Successful Digital Marketing & Promotion
For New Brands & Businesses
According to a ‘Managing Digital Marketing’ study by Smart Insights, 46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy, while 16% do have a strategy but haven’t yet integrated it into their marketing activity. But here’s the thing: if you don’t have a plan in place how can you expect to grow and innovate, to measure meaningful results and to learn from past mistakes?
It’s time to stop panicking about next year or next month and start crafting a plan that can pack a powerful punch. We’ve selected the 5 most important steps that you, the decision maker should take to ensure that your digital marketing efforts create a real impact on your bottom line.
Previously, digital marketers collected qualitative and quantitative information about the target audience that included age, gender, occupation, interests, and location. The definition of the potential customer has been taken to another level recently, with buyer personas taking over. Now, the most effective marketing strategies are incomplete without them.
Buyer personas are a term used to describe the ideal customer that can be defined by surveying and contacting the pre-defined target group. To define your own buyer persona, you can make use of online tools like MakeMyPersona and Persona Creator.
IDENTIFY GOALS AND TOOLS
Every professional marketer knows how important this stage is. Without goals, the strategy simply will not work, so defining them is your main task. To make sure that the goals you developed are suitable, and make them measurable.
Example of a weak marketing goal:
Increase the conversions on the website next year and create two promotional offers.
What is wrong with this goal? Right, it is non-measurable! How one can measure the progress using this goal, right?
Here is how it should have been formulated:
Increase the conversions on the website by 20 percent in the first quarter of 2017, and create two promotional offers: free marketing report and a marketing book. Have them online by February and March respectively.
There, measuring the progress becomes possible now.
FOCUS ON BLOGGING
Blogging will be important for online marketing in 2017 and far beyond. This key aspect of the strategy performs some critical functions, including bringing more traffic to your website, reinforcing social media presence, positioning against other companies and ranking all those long-tail search queries and keywords.
If you have a regularly updated blog that the visitors find useful, it means that your website will be easily found through the search engines and can be used as a platform for your marketing campaign.
EVALUATE DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS
Analyze the digital assets and channels that you are already using, including website, blog content, social media account, word-of-mouth, native advertising, Google Adwords, paid advertising and so on. Ask yourself: how effective were they and how they can be used in 2017?
It is okay if your future digital marketing strategy does not incorporate all of these elements, but it sure should use those that were the most effective in 2016. For example, if a landing page you recently created has been effective in generating leads, use it again but improve it as much as possible. The same applies to other assets and channels.
AUTOMATE MARKETING
The report of digital marketing trends from SmartInsights states that marketing automation will be a huge thing in 2017. In fact, it has been in the top 3 for the last 5 years in terms of trends and many businesses still have not improved their automation.
If your company is among them, make sure you add marketing automation to your strategy before 2017 arrives!
MAKE MOBILE MARKETING WORK
According to the aforementioned report from SmartInsights, mobile marketing has been on the rise in the recent years. However, there are still many opportunities for growing in the area of smartphone conversions, as these rates were very low in 2016 (SmartInsights). Desktop and tablet were the most widely used tools for this task so far, so if you are looking for opportunities in mobile marketing, here is your chance.
Review your mobile responsive design and email templates to ensure that you are using the latest methods and provide only relevant and latest data.
MAKE IT EASY FOR CUSTOMERS TO REACH YOU
Online business is all about connecting with potential customers, so traffic on your website should be high to ensure positive outcomes. Your digital marketing strategy therefore should ensure that your leads and visitors are not exerting unnecessary effort to connect with you. Engaging with your customers is invaluable for your business.
To eliminate the unnecessary effort, you should ensure that landing page does not ask for irrelevant data. Make call-to-actions clearly visible on the landing page and other pages on the website.
USE THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGY
A marketing effort is wasted if an ineffective or inappropriate technology is used. For example, email marketing should not be done manually but rather by tools like Vendasta that advance it by providing sophisticated functions.
CONFIRM YOUR DIFFERENTIATORS
If your company is not different from your competitors, you should not expect high profits in 2017. Make sure you change (or reinforce) your difference from the others by talking to your customers and asking them why they selected your company. Then, fix your existing differentiators if needed.
TRACK YOUR PROGRESS
Constant monitoring should be provided to ensure that the strategy is working effectively. This is done by assigning teams that would deliver this task. Remember to learn from the mistakes and always find improvement opportunities!
Structure a digital marketing plan step-by-step in 2020
Situational Analysis
The first thing you need to do when developing your digital marketing plan is to carry out an internal and external analysis (SWOT analysis) of the firm. A useful framework for this is the SWOT analysis that allows you to look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and weaknesses for your company and the market at large.
We need to be familiar with the ecosystem we operate in, what our customers’ needs are, and where they get addressed. This analysis is equally qualitative as it is quantitative through looking at factors such as digital habits, intermediaries, influencers, and more.
Implementing bench marking techniques that aim to identify the best digital practices and success stories and applying them to the business is an increasingly prominent part of the overall corporate strategy.
We also need to conduct an internal study to know what our company’s situation is like in the digital age: is our website customer-oriented? How is the usability and browsing experience? Do we update our blog periodically? What is our website’s current positioning? And what is our social media presence?
ESTABLISH DIGITAL MARKETING GOALS
Once you have your place in the market and your strong points in mind, work on establishing some goals to have a clear idea of where your actions should take you. Everything you plan has to work towards meeting those goals.
