Getting people from the online cloud to your homepage to buying your product is not accomplished with random online marketing activities. You have more control over this than you think as long as you plan, act and measure. By paying attention to your marketing strategy—laying down the path and narrowing down your focus—you will be able to lead potential customers to your offerings and keep you steps ahead of your competition.
Set your Objectives and Goals
Before putting your strategy into action, establishing a point of focus is key. A goal is the first step towards success because it sets parameters for you to measure. A more specific objective will give you an idea of your mission, or what you wish to achieve, as well as a gauge for progress, whether it involves tracking conversions or simply monitoring new traffic.
Define your Ideal Customer
A digital marketing campaign benefits from narrowing the audience down to your ideal customers through research. By surveying, interviewing, and receiving feedback from people you want to reach, you ensure that you create an accurate buyer persona you can then target. To design the right buyer persona, consider quantitative or empirical data, such as age, income level, language, and location, as well as more qualitative data from customers, like their personal goals and motivations, general interests, and issues they are trying to solve.
Evaluate your Existing Assets
While thinking towards your future customers, don’t forget the marketing assets you already have. This consists of the media or channels you already own; consider, for instance, your online presence on websites, blogs, and social media. If you have content spreading through word-of-mouth or through exposure to other sites or networks, this earned media will also help market your services. Are you paying to garner attention through advertising, Google AdWords, and other means for spreading information about your services? How are they performing?
Review your past and existing digital marketing campaigns. What’s working, what’s not? Factor them into your new digital marketing strategy.
Also, assess your digital marketing tools. What are the ones that are more useful than others? Can a particular set of tools do the job without the others? If yes, retire the tools you don’t need.
Set Targets and Key Performance Metrics
The more specific the key performance indicators are, the easier it will be to track and measure your progress. And in case of targets not being met—it’s easy to modify your strategy because you know what didn’t perform. Pay attention to how well previous marketing strategies worked to establish realistic expectations—use them as benchmarks.
Have a Content Plan
Once you have an idea of your goals, buyer persona, and how you will evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing, outline a content creation plan that aligns with your goals. A spreadsheet with information like Objectives, Themes, Format, Promotion and Distribution Tools, Priority Levels to show the importance of different steps are most crucial for your success. Also, include the workforce, budget, time estimates, and other resources required.
Create Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is when you give visitors valuable information or an offer about your product that is relevant to their goals. It’s an opportunity to collect more data about people considering your service as they progress through your funnel. Free downloads, special offers, and other promotions can help potential customers interact with you more as each of you exchange information.
Funnel in Leads
With a content plan in place and a solid website, it’s now easier to plot your customer’s course. Initially, customers will become aware of you as they seek information about your services, drawn by lead magnets or calls-to-action where they let you know more about themselves, such as their contact information. As they become more interested in your offering, give them more specific information that meets their criteria to help show individualized concern. This, in turn, will lead to further contact via email or scheduled appointments where even more information can be exchanged with an emphasis on your product’s benefits. Discussions on price, ways to process payment, and final details will lead to purchases and other potential sales.
Drive Traffic
Don’t expect traffic to come in automatically now that your funnel has been set up,. You have to make it happen. Do SEO for your website. Make sure your site has content that attracts traffic and keeps it. Blogs, articles, videos, and connections to reputable websites maintain interest and increase the number of visitors. Perform social media marketing. A social media presence tied to the site is also helpful. Consider doing AdWords PPC, social media ads, and remarketing to drive those visitors.
With these strategies in mind, you are preparing your website to generate more leads and conversions that you seek. Stay ahead of your competitors; plan, measure and act to achieve your goals for your business.
Philip Sinclair
The internet has spawned a set of so-called self-proclaimed internet gurus over the last decade, some good some bad and can often lead to blind alleys leading to wasted money and time, this has caused me to set up a clear and concise path for a business’s digital marketing efforts.
When setting up a website, what are the best platforms to use? There are the platforms that are billed as free, but is free really free? What doesn’t cost you in money could end up costing you in time and lost sales so it isn’t really free, is it? Software systems can often be confusing and there is huge learning curve, often leading to lost time.
A lot of small and local businesses struggle to understand the online world and how it can help their business with a few simple strategies and this is why we have set up this consultancy.
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