Digital marketing has become a broad area with lots of interrelated pieces. I commonly see small businesses implement fragments of digital marketing tactics, not get the desired result and then give up. Without understanding the big picture, having a marketing strategy in place and combining the right tactics you can very easily waste time and money.
The Benefits of a Digital Marketing Strategy
- Businesses of any size can reach their ideal customers cost-effectively.
- Measurable – you know what works and what doesn’t in real-time.
- Speed and flexibility – spot a campaign opportunity and go live the same day.
- You can make adjustments during the campaign, optimising for success as you go.
- Connect with your prospects and build real relationships with social media.
It all begins with wanting to promote something – whether it’s your business or a campaign for a specific product or service.
The foundation of all good digital marketing is your website. Your objective is to attract the right visitors to your website, have them complete an action that you guide them to, such as putting products in their shopping cart or filling in an enquiry form. Close and win, whether they buy the products in the shopping cart or convert through your offline channels. And finally delight, they have such a wonderful experience they come back again and again because it’s so easy to deal with you – and recommend you to others.
A Simple Framework to Improve Your Results
We’ve all felt the frustration and disappointment of campaigns that we thought would be winners, but instead fell flat. It’s never easy, and anyone that tells you it’s easy is probably trying to sell you something. So, let’s take a deep breath and reboot.
Reflect on Where You’ve Been
- What digital activities have you already tried?
- Which of these activities were successful or showed promise?
- Did you wait long enough and were you consistent with your efforts?
- Were your expectations realistic or too ambitious?
- Did you have clear goals you wanted to achieve?
- If you could go back in time, what would you do differently?
Take Stock of What You’re Doing Now
- Is your product or service getting good reviews, feedback, repeat sales or referrals?
- How large is your audience?
- Do you know who your ideal customer is and how to reach them?
- Do you know their demographics and characteristics?
- Is your audience genuinely interested in what you do?
- Analyse your competitors – what are they doing well online?
What Do You Want to Achieve?
It’s essential to nail this – every campaign can have a different purpose.
- Do you want more sales?
- Achieve lower marketing costs?
- Higher average order values?
- Higher purchasing frequency?
- Higher lifetime value?
- Higher conversion rates?
- Lower customer churn rates?
How Will You Reach Your Goals?
What channels do you think are best suited to your goal? For example, generating sales via Facebook Ads is hard, so Google Ads might be a better choice.
Then you’ll either repeat the digital activities you’ve tried, but with improvements, or replace them with different ideas. Here are a few tips:
- Be very specific with the audience you want to target and focus only on them. Don’t try to target a random or a large audience, especially with a small budget. Remember that you can’t please everyone. You’ll have way more success by focusing your effort.
- Develop a clear ‘Call to Action’. Put simply, tell people what you want them to do – call us, complete the form, buy today. Done right, they work well. A good Call to Action should be attention-grabbing with the help of clever copywriting, interesting graphics or video.
- Test, test and test again until you find a winner. Test everything from the copy, images, call to action, audience segments, landing page and the digital channel.
- Expand your reach with social media. This is where people are more likely to see you, including B2B subjects. Scroll through your LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram feed to see real-life examples. If the ad or post has comments and likes, what do you think they have done right to engage those people?
- Optimise your content with SEO to drive more traffic. Be strategic with the keywords you write into your content and the links you create. Use the Google Keyword Planner tool to choose keywords with a mid-range search volume (very popular keywords will be too hard to rank for). Also, be patient as it takes 6 – 12 months to see results from organic search.
Digital marketing activities take some time to plan and implement properly. Once up and running, you must continually monitor and modify throughout. It’s tough to estimate how much time, but be sure to schedule a time to monitor daily. When you’re paying for every click, you want to know immediately if the clicks are coming from irrelevant people who leave straight away so that you can make adjusts. There’s no reason why you can’t find success with planning, monitoring, optimising and persistence.
