Love is in the air, Valentine’s day is here! Getting ready for Valentine’s day is just as easy as running a successful digital pro­motion. Here are 5 steps to follow to achieve both.

Defining Your Target Audience

Just like figuring out what you want in a Valentine’s date, you need to know who your target audience are. Defining your target audience is just as important as defining who you are as a company.

There are a few ways to define your target audience.

• Age
• Location
• Income level
• Education level
• Marital or family status

The more you define your target audience the easier to reach them, expressly when your using targeting ads.  

Budget and SMART Goals

You don’t want to take your date out to dinner and realize you can only afford appetizers, right?

The same things go with doing a digital pro­motion. If you spend your whole budget on designing the pro­motion, you won’t have anything left to execute it.

This is why knowing your budget before you run your pro­motion is key. You need to plan out how you’re going to spend your money. If you’re going to hire a Graphic Designer, Photographer or a Copywriter, you need to find out what they charge before so you can budget that in. Then, you can start budgeting for Email Marketing, Social Media Promotion, and Paid Search Review.

SMART Goals are a great way to break down what you’re wanting from the digital promotion your doing.

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-based

SMART Goals will help you know if the digital pro­motion is working. It’s a good practice to look back at your SMART Goals throughout your pro­motion to make sure you will reach your goals by the end. Just like dating, you need to know where you are right now, where you want to be, and if your heading down the correct path.

Utilizing Social Media

Just like preparing for your Valentine’s day date to know more about them and what they might want for a gift, it’s important to know yourself to know what is working for you.

If you look at Insights on both Instagram and Facebook, you’ll be able to see when your audience is most likely to be online. If you post during this time, you will be able to reach more of your audience. It’s a great idea to schedule your Facebook post at the beginning of each week and upload them by using the schedule post option. This way you don’t have to stress about being at your computer to post it when your audience is most likely to be online.

Looking more closely into Facebook and Instagram, you can see what posts are getting more traffic. This is useful to learn what your audience are more interested in and it’s also a great way to look back to see what works and what doesn’t. To improve your digital marketing strategy, you should use your top hashtags that go with your post and always have a list of hashtags that work and ones that don’t do as well. It’s also good to look at your competitors’ social media to see what are getting the most engagements (such as, likes, comments, and shares). See what hashtags they use and if there are any that they keep reusing.

Using Google Analytics, you will keep track of the online traffic and seeing how people came to your site, organic, e-mail, paid, social, and direct.

• Direct: User type your website address directly into the web browser.
• Social: Your audience comes to your website social network, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.
• Organic: Your user find your website through search engine results, SEO helps a lot here.
• Paid search: Your user find your website through search engine results that are the result of paid advertising that you can do through Google AdWords or another paid search platform.
• Email: Your audience comes to your site through email marketing.

A/B Testing

When planning the perfect Valentine’s date, give your date two options. This will help you know what they like more. It’s similar to doing A/B testing for your digital pro­motion, your comparing two versions to see which is effective. A/B testing through social media ads and email campaigns to see which one acquire more customers. Sending multiple versions of an ad or email to determine which version generates more opens or clicks, to see what your audience respond to. Using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising focusing on specific keywords. You can test the keywords you chose through A/B testing to create a list of keywords that work best for you and your content.

Follow Up

After you have finished your digital pro­motion, you need to look back at your SMART Goals. Make notes if you reached your SMART goals and how you were able to achieve them. Keep track of what has worked well through your digital pro­motion and what didn’t. These records will help your next digital pro­motion to do even better. Follow-ups are always important with anything, it’s a great way to make sure your date had a good time and maybe you will learn more about them.