Big Data: The Digital Marketer's Playground

Any digital marketer will tell you data is their secret weapon, an all-powerful force in the digital world. Data guides consumer outreach campaigns, directs SEO strategies, and propels personalized brand interaction. Data is king, and our human experience has evolved alongside data collection mechanisms, as they've given way to new access points in the customer journey.

Data has allowed us to increase efficiency, increase convenience, and increase accessibility. One of the ways we conquer an excess of data is through digital marketing platforms, compartmentalizing all the moving parts to bring cohesion to the marketing process.

Our client is a marketing firm comprised of a tenacious team of digital marketers who needed a new source of data for their email and direct marketing initiatives. The company was undergoing a merger, combining a data-centric agency who pioneered targeted marketing with a highly creative team to form one of the most successful digital marketing agencies in the word.

Driving Success With Custom Digital Marketing Platform

They were looking to build a custom digital marketing platform to creative orders and campaigns, distribute tasks and assignments, approve and disapprove elements, and sync campaigns to a singular database. To make things easy, they tasked us to engineer an inclusive and intuitive dashboard where users could view all these modules holistically from a singular digital marketing platform.

To sync the campaigns, we integrated EZanga APIs. Our application retrieves data from EZanga API and uses the data to populate reports and issue email notifications when certain events occur within the campaign.

We designed a technological toolbox around the client's project objectives and must-have features, deciding on Laravel Version 5.4 for the development framework. We discussed the client's expectations at length, going through preexisting digital marketing platforms and collaboratively determining where those platforms excelled and where they fell short. This allowed us to engineer the perfect formula to solve the client's long list of needs.

We used the following technologies during the development process…

Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox

In terms of the environment, we created the application in a local environment. We are syncing campaigns in the digital marketing platform using ACT-on API. All events are reported using this API, and certain events prompt email notifications when the events match a predefined set of parameters.

The Admin user can create orders, modify them, and relay the orders to other users through the ACT-on API, notifying others of changes in creative direction and campaign setup.

In the next section, we discuss the different layers and functionalities we forged a dialogue between to create the perfect data-centric digital marketing platform, custom-tailored to the client's unique list of needs. Each of these functionalities begins with creating a new order.

Add New Order: A 4-Step System

1) Campaign Details: This part contains the basic information of campaign e.g Campaign Name, White-label, Broadcast date, Representative Name, Representative Email, Special Instructions etc.

2) Geo Details: Geo detail contains geo-location, Demo, Email quantity, and Suppression File. Geo Location is further divided into two part:

Zip code: Contains the list of zip codes in a CSV file in 'A' column of a CSV file
Misc: Under Misc, we can add either based on States, City or zip codes. We can search based on these parameters and can add under the box or copy/paste under the box.

3) Creative Details: Under creative details, we need to upload the HTML file, Images, From line, subject line, SeedList Test (Only CSV file), SeedList Live (Only CSV file)

4) Digital Plus: This part contains Vertical, Omnichannel, and social channels and dictates channels based on the content.

The Digital Marketing Platform User Journey Explained

The Order Listing Screen, where all open orders are displayed and accessible to assigned users, has its own robust set of features. Users can sort through orders using filters based on campaign data, status, or white-label. From the Order Listing Screen, users navigate to more specific tasks and actions – cloning the order, completing, deleting, or testing – according to the context of the order.

Campaigns can be compared by selecting multiple projects from the Order Listing Screen. This is incredibly helpful when analyzing campaigns to zero in on the successes and failures of each. The client uses the comparison tool for A/B testing and strategic planning.

Users redirect themselves to the Creative Screen through the Order Listing Screen. The Creative Screen is used for the ideation stage, formatting email campaigns and coordinating content workflows.

From the Creative Screen, information is passed to the Approve Campaign Screen. The Approve Campaign seeds out flawed strategies, and Admin approves user requests on a case-by-case basis.

All campaigns are geotagged and localized so users can produce a hyper-relevant campaign for their client's target market. The Campaign Setup Screen allows users to include additional details for each campaign profile.

During setup, users upload the links in a CSV file. After uploading the links, it will appear within the setup arena. We can select multiple links and send to the Campaign Monitoring Screen. The Campaign Monitoring Screen displays all campaign that passes through Campaign Setup Screen.

After creation of the campaign, the API processes the campaign on the Creative Screen and the campaign will display the result based on the API's response.

This is an ongoing project, and moving forward we will be adding functionalities incrementally. We will be adding additional API integrations in support of the existing email campaigning modules and link generation efforts. Right now, we are working on refining the reporting dashboard to include graphical and chart displays. The client has been more than pleased with the results thus far, and our relationship has evolved into a long-term partnership.

Leading Marketing Agency Conquers Consumer Data With Digital Marketing Platform

Big Data: The Digital Marketer's Playground

Driving Success With Custom Digital Marketing Platform

The Digital Marketing Platform User Journey Explained

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