Digital marketing should be playing an essential part in your business’s marketing, but there are several steps you need to take before starting your first campaign.
Make sure you’re making your digital marketing work for you by following these simple steps.
Set Your Goals
Before you start your marketing campaign, it’s essential to know what you want to achieve.
What is the purpose of your campaign? There are lots of reasons people run digital marketing campaigns, so you need to decide why you are running yours, some options include:
• Increasing brand awareness
• Generating leads
• Making sales
• Educating your audience
• Building an email list
Your ultimate purpose might be a mixture of these, but the important thing is that you set yourself goals you can work towards. The best goals are SMART goals, which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
When you’ve set your goals, you know what you’re working towards, and you can measure your level of success.
Narrow Down Your Target Market
The digital market takes an investment of resources, be that time, money, or both. You don’t want to waste those precious resources by reaching people who aren’t going to help you achieve your goals.
One of the critical aspects of any kind of marketing is making sure you reach the right people with your message. Digital marketing gives you great tools to do this, but you’ve got to understand what that target market looks like first.
Take Facebook adverts – you can reach 2.5 billion active monthly users, but just because you can (in theory) doesn’t mean you should. When each click costs you money, you want to be reaching the people who are likely to help you achieve your goals and miss out on the ones who aren’t.
Define Your Ideal Buying Persona
What does your ideal customer look like? If you can’t answer this question, then you’re going to find it hard to narrow down your target market.
See if you can come up with an ideal buying persona by asking yourself these questions:
• Who are they? Gender, age, etc
• What do they do? Occupation, type of company, industry
• What does a day in their life look like?
• What are their pain points? What challenges are they trying to overcome, and how can you help them?
• What are their goals? What do they value?
• Where do they get their information from?
• What do they look for in a business?
• What are their objections? What reasons are they most likely to have for not buying from you?
When you have a picture of what your ideal buyer looks like, then you can start figuring out how best to reach them.
Choose Your Mediums
Digital marketing offers so many ways of reaching your target audience, so it’s essential to find the best method that works for you.
Which platforms you use will largely depend on your goals, the niche you operate in, and what your ideal buying persona looks like. However, most campaigns will be a blend of some of the following methods:
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Influencer Marketing
Each medium will have its own advantages, but in general, the best campaigns find a way to pull many mediums together for optimal success.
The vital driving force behind this is your website. If you can use these different mediums to drive people to a website that converts on your goals, then you’re going to see a lot of success.
One of the substantial advantages of digital marketing is that you’ve got a considerable amount of data that can show you which mediums are most effective for you. With courses from colleges like Emerson College Online, you can learn to make the analytics work for you and find which mediums work best for your business.
Keyword Research
Even when you’ve figured out what mediums you’re going to use for your digital marketing, you’re still left with the question of how you’re going to reach your target audience.
One of the main ways you’re going to do this is through keywords, particularly for SEO, content marketing, and PPC. When you’re doing SEO or PPC, you want to be appearing in the search engine rankings for keywords that your target audience is searching; otherwise, it’s a waste of a click.
Using software like Moz and Google Keyword Planner, you can narrow down your keywords by finding out what people are searching for. These platforms give you essential information about how much search volume a keyword has, how competitive the search term is, and how much a PPC ad will cost.
Ideally, you want to find a balance between search terms that get a good number of searches without being too competitive. Keywords with huge volumes are great, but you’ve got to look at the businesses you will be competing with for these search terms – and often they’re not ones you can compete with.
Retargeting
It takes lots of touchpoints to create a qualified lead. Very rarely does someone see your ad and buy your product there and then. This means you’ve got to find ways of creating more touchpoints between you and your prospective customer.
Email marketing is an excellent way of doing this, as you can send people emails long after their first point of contact with you. Another great way of increasing your touchpoints with a potential customer is through retargeting ads.
People often put so much effort into creating that first click, and they forget that it takes more than just one interaction for someone to take the action they want them to take (buy a product, sign up to an email list). However, there are good options for retargeting, with Facebook, Google, and others offering advanced technology to track people who have visited your website, so you can retarget them with advertising.
If you’re retargeting the right people, then you can find that it makes a big difference to the success of your digital marketing campaign.
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