“Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise.” - Michael Jordan
High performance in any field relies on a relentless focus towards the mastery of basic skills. Without truly understanding the fundamentals and how to implement them, any success is likely to be short lived and difficult to consistently replicate.
Digital marketing is no different. Picture an account as a house of cards with advanced tactics and long term strategies building on each other. Without the support of a solid base, there’s no way they can be as effective as possible and, over time, performance will decrease as cracks begin to appear. Below, we’ve listed some of the most important tasks to get right early on so that your accounts have the best chance of success.
Traffic Relevance - You can build the best strategy in the world but with the wrong people coming through to your site you’ll never get the results that strategy deserves. Ensuring your traffic is as relevant as possible is the most important thing to get right for any account. For Paid Search, having a detailed, regularly updated negative keyword list is the easiest way to ensure the right people are seeing your ads. On Social, ensure that your targeting is set up correctly so you’re not using Job Titles when you should be using Interest audiences or vice versa. On Display & Youtube, regularly review the sites & channels that your ads are appearing on to make sure they’re as closely related to your product or service as possible.
Location Targeting - How often have you duplicated a campaign for a new area, only to realise that the location targeting hasn’t been updated? Ensuring your campaigns are targeted to people in the right locations is a simple task but one that often slips through the gaps. Similarly, ensuring your location targeting is updated to show to people actually in the targeted location, as opposed to the default of just having an interest in that location, is crucial. The more cynical marketers among us (me) would suggest this is an easy way for the platforms to inflate spend but it’s a quick fix and an important one to get right for campaign success.
Keyword Match Types - Another one that can be easily overlooked, but has a major impact on account performance. Despite Google’s ongoing attempts to change the definition of match types, these are still a crucial part of any account. Ensuring your match type is correct for your campaign goals and avoiding Broad Match at all costs is a simple way to boost performance across all parts of your campaign.
Naming Conventions - Whether it’s a new account or an existing one, having a strong naming convention in place makes life easier for any marketer and reduces the possibility of mistakes. On accounts with hundreds or thousands of campaigns, taking the time to create a logical and scalable naming convention across the account means it’s easier to diagnose problems, report on performance and understand areas of opportunity.
Digital Marketers have never been busier and their time is increasingly limited as accounts get more complex. Getting the basics right takes some time at the beginning, but the gains you’ll make as a result means you get that time back with interest. Ensuring your account has a strong foundation in place gives you the confidence to build on that foundation knowing that the basics are covered and any advanced tactics have the highest possible chance of success.
To learn more about how Scope Digital uses the fundamentals to build world class digital strategies, get in touch.