It’s a new year, so we’ve devised the ulti­mate dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate to help you devel­op your 2015 strate­gies for paid, earned, and owned media. The suc­cess of your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy depends on your prepa­ra­tion upfront. Start with fresh look at your KPIs, your under­stand­ing of audi­ence, and the tools you use to track site activ­i­ty and con­ver­sions. Then imple­ment stream­lined tem­plates to improve your email, paid search, organ­ic search, social, and con­tent mar­ket­ing efforts.

Create Or Fine Tune Customer Personas

Before you can “talk” the lan­guage of your cus­tomer through your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, you have to know who you’re talk­ing to. Per­sonas are a gen­er­al­ized rep­re­sen­ta­tion of your ide­al cus­tomer, made spe­cif­ic through a sketch of their fic­tion­al sto­ry.

If you already have devel­oped buy­er per­sonas fine-tune them through new research or what you’ve col­lect­ed over since the last time you gave them a fresh eye. Be sure every piece of mar­ket­ing col­lat­er­al you cre­ate in 2015 speaks to a spe­cif­ic per­son­a’s goals, behav­iors, and con­cerns.

Flesh out each cus­tomer type­’s per­sona by defin­ing the fol­low­ing (cour­tesy of Hub­Spot):

• Per­sona name.
• Back­ground: Job, career path, fam­i­ly.
• Demo­graph­ics: Gen­der, age, income and loca­tion.
• Iden­ti­fiers: How would you rec­og­nize this per­son if they were described to you, such as their demeanor or how they pre­fer to be com­mu­ni­cat­ed with?
• Goals: Their pri­ma­ry goal and sec­ondary goals when engag­ing with your brand.
• Chal­lenges: The pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary issues they face that keep them from their goals.
• What you can do: What you do to help him or her achieve their goal and over­come their chal­lenges.
• Real quotes: Assem­ble these from “real world” exam­ples of this per­sona.
• Com­mon objec­tions: Rea­sons cus­tomers matched with this per­sona have passed on your ser­vices in the past.
• Mar­ket­ing mes­sage: How you describe your solu­tion in rela­tion to their goals and chal­lenges.
• Ele­va­tor pitch: The briefest pos­si­ble expla­na­tion of what you can do for them.

Include these ele­ments in your per­sona tem­plate, along with a pho­to of a real cus­tomer who fits this per­sona, and then fill out the tem­plate for all your com­mon types of cus­tomers.

Establish KPIs To Track For Your Business

Key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors mea­sure the health of your busi­ness and mar­ket­ing. When decid­ing your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing KPIs, fol­low this five-step mod­el designed by Google Ana­lyt­ics evan­ge­list Avinash Kaushik:

1. Iden­ti­fy the busi­ness objec­tives up front. These are estab­lished by senior exec­u­tives.
2. Iden­ti­fy crisp goals for each objec­tive. Mar­ket­ing man­age­ment con­tributes to this con­ver­sa­tion.
3. Iden­ti­fy KPIs that align with above goals. Data ana­lysts and mar­keters lead this step.
4. Set tar­gets for each KPI, set­ting the para­me­ters for suc­cess.
5. Iden­ti­fy the seg­ments of peo­ple, behav­ior, and out­comes on which suc­cess will be ana­lyzed.

Create A Custom Dashboard In Your Analytics

Have you set up a cus­tom dash­board in your ana­lyt­ics yet? As part of your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate, you should con­sid­er an ana­lyt­ics tool, at the very least, a free one like Google Ana­lyt­ics.

How­ev­er, out of the box, these free tools are gener­i­cal­ly set up, and should be cus­tomized to your mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence. With sev­er­al cus­tom dash­boards to choose from, and up to 12 “wid­gets” on each dash­board in Google Ana­lyt­ics, your data dash­board can tell you the sto­ry you need to track when your vis­i­tors come to your web­site.

An easy-to-use wid­get in Google Ana­lyt­ics lets you place met­rics, pie charts, time­lines and tables with­in a cus­tom dash­board. This is great if you reg­u­lar­ly look for your top traf­ficked pages or check your top traf­fic week­ly. So stop dig­ging around Google Ana­lyt­ics for what you need, and put this info front and cen­ter in a dash­board. You can start with Google’s help arti­cle on how to cre­ate and cus­tomize dash­boards.

Pick A Tip To Send Better Emails Every Time

If you have a cus­tomer’s email, you have the pow­er to give them the right offer for the right prod­uct at the right time. This is not a pow­er to be abused. Cus­tomers are quick to unsub­scribe or mark as spam, which caus­es your brand to lose its direct line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion in an instant.

Fol­low these tips from Vero to make your email mar­ket­ing pro­vide more val­ue to its recip­i­ents in 2015; every email you send should accom­plish one (or many) of the objec­tives on this list:

• Offer ear­ly access.
• Enter them into an exclu­sive club.
• Announce stuff, and give them an advan­tage.
• Pro­vide social proof.
• Include a down­load.
• Ask them to do some­thing “next”.
• Offer a refer­ral code.
• Make your CTA a but­ton.
• Say “hi” if it’s been a while.
• Jump on trends and cur­rent events.
• Pig­gy­back off the pow­er of your brand part­ners.
• Help them devel­op a con­ver­sion habit.
• Tell them some­thing per­son­al.
• Give them some­thing to show you care.
• Give them some­thing to make them smile.
• Gam­i­fy their inter­ac­tion with you.
• Ask for feed­back.

