My name is Alex, and I’m the Digital Associate here at 8THIRTYFOUR. I have two passions in life: coffee and digital marketing. These two passions have one key thing in common: the quality of the end product is very much dependent on the quality of the process.
Coffee grown on the same plant can taste wildly different based on the process that it goes through before being turned into the beverage we all know and love. In the same way, your digital marketing campaign is going to be affected based on how you plan, implement, and optimize your efforts.
Humble Beginnings & Digital Strategies
Planting and pulping the coffee cherry is one of the most underrated parts of the coffee process, yet it has one of the greatest impacts on the final cup. How a producer goes about raising their crop is very important. If they don’t pay enough detail to the different variables, such as elevation, varietal, and sun exposure, their crop could be ruined.
This is the equivalent of the planning and research phase of digital marketing.
For this, a general checklist can be followed. However, in the same way that coffee from Kenya and Colombia are treated differently, so too should your different digital efforts. This will need to be tweaked for each campaign, but here’s a place to start:
- Keyword research
- Priority keywords
- Organic rankings
- Site structure
- Third party digital presence
- Content accessibility
- Content quality
- Audience
- Goals and objectives
- Reporting capabilities
How each one of these items is treated varies from campaign to campaign, but they will almost always affect the quality of your end product.
Campaign Setup
So now you’ve done your due diligence and completed all research and planning. The crop has been picked, so to speak. So what comes next?
Well in coffee, that next step is roasting. This is where the coffee seed is turned into the bean we’re all familiar with. In digital marketing, this is where you set up the campaign.
However, like I’ve been saying, the specifics will depend on your needs.
It’s All In the Details
In coffee, this part is where many mistakes are made, and the same can be said for digital. Roasters will roast for too long, or not long enough, or they won’t properly manage the temperature and airflow during the roast. Whatever it is, if they don’t create the right environment, the coffee will taste bad.
The same can be said for digital. If you don’t pay proper attention to setting up all aspects and details of your campaign, including your audience, budget, geographies, bid strategies, content, and more, your efforts will fail.
The Importance of Campaign Management & Optimization
Okay, so you’re almost ready to drink your coffee, but we aren’t there yet! We still need to grind and brew the coffee.
If you grind too fine for your brew method it’s bitter, and too coarse makes it weak. Brewing with a pour over method will greatly change the taste compared to a full immersion brew method.
This can be equated to how you treat your campaign after launch.
At 8THIRTYFOUR, data drives everything we do. So, after we launch a campaign, we continuously monitor the success and make adjustments to optimize based on our goals.
Too many people get coffee and then put it in a Keurig because they think the process is over, when in reality they can still make efforts to achieve a better cup of coffee.
The same can be said for digital campaigns.
The job isn’t done after you launch your ads, make a website live, or hit send on that email campaign. To see truly great results, both with your morning cup of coffee and your next digital campaign, you need to go the extra mile and be conscious of the process.