You can work on developing this part of your digital marketing plan with the SMART goals framework in mind: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals.
DEFINE THE MARKETING STRATEGY
Once you’ve defined your business objectives, what are you going to do to achieve them? Personalization is becoming increasingly important in digital marketing. Therefore, when it comes to defining your strategy for carrying out your plan, keep these factors in mind:
Once you’ve defined your business objectives, what are you going to do to achieve them? Personalization is becoming increasingly important in digital marketing. Therefore, when it comes to defining your strategy for carrying out your plan, keep these factors in mind:
· SEGMENTING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE:
Know who you want to address, what their tastes, needs, or preferences are, where are you looking to meet their expectations, etc. This is the time to create your buyer persona.
· POSITIONING:
To achieve proper positioning, it’s crucial that you are very clear (and reach your audience in the same way) about what your value proposition is and what it entails. In short, it’s why the consumer should choose you and not the competition. You need to know how you’re going to communicate your unique value proposition and how to do so appropriately in the channels where your audience is present (social media, blogs, email marketing, and more).
· CONTENT STRATEGY:
This is important for creating, distributing, and managing original content that attracts users and positions the brand as referential in users’ top of mind. Besides, you also have to map out a specific communications plan (content marketing) for every channel. Some of the tools we use to execute this strategy are:
1. Keyword research: This involves identifying appropriate keywords for us to use correctly in our content to organically improve our SEO positioning. This is imperative for every content strategy if you want users to find you on search engines.
2. Content calendar: A content calendar is key for ensuring your strategy makes sense. It provides value; it lets you think long-term and optimize your resources, help create ideas, and more. In a content calendar, you should include the date of publication, author, post topic, keyword, the tags to use/take into consideration, and so on.
3. Social posting: Writing an article and not promoting it on social media is a mistake. It’s not spamming but instead planning out what you are going to publish and when on every social media platform with the copies best suited for each one, all while having the ideal number of characters, links, hashtags, and more.
You should also consider:
- What your audience is like.
- What topics you’re going to talk about.
- What tone you’re going to use.
- How frequently you’re going to publish.
DIGITAL STRATEGIES AND TACTICS
Based on our objectives (attraction, conversion, and loyalty), we’ll start to carry out different strategies: email marketing campaigns, social media, CRM, web optimization, SEO strategies, Paid Media advertising, etc.
Today, considering that the number of channels to manage is multiplying and the amount of information we get about our customers is increasing, it’s critical we use Marketing Automation tools that let you automate your marketing campaigns.
Thanks to these tactics, you’ll be able to create workflows that will allow you to create hundreds of campaigns with mere clicks. You’ll be able to personalize messages based on your buyer persona, increasing your chances for success; not only that, you’ll be able to take them, depending on their interactions with the brand, towards the moment of purchase.
Technology has turned into a fundamental tool for implementing digital strategies, making it critical for you to learn to get the most out of it.
MEASURING RESULTS AND KPI
The work doesn’t stop after you’ve designed and implemented your digital marketing strategy. The next step is one of the most important: analyzing the results. Analytics has turned into a critical pillar for successfully optimizing digital marketing performance and spending.
We have to measure every action using KPIs to figure out if we earned the ROI we expected. Measuring the effectiveness of the strategies and activities we implemented in our digital marketing will help us correct what doesn’t work to achieve the goals we set.
Make sure you have an effective real-time data visualization system. The digital world evolves rapidly, so you need to be on the lookout at all times to identify opportunities and room for improvement in an instant.
Keep these steps in mind when creating your digital marketing plan and don’t leave anything to chance; it’s your greatest enemy if you’re looking to position yourself and boost your presence in the digital space.
Likewise, keep in mind that technology can turn into your greatest ally to create personalized, automated, and ultimately, successfully marketing campaigns. As the task gets complicated, the new tools out there let you simplify your work and boost your performance.
CONCLUSION
That’s the scoop on digital marketing. As you can see, the internet is, by far, not the only place for marketers to gather success, even today.
Of course, no one can afford to miss out on the opportunities of the web and, eventually, every marketer will have to master online marketing.
But, employing a few of these offline marketing tactics can help you to not put all of your eggs into one basket and diversify your lead generation beyond social media, content marketing and the like.
Plus the offline and online world is colliding. Traditional devices such as fridges, ovens and even billboards will all be modernized to leverage digital media.
Keep these steps in mind when creating your digital marketing plan and don’t leave anything to chance; it’s your greatest enemy if you’re looking to position yourself and boost your presence in the digital space.
Likewise, keep in mind that technology can turn into your greatest ally to create personalized, automated, and ultimately, successfully marketing campaigns. As the task gets complicated, the new tools out there let you simplify your work and boost your performance.
Here’s the breakdown of digital marketing again:
ONLINE MARKETING
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Content marketing
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
Affiliate marketing
Email marketing
OFFLINE MARKETING
Enhanced offline marketing
Electronic billboards
Digital product demos
Digital product samples
Radio marketing
Radio commercials
Show sponsoring
TV marketing
TV commercials
Tele-shopping
Super Bowl commercials
Phone marketing
Cold calling
Text message marketing
QR codes
I hope this guide expanded your view a bit and showed you that digital marketing is more than Facebook ads and social media blasts!