Optimize PPC With This Campaign Management Template

A PPC mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate can be devised in a spread­sheet that helps you orga­nize your search ads for all your cam­paigns and ad groups. You can keep track of your Google AdWords and Bing Ads in a sim­ple Excel spread­sheet for col­lab­o­ra­tion, record­ing for each:

• The tar­get mar­ket or per­sona.
• The key­word.
• Ad mes­sag­ing: Head­line.
• Ad Mes­sag­ing: Descrip­tion line 1.
• Ad Mes­sag­ing: Descrip­tion line 2.
• The des­ti­na­tion URL.
• What ad exten­sions you’ll use.
• If the land­ing pages have been opti­mized with key­words and for con­ver­sions.

Perform An SEO Audit With This Template

Start your 2015 dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paigns with a clear diag­no­sis of the health of your site. SEO audits come in many forms, but here’s a sim­ple check­list you can use as a base­line.

Start by first per­form­ing a crawl of your site to col­lect the fol­low­ing data with­in a spread­sheet for every page on your web­site. Pri­or­i­tize the fix­es you’ll make based on the val­ue of the pages on your site (start­ing with the most valu­able in terms of traf­fic and link equi­ty, and work­ing down the line).

You’ll want to look at:

• The cur­rent state of your meta data and head­ing tags.
• Any errors, redi­rects, or URL issues occur­ring.
• The state of your robots direc­tives and canon­i­cal tags.
• A pic­ture of the file size and image sizes on your pages, and mak­ing sure they aren’t con­tribut­ing to slow page load times.
• Iden­ti­fy­ing any dupli­cate con­tent and anchor text to note.
• Under­stand­ing your back­link pro­file by view­ing your exter­nal links and inter­nal links, and get­ting a pic­ture of your fol­low and nofol­low direc­tives.

Oth­er basic SEO areas to look at:

• If you haven’t already, reg­is­ter your site with Bing and Google Web­mas­ter Tools.
• Install an ana­lyt­ics pro­gram if you don’t have one (see the sec­tion on con­fig­ur­ing cus­tom dash­boards above).
• Ana­lyze the URL struc­ture inter­nal­ly, like how your direc­to­ries are set up and the URLs are named – is it orga­nized?
• Every page should have unique and rel­e­vant con­tent for your tar­get per­sona, in sup­port of the pur­pose of the page, includ­ing impor­tant key­words when nec­es­sary.
• On-page opti­miza­tion should also take into account the appro­pri­ate use of head­er tags and image file names.
• Val­i­date your page’s code with the W3C val­ida­tor, a gold stan­dard in crawlable code.
• Improve page load speed with avail­able tools.

Design Graphics And Infographics With This Go-To Template

Visu­al imagery is vital to every mar­ket­ing activ­i­ty, from web­site and blog con­tent to paid and organ­ic social media posts. Not every­one has to be a design­er, but know­ing the guide­lines of good design, and know­ing the ide­al dimen­sions and specs for images on every chan­nel, you can add visu­al piz­zazz to your con­tent across the board.

While many social net­works have set their best prac­tices for image size, some design­ers have test­ed them out and come up with their own ide­al specs. Check out these tips from design­er Dustin Stout:

• Land­scape images: 1280 x 720 (Google+, Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn)
• Por­trait images: 735 x 1102 (Pin­ter­est, Google+)
• Square images: 900 x 900 (Insta­gram, Google+, Face­book)

Create Content Briefs To Manage Content Better In 2015

Keep your con­tent orga­nized, and cre­ate a bet­ter end prod­uct in 2015. Check out these tips via Hub­Spot on how to man­age con­tent cre­ation through con­tent briefs. Cre­ate a cov­er­sheet for the author and edi­tor to fill out the fol­low­ing info for every piece of con­tent as well:

• Title or top­ic of the con­tent
• Descrip­tion of details to be cov­ered
• Key­words for the top­ic
• Tar­get audi­ence or per­sona
• Call to action or point in the fun­nel
• Author
• Due date and pub­lish date

Publish To Social Media Efficiently With A Schedule

A tem­plat­ed pub­lish­ing sched­ule is your friend in the fast-paced space of social media. If you can pre-sched­ule (and set to post) your con­tent for Face­book, Twit­ter, Google+, and LinkedIn ahead of time, you can get bet­ter dis­tri­b­u­tion of your con­tent at the right time.

To cre­ate a sched­ule for your social media pub­li­ca­tions, use an actu­al cal­en­dar to map out updates and posts for Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, and Google+ by date, time, tweet copy, char­ac­ter count, link and media assets. You’ll also want to cre­ate and track any cus­tom URLs for all your social media posts on your sched­ule.

In clos­ing, think­ing through your KPIs and audi­ence per­sonas at the start of a new year is a good prac­tice to re-cal­i­brate your mes­sage for the needs of your cus­tomers. And with a frame­work for orga­niz­ing every chan­nel through a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate, you’ll find your efforts bet­ter focused and hav­ing greater syn­er­gy.

Hap­py imple­ment­ing, and hap­py New Year!

Did we miss any­thing? Tell us what you would add to the ulti­mate dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paign tem­plate for 2015.