Perfect your digital marketing strategy by asking yourself these four simple questions.
It doesn’t matter whom you are marketing to – businesses or consumers – today’s buyers are interacting with your brand across multiple digital channels and devices. Plus, they have more expectations than any other buyer generation in history. Modern buyers want personalized, one-on-one conversations with brands at the right place and at the right time. In this reality, it is absolutely critical that your digital marketing strategy is optimized to build those relationships with customers.
Whether you are a fresh face to the industry or a seasoned marketing veteran, good is never good enough. You should constantly question campaign performance, researching and testing new ways to enhance your marketing strategy and exploring strategies to grow.
If you are unsure where to start your search for digital marketing strategy excellence, begin by asking yourself the following four questions.
1. What stage is your digital marketing strategy at?
It makes sense to take stock of where you are right now before deciding where you want to be. As a result, a full audit of your current marketing activities is a sensible first step.
A marketing audit will lay solid foundations for your strategic optimization, identifying weaknesses in your campaign that may have previously gone unnoticed. But it will do much more than just point out your shortcomings. It will help you see areas of your strategy that are working better than others, showing you where you’re getting the most return on your investment.
Based on this, you will have a clear picture of your current performance, from which to set key targets and metrics to ensure your marketing strategy is always moving forward.
2. Are you making the most of quality content?
Getting creative with current, engaging and authoritative content is key to building your online brand identity. As a result, well-written content needs a firm place in your greater digital marketing strategy.
To buy your products, subscribe to services, or even pick up the phone to speak with a representative of your company, your audience and potential customers need to feel they can trust you. Question is, how do you do this?
High-quality content needs to find a place at the center of your strategy. When used correctly and in conjunction with your other methods, content creation can be an impressive cohesive agent, bonding social media, email marketing and SEO together.
Producing high-quality content can also enable you to build a brand-loyal audience. In addition, it can boost organic site traffic, improve SEO rankings and bolster your on-site conversion rates.
Cutting corners, however, will not do you any favors. Seventy-six percent of businesses prioritize quality over quantity and for good reason. If what you are publishing is subpar, contains grammatical mistakes and is deemed irrelevant and off topic, do not be surprised when readers bypass the piece, which, in turn will adversely affect your site’s strength and rankings within search engines. Your audience is likely to deem poor content a reflection of your services, diminishing their trust in your brand.
3. How human are you on social media?
In a virtual world based on social norms, it is easy to cherry-pick parts of your business and craft a persona of yourself.
However, this is not always what audiences want to see. Business is won by developing real relationships and connecting with your audience. If you are using social media solely to pump out on-brand sales messages, you are doing it wrong.
Very few people want to be sold to directly on social media. They want to digest valuable content, share experiences and interact with people and brands they care about. Distorting a potential customer’s news feed with a hard-sell status is a one-way ticket to an unfollow on Twitter or Instagram.
If you can set yourself apart from the competition and share quality content, fulfilling your audience’s needs and answer relevant questions, you will win consumers’ attention and trust. The more attention you win, the more traffic you will drive to your site. The more traffic you drive to your site, the more end conversions you will see. Content marketing is a numbers game, and it pays to be on the right side of it.
4. Are you regularly reviewing your results?
If a campaign is producing results, leaving it to run in the background is not the answer. In digital marketing, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” doesn’t apply. Unless every relevant individual has bought into your service, your campaigns can always perform better.
If you cannot quantify the success you are seeing, revamping your ROI becomes a tough task. Plan, launch, review, test needs to become your mindset.
Decide what your key performance indicators (KPIs) will be and make sure they are an accurate reflection of the results you want to see from your business. For example, if you are developing a warm lead-nurture program, email sign-ups would make a strong KPI.
Track your performance against these KPIs. Follow your investment through the marketing process, from campaign launch to lead generation and work out your cost per lead (CPL).
By asking yourself these four questions and actioning your answers, not only will you discover your most profitable areas, you will work out which marketing channels warrant the most time and investment. From here on out, you can stop worrying about campaign costs and start focusing on campaign ROI.