“Innovation needs to be part of your culture. Consumers are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up, we’re in trouble.” – Ian Schafer.
Digital advertising and marketing is all about selecting and applying the most suitable strategy and tactics, and the right metrics to measure the results. With competition becoming tougher by the day, especially during the pandemic, marketers need to choose the digital advertising techniques that will ensure they achieve the marketing and advertising goals. So how do marketers choose their digital advertising techniques and metrics? In our opinion, visual depiction of marketing campaigns and advertisements are possibly the best. Not only does visually depicting benefit the team by better understanding of the scope of the responsibilities, but visual depiction also works better to help clients to understand what you are trying to achieve and put forward. Using flowcharts for digital advertising is a lucid representation of the social media strategy and ensures that everyone involved is able to understand the entire campaign.
Preparing a draft of the flowchart for your digital advertising campaign is the first step. The building of the flowchart ensures that the creators think about the process, action steps, and people responsible in a strategic and logical manner. Creating a flowchart for digital advertising (and other processes) is also a great way to highlight challenges/roadblocks/redundancies in the strategy and metrics. These might go unnoticed at the conceptual stage. Rooting out these problems at the start, affords a better chance at success for such activities.
The good part is that there are programs, methods, and software to create such flowcharts. However, it is also possible to build a flowchart for your digital advertising campaign using the shapes tool available on both Word and PowerPoint. Creators can use shapes and color based on branding guidelines to create a flowchart that will accelerate their digital advertising and marketing endeavors. Yes, the flowchart may not come out right in the first instance, but going through the process will help the creators better the depiction each time. The great part is that the base flowchart can be used as a template for the creation of future processes/campaigns.
Digital advertising, more now than ever before, has become critical to setting the foundation for future success and market capturing. A flowchart for this purpose is a clear, visual, and concise documented plan that everyone can comprehend, stay informed and accountable, and there is uniformity of understanding across all stakeholders. The flowchart for digital advertising (and any other process) depicts that process, the underlying reasons for the steps, the interrelation between the steps and persons, and the path that the digital advertising campaign would follow. In the digital advertising process, it is critical that everyone understands how all of the content assets in a campaign connect and depend on each other to meet and exceed the strategic objectives. A flowchart helps all those involved to fully grasp lead nurturing, subscriptions, cross-selling, leads and changes in their status and a lot more. A digital advertising campaign can be made more effective by following the one page flowchart that acts as an ‘architectural plan’.
The great part of a flowchart is that it can be shared with other team members, members of other teams, and decision makers. A flowchart visually displays the efforts that go into a single digital advertising campaign, the support required, the possible obstacles, and the chances of success. Those viewing this visual document can weigh in with suggestions, ensuring that tweaks and revisions can be made where necessary. The final campaign flow that goes out would then have a lot more clarity and buy-in. Getting support and suggestions, removes uncertainties about work required, roles and responsibilities, and strategic goals. A campaign flow chart serves as a virtual specification sheet for the content assets that must be developed from scratch or adapted from your existing content library. Better still, this streamlined visual representation of the campaign will assist both parties in checking off and campaign feature as it is designed, configured, and ready for deployment. It also clarifies how the marketing automation software should be designed and wired up in order to monitor all of the campaign’s behavior and activities. When each asset and mission is completed, make sure to cross them off your list.
Flowcharts are not limited to digital advertising or campaigns or media planning. Once you see the value from flowcharts, you would be able to create stunning flowcharts with a lot more detail. You would be able to include actual performance and success rate of your digital advertising campaign and marketing reach. Those involved in and responsible for media planning and digital advertising love flowcharts. The reasons are simple – the conciseness with which, flowcharts are able to display and communicate tactics, timings, and the investments make all the difference. The power, lucidity, and simplicity of these visually descriptive tools, makes them elegant, appealing, and used increasingly.
Flowcharts visualize the plan – it helps in the planning phases and is a potent tool to communicate the plan strongly enough to media authorization. It would behoove companies to have professionals master the art of flowchart creation or at least those who can use the software that enables the creation of these diagrams. Imagine the ease of creating KPIs depicted clearly, or actual performance data that can be captured using some flowcharting tools/software! The success of business does depend on the digital advertising and marketing efforts – you would agree. Using flowcharts for this exercise is a great way to forge ahead and beat the competition. Additionally, flowcharts help to identify problems, innovate, and discover new insights – for those who really want to learn.
There are several software/flowcharting tools that make flowchart creation and improvement easy. They would help both offline and digital advertising efforts – basis the data source of the performance data that is to be mapped on the flowchart. These would enable you to combine offline and online customer behavior for better results. Imagine the possibilities of your digital advertising campaign – the visitors, visits, page views, sales, conversions, and other such leads. Irrespective of the kind of advertising, creators can easily visualize it on a flowchart. The possibilities are endless!
