Instinctively, you might think putting your digital marketing budget toward only one channel, making a big splash in one place, is the right move for the most impact, especially when your budget is limited. But to truly boost your campaign performance, diversify. Combine multiple digital advertising channels – such as search, display and social – to extend your advertising coverage so you can reach your entire target audience, no matter where they are or where they happen to be in the purchase cycle. Here’s how. Follow this 5-step holistic marketing formula: 
Lay the foundation with paid search.
Make paid search the bedrock of your campaign. When highly engaged in-market consumers at the bottom of the advertising funnel are actively searching for what you offer, weighing their options, and looking to buy now, you can engage them at the right moment.
Quick Tips
- Set up your keyword groups based on every aspect of your business: your branding, competitors, and all the terminology relevant to who you are and what you do.
- Determine your conversion actions, such as calls, website clicks and form fills.
Add digital channels on top to widen your advertising net.
Multiple digital advertising channels have more power than one alone. To build on paid search’s firm foundation, add digital advertising options, such as display banners and social. Layering these on top of paid search is effective because it creates brand awareness and primes interested consumers to search for your brand, which increases people’s likelihood to convert. For instance, when our healthcare client incorporated search, display banners and social into one holistic digital advertising campaign, they increased their paid search click-through rate and conversion rate by more than 30% than running paid search alone!
Quick Tips
- If adding display banners,
- consider employing cross-device behavioral targeting to find your target demo and people interested in what you offer.
- use keyword contextual targeting to capture people on niche websites searching for terms related to your products or services.
- employ geo-retargeting to remind consumers in your geographic area about your local offers.
- If adding a paid social component,
- ramp up both your organic and paid social presence on popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram to better connect with and build rapport with your target audience, at any time of day, in the place they like to spend their time.
Analyze current converters to better understand your target audience.
Find customers and prospects similar to your converting audience. Then weave these consumer insights into your media plan. For instance, pick the tactic mix that most appeals to your target audience for better results.
Quick Tips
- Try using behavioral targeting segments for social that are similar to those for display banners.
- Use look-alike modeling to find those users similar to your converters to expand your audience.
Review the channel data to spot surprising finds and trends.
Examine each digital advertising channel’s data to make connections or new discoveries and then apply what you learn. Our healthcare client found the majority of paid search conversions came from younger and middle-aged women, which was expected. But something else caught them by surprise and gave them an untapped market to pursue: A quarter of all their paid search clicks generated in their campaign came from men! Optimizing your campaign based on channel insights can also provide significant savings. When our healthcare client applied their social campaign’s best age demos to their display banner campaigns, they were able to decrease their display banner effective cost per action (eCPA) by $5. On the other hand, when they noticed their display banner converters showed a strong interest in healthy foods, they were able to quickly optimize their social channel for better success by adding similar segments.
Quick Tips
- Review advertising channel data to learn about untapped markets to pursue.
- Personalize your digital advertising to make it more effective across channels.
Apply data insights to continually improve your campaign performance.
As mentioned above, optimizing your campaign regularly based on what your data is telling you is vital. For example, when our healthcare client reviewed their data insights, they also found social converters were younger, married and highly educated women while display banner converters were middle-aged parents. Having this information helped our client determine the right tactic mix for each audience.
Quick Tip
- Use data insights to guide your media plan’s tactic mix and campaign improvements over time.
Do one more crucial thing before implementing this holistic digital marketing formula.
Before you put this 5-step formula in place, select a single partner to manage your holistic digital marketing campaign. If you don’t? Our president Jay Friedman says working with multiple vendors is like scattering a dandelion in the wind. “All the performance intelligence about your brand — what media works, what audiences work, their seasonality — gets seen by multiple vendors,” he says. “These vendors have turnover like anyone else, but the impact on your business is multiplied when you’ve spread knowledge around. Their employees go to other places and have no reason not to share this knowledge with your competitors!”
Quick Tips
Look for a single vendor who can do the following:
- Take an audience-centric approach: Will they let your target audience dictate the campaign?
- Surmount channel silos: Can they easily share data and insights across ad channels? Do their teams share one vision and the same goals? Can they create a cohesive campaign and also make smart improvements on the fly?
- Create relevant messaging for every channel: Do they understand the nuances of each digital ad channel? Can they speak to each channel’s audience to drive the maximum conversions?
- Build a successful campaign: Are they easy to communicate with and to work with? What types of expertise, industry-leading tools, technology and reporting can they provide and integrate to set you up for success?
Ready to put this holistic digital marketing formula into action? If you’re still looking for that ideal single partner to help you implement it – one who can deftly create, manage and optimize your campaigns to take your performance to the next level – we can help; reach out to us.