DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY CHECKLIST

[CAMPAIGN NAME HERE]

1. SET CAMPAIGN GOALS

What is your motivation for running this campaign? (e.g. sell €20,000 worth of gift vouchers in ‘x’
number of months)

Are your goals SMART?

Specific: Are your goals clearly defined?

o Yes
o No

Measurable: Can you measure your goals quantifiably, so you know when you’ve met them? Do you
have metrics defined?

o Yes
o No

Achievable: Are your goals realistic?

o Yes
o No

Relevant: Are your marketing goal relevant to your overall business plan?

o Yes
o No

Time-Sensitive: Are your goals achievable within a reasonable period of time?

o Yes
o No

2. DECIDE ON CAMPAIGN CONCEPT

Decide on key factors for your campaign. Research competitors’ prices and offers at this point, to
make sure your offer is unique and priced competitively.
What offer will you promote? ________________________________________

At what price point? _______________________________________________

Over what time period? _____________________________________________

3. DEFINE TARGET AUDIENCE

a) Users who already engage: Use your guest personas to define this audience. If you don’t
have guest personas, look at the ‘user demographics’ of your Google Analytics account to
find customers who already engage with your brand. You can also use your booking engine
data. Ask yourself who stays with you, how old they are, where they come from, and why
they are staying with you.

b) New audience: Do research online, asking similar questions to those above. Narrow
targeting as much as possible to focus your message – this will result in a higher conversion
rate.

4. CHOOSE TIMING
Research average lead times for the demographic you’re targeting. What is the average lead time?

If your campaign is going to be very short, you should send a teaser message out on your platforms.
Will this campaign require a teaser message?

There is no universal rule book, but here are some factors to consider: if you have a price-conscious
demographic, consider launching your campaign near the end or beginning of the calendar month to
coincide with your guests’ paydays. Additionally, Mondays are often more successful days for a
campaign to launch.

5. CREATE YOUR MESSAGE

How are you going to sell your message? Create a Unique Selling Proposition.

Your USP should have:

a) A strong headline – you must grab a user’s attention in 5 seconds or less

b) Bullet-pointed or numbered information, to keep a reader’s focus.

 c) Information presented as benefits, not features. Explain how your spa will help your guest
unwind, not just the fact that you have a spa.

6. BUDGET AGREEMENT
You must be willing to invest enough to meet your goals. A general rule of thumb is 5-10% of
potential revenue, but many factors can influence this. What is 5-10% of your campaign’s potential
revenue, and what are some factors that could influence the level of investment needed?

If your campaign exceeds its goals, do you have surplus money to keep the momentum going?

In theory, as long as your CPA% – cost per acquisition – is being met and is lower than other
channels like OTAS, your marketing budget should have no limit. Why turn off the tap if the money
is flowing?

7. MARKETING PLATFORMS
This is the part where you can get creative. With your budget, offer and target audience in mind,
assess the following platforms:

a) Paid Social Media

a. Facebook: Facebook is one of the most successful e-commerce platforms for

promoting a campaign to a specific audience. Use Custom Audiences to tailor your
campaign to your target audience, and use Facebook remarketing to get the most
out of this platform.

b. Instagram: only launched in September 2015, Instagram’s advertising platform is off

to a very strong start. You can control your Insta campaigns from your Facebook
advertising account. Remember: Instagram is a visual platform – make sure you’ve
got strong images.
b) Paid Search and Display: Google

When running your campaign, use your Google AdWords to draw attention to your campaign.
You can do this by:

- Highlighting your campaign within Google search network adverts

- Using advert sitelinks to deep-link searches directly to your offer page
- Using Google Remarketing on the display network to promote your offer – images work
best here
- If your budget stretches to this, display marketing can scale your reach and drive
awareness to a new audience –make sure you’re targeting correctly
- Customer Match, a new feature, allows you to upload email addresses and target those
users via the search network, YouTube and user’s Gmail accounts.

c) Email Marketing

Email marketing is an integral part of any digital campaign. It’s how you engage directly with
your guests, and, depending on the quality of your list, can drive considerable revenue.

Simplicity is key to the design and message of your e-zine – keep that in mind. You can
communicate with your audience both before and during your campaign. Consider a Teaser
campaign 48 hours before your campaign begins, or offering exclusive access to the campaign
before general release.

d) Your Website

This is your most important channel. All your marketing campaigns, across every platform,
direct traffic here. Two things to consider:

Your Home Page: if a visitor lands here, can they tell you’re running a promotion? How? Do you
have a floating banner, a countdown clock, or something similar?

Marketing Landing Pages: These are key. Landing pages give your campaign a dedicated space,
and let you narrow the focus of a page to just the offer you’re making.

- Make sure all content – images, text, offers – are relevant to your campaign. The page
should have a single objective.

- Message match is important. Make sure the message across all your platforms matches
the message on your landing page. Are you using the same image? Do the titles and
wording match up? If they don’t, you run the risk of confusing customers.
8. DESIGN WORK
o Make a note of all platforms you need design work for
o Ensure your message will work (image dimensions, text limitations) on each platform – but
make sure your ‘hero shot’ and key message are consistent
o Make sure all design work is tested on mobile – some hotels have almost 60% of their traffic
from mobile, and 98% of Facebook’s revenue is from mobile devices

Tips: don’t compromise on quality of image – you’re representing your brand! Also, people
connect well to adverts that evoke emotion.

9. LAUNCH AND TEST CAMPAIGN

o Proofread everything
o Test everything

Take a step back – does everything look and work the way it should? If it’s an offer set up in your
booking engine, do a test booking.

Is all the relevant tracking set up? For platforms like Facebook, you can run multiple variations
of the ad, and then, when the tracking shows which performs most successfully (after the first
few days, usually), you can pause those that don’t perform well.

Tools to help:

- Bit.ly: This is a great tool to use when posting links to social media platforms and
provides you with extra data regarding click and engagement activity. It also shortens
your link so it looks cleaner and takes up less character spaces. Particularly useful for
Twitter.
- Google URL Builder: this tool allows you to customise your URLs so you can clearly see
your campaign performance data within your google analytics account.

10. REPORT AND MEASURE SUCCESS

o Check daily performance: look at key KPIs and goals set in earlier steps

o Keep notes on what’s working the best. Give it time – Rome wasn’t built in a day!

o When your campaign is over, prepare a report on how each platform performed: include all
engagement and e-commerce metrics. This will help immensely with all future campaigns.