Digital Marketing and Campaigns
On this page:
Strategy
Digital strategy is a roadmap for your departments鈥� communications and marketing success in the digital space. It defines your primary audiences, channels, and tactics that support your overall marketing efforts, mission, and goals.
The steps you can take today:
- Analyze your current digital marketing and communications efforts by auditing existing
digital channels, such as social media, website, email marketing, and paid advertising.
Summarize lessons learned from these channels and identify the most successful campaigns.
- Determine your target audience. Who is the primary audience for your digital marketing
messaging? Create personas to better understand your audience鈥檚 content needs.
- Strategize on your primary messaging: What do you want to convey? Adjust your brand鈥檚
tone of voice per channel, audience, and message type.
- Focus on the most successful tactics and channels. Be consistent and strategic in
your efforts. If it worked in the past, it will probably work again!
- Experiment with new content ideas, platforms and audience members and expand gradually.
Five social media profiles with consistent content will yield more results than ten
accounts with sporadic and infrequent messaging.
- Fill the gaps and diversify your digital marketing efforts. Reach your audience via various channels to reinforce your message.
Digital Ads
By integrating similarly branded images, videos, and copy across multiple platforms for a campaign, you can maximize the power of your messages and calls-to-action to your audiences without having to reinvent new assets for each communication or touchpoint.
Email Marketing
San Jos茅 State University utilizes Adobe Marketo Engage, a leading Engagement Platform that empowers marketers to build brand value, grow revenue, and prove impact. You may for you and your team members (license availability is limited and there may be a waitlist).
Strategy When Building Your Email
- Identify at least 1-2 goals for your email. Examples:
- Engage more with businesses to increase the number of internships, grants and scholarships offered for students and faculty.
- Increase number of attendees to events
- Improve customer service to incoming students
- Be sure to have emails proofread.
- Adhere to best practices when designing your email
Best Practices
Images/Video
顿辞苍鈥檛:
- Use stock images and clip art.
- Authenticity equals trust with users. Keep in mind images are optional鈥擨t is often better to not have anything at all than to use a generic stock photo.
- Rely on using photos of text over plain text.
Do:
- Optimize images for the web (resize images to a maximum of 800 pixels width for email)
- Leverage our . You may also contact a UMC team member for missing subject matter that you would like us to capture.
- Use images to provide visual support for your text, not replace it.
Text/Tone
顿辞苍鈥檛:
- Overwhelm readers with long and wordy content.
- Hyperlink vague text such as 鈥渃lick here鈥� or 鈥渓earn more.鈥�
- Use embedded links (for example: use 鈥淐heck out 鈥�Our Event Name鈥欌�� and not: 鈥淐heck out 鈥極ur Event Name鈥� at www.sjsu.edu/eventsite鈥�).
Do:
- Speak in short sentences with an active voice.
- Understand your target audience.
- Use compelling, brief, and to-the-point subject lines for your email.
- Be concise and brief; less is more.
- Use short, but descriptive direct calls-to-action (strong action verb & 1-4 words max).
Visual Style
顿辞苍鈥檛:
- Overuse background colors and different fonts (1鈥�2 fonts).
- Overuse call-to-action buttons when a hyperlink would suffice.
Do:
- Utilize background colors that have enough contrast with your text to be accessible. To maintain color contrast use .
- Ensure there is enough white space to balance out the content.
Tips and Strategies
- Use curated and engaging content.
- Identify the purpose of your newsletter and define a strategy; avoid the 鈥渆verything but the kitchen sink鈥� strategy (Ask yourself whether you really need an e-newsletter and have the resources to support it).
- Determine the best distribution frequency and be consistent.
- Leverage the event calendar to host your content and link to it from your email newsletter for more details.
- Test your newsletter with your colleagues, check for errors (e.g. broken links, typos).
