Take a long look at introducing new media tools into your campaign before investing time and money, says Bryan Black (pictured below), and make sure you get the basics right.

Everybody likes new things. People crave the flashiest cars, the smartest clothes. Children scream for the trendiest toys. Many marketers are no different, always ready to jump on the latest trends and find innovative new ways to communicate with customers. But in their fervour to take advantage of all the shiny new toys at their disposal, many marketers rush or overlook the basics of marketing. And without a solid foundation, their campaigns crumble around them.

Today, everybody seems obsessed with social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter. Marketers are flocking towards them, looking at how they can use them to communicate more effectively with customers. But while it’s true that these types of tools can enhance marketing, without a solid foundation to the campaign, it’s all a waste of time and money. The success of digital marketing lies in getting the basics right, and then ensuring the campaign is optimised through testing and refinement.

Ensuring good quality data can be a struggle for many businesses – particularly if the organisation possesses multiple data stores that are not well integrated. For example, many retail companies allow customers to buy through the Internet, over the phone, or over the counter. If a customer buys once through the Internet and again over the counter, this could very easily go into the system as two separate customers.

This causes a very real danger of bombarding the customer with the same message multiple times – something they are unlikely to appreciate. The key to avoiding this is to use marketing software to establish a single customer view. By ensuring all marketers are using the same customer data, marketers can be sure that the customer list is free of duplicates, and marketing can be accurately targeted.

The way data is captured is just as important as the way it is stored. Creating an effective online data capture form is a precise science. A well-designed form should capture as much information as possible, but if it’s too long, or confusing to navigate, customers or prospects are unlikely to expend the effort. It’s a fine line, but with marketing software, marketers can analyse the success of online forms and establish a scientific process to form creation. It can also be useful to use outside help. Many email service providers (ESPs) are experts at creating optimised forms and leveraging their expertise can ensure you are collecting quality information that is of real, practical use.

If marketers are to ensure their campaigns are working, they need to be accurately targeting the right people. Even though email is firmly established now, a surprising number of businesses still send out emails in bulk, causing emotionally unsubscribed readers. While marketers may measure the conversion rates of a campaign, nobody is measuring the adverse impact of a badly targeted campaign – the damage done to success of future campaigns.

Customers are likely to get frustrated by having their inbox clogged with messages that are of no interest to them and identify the emails as junk or spam.

ISPs can start getting ban-happy, blocking all future messages from that company. And it makes it much harder to draw customers’ attention to messages that will interest them.

Targeted campaigns, in which customers are only presented with messages that are likely to be of interest to them, sidestep all these problems. Segmentation of customer data lies at the heart of an optimised email campaign, allowing you to identify similar groups of customers and present them only with messages that will be of interest to them.

With these basics in place, the business can start looking at ways to optimise their campaigns.

Targeting in particular should be subject to continual optimisation. The key to optimised marketing is testing, analysis and refinement. Segmentation is not just a one-off thing and the customer lists need to be reorganised as more information about these customers becomes available. People change – they age, they marry, they fall on hard times, they prosper. Being able to keep track of your customers as individuals is crucial.

For instance, a 23-year old man is likely to have different needs when he hits his 50s. An effective email marketing solution allows businesses to keep track of their customers and segment dynamically. And, as the targeting improves, so will the results.

The ability to analyse campaigns is crucial if businesses are to reap the most benefits from their digital marketing. The advantage that email has over direct mail campaigns is that you can receive immediate intelligence about campaign and customers. A few marketing solutions can present this information visually, for example as graphs or Venn diagrams, allowing marketers to easily identify which parts of a campaign are working best, visualise developing trends and see what each individual customer is responding to. They can then modify campaigns accordingly.

Being able to constantly refine campaigns means more effective marketing and more value delivered to the business.

All the new toys available – social networks, blogging, microblogging to name a few – are very attractive to marketers. Popular with the media, popular with the public, the benefits of using them are clear.

But unless the foundations are solid, the value they bring will be variable. Marketers should constantly be going back to basics and then optimising campaigns. And then, and only then, should they take the new toys out of the box.

Bryan Black is sales director, smartFOCUS DIGITAL.