hey, you visited our site. Did you maybe want to go back to look around some more? Would this special offer entice you to book today?” When encouraging visitors to more deeply consider your destination and to book their vacation, remarketing is an invaluable tool.
Social
When you’ve built up the foundation of your core marketing campaign, you should then include social media advertising: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat, to name a few. While maintaining every-day social media posts is something we feel is best handled by each destination, creating and optimizing ads through these platforms to spread the word, gain more followers, and increase views should be an important facet of your paid media mix. From your individual goals, we can determine which platform would be most beneficial. For example, if you are looking for a fun element that brings awareness to your destination, Snapchat is your jam. If you’ve got some videos promoting your area, Facebook or YouTube will work well. If making visitors drool over your images is your thing, using Instagram is where you’ll see the best results.
For example, if you are looking for a fun element that brings awareness to your destination, Snapchat is your jam.
Now that you’ve laid the foundation of a comprehensive digital campaign, you can begin thinking about honing your strategy by activating more robust targeting or including influencers and user-generated content into the mix.
Research and Analytics
You’ve made a comprehensive digital campaign—now what? The best piece of advice we can give is to establish your goals up front and don’t build or promote anything you can’t track. Knowing what’s working and what’s not working using metrics from the individual platforms, as well as your website analytics, ensures that you’re able to continually optimize and maximize your marketing dollars.
Madden Media’s team of digital experts is ready to work with you on a strategy, keep you updated with regular reports and daily optimizations, walk you through the performance results (good and bad), and make adjustments based on tracking of your goals.
