Digital Marketing Quick Tips

 Digital marketing is simply all the things you do through various online channels that help grow your business. That can mean a bunch of different things like:

• Attracting more visitors to your website
• Filling your pipeline with a steady flow of leads
• Generating more sales through better quality leads
• Driving repeat purchases from existing customers

All of these can be accomplished in many different ways, and the digital marketing strategy you choose will determine how successful you are.

Before starting any digital marketing you have to ask yourself, “What am I trying to accomplish?”

Want to attract more visitors to your website? You could:

• Use search engine optimization (SEO) to drive more free, organic traffic
• Set up a posting schedule on social media providing great content and get more people visiting your site
• Engage your existing customers with emails and get them visiting your site more often.

Looking for more leads? You could:

• Create valuable content and give it away for free in exchange for an email address
• Set up a sales funnel that offers a free quote in exchange for their phone number or contact information
• Launch a Google AdWords campaign with the goal of getting leads to schedule a call

Wants more sales? You could:

• Use SEO to rank your webpage above a competitor’s alternative offer
• Set up a re-marketing campaign that targets your website visitors who didn’t make a purchase
• Create an abandoned cart email that reminds users to complete their purchase

This all sounds simple but these are all difficult things to achieve. They take knowledge, skill and resources to accomplish and many businesses lack the time to properly execute a strategy.

Digital marketing is about generating growth, so you have to think which strategy is going to do that for your business.

How to Improve Revenue Generating Activities in a Digital-First World

 As on-site demos, roadshows, and conferences grinded to a halt in early 2020, marketing and sales departments lost the heavily relied upon personal interactions that built relationships and drove deals.

In order to maintain proper communication and engagement with customers, digital is now the new norm.

Digital Marketing Transformed

Digital marketing must become a center of knowledge and learning for customers in order to replace in-person meetings. Requiring the re-allocation of budget and resources to execute a digital first strategy necessary to succeed in today’s environment.

A constant flow of valuable content is the best way to keep your audience and customers engaged. One key benefit to digital marketing is the low cost of participation for you audience. Therefore, if you don’t have an audience, it’s because you aren’t providing enough value.

Going Digital Across the Entire Customer Journey

Not only marketing, but a company’s entire digital presence must work to replace the personalized experience that has been lost. There will no doubt be gaps, but now more than ever companies must engage with their audience online through the entire customer lifecycle.

Being everywhere your buyers are means having a strong digital presence that effectively communicates your value proposition and makes it easy for customers to do business with you.

Examining different content delivery mechanisms, personalizing the content experience, mapping out the customer journey are all ways to improve your revenue generating activities in a digital first world.

The New Digital First Team

In order to properly pivot, businesses need a digital team to take center stage and develop a strategy for digital transformation. Not only marketing, but all revenue generating activities must see the transition to a digital first customer experience.

The Difference between Google & Facebook Advertising

 While there are many places online to market, most digital advertisers focus on just two: Google and Facebook

• They have the largest audiences
• They offer the best targeting capabilities
  
• They’ve developed the most robust features for advertisers

But choosing which platform is best for your company requires you to first understand the fundamental difference between them.

Google is intent-focused

Google offers advertisers many different ways to target and display their advertising, but its main one is search ads.

Those are the ones that appear on the top of the search results.

In general, advertisers “bid” on certain keywords (a.k.a the phrases they think people are searching for) to show their ad in the search results.

Google assumes that people who search for a certain term (keyword) have a specific intent at that moment in time.

This presents you, the advertiser, with the perfect opportunity to put your product or message in front of people who are looking to take a certain action if your search result matches their intent.

Think of how different that is from TV advertising, where you get interrupted by an ad during pauses of your favorite show.

Traditional ads use interruptions, while search ads (if done correctly) offer value to the specific intent of the searcher.

Facebook is interest-focused

Facebook, on the other hand, uses a different approach.

They have gathered tons of data on each of their users: what they like, who they know, where they’ve been, what they are interested in, and even what they do in websites other than Facebook.

They may not know what you’re looking for now. But they can triangulate your demographic and psychographic data, and make a good guess about what you might be interested in…

… yeah, let’s be honest. It’s a little creepy. But it’s an insanely powerful tool when it comes to advertising. Facebook uses that data to show highly relevant ads to its users.

Allowing you, the marketer to target specific audiences within Facebook that have shown interest in your product or service.

This is also drastically different from traditional ads.

With TV ads, you launch ads to a massive audience hoping a portion of them might be interested in your product.

With Facebook Ads, you are carefully choosing to show your ads to people who, based on a ton of data, are very likely to be interested in your product.

That’s why Facebook ads are based on interests.

Improve your Data Driven Marketing Plan

 Data-driven marketing is about much more than just metrics and retargeting. It’s about designing a seamless experience that drives sales by making it easier on your customers to do business with you.

It can improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Through data-driven strategies, you can refine your marketing into ultra-personalized campaigns that have a direct impact on maximizing sales, deal size and profits in B2B and B2C channels.

In B2B companies, data-driven marketing is incredibly effective as more and more customers are starting to demand personalized experiences that match their needs. This could be as simple as switching your marketing from email blasts to customized, segmented email campaigns.

In addition to increasing sales, data-driven marketing can also help you understand what customers are looking for and which strategies are most effective. Giving you the insight needed to make informed decisions about the future of your marketing.

It can help you better understand the buyer’s journey.

Connecting your ecommerce and marketing to the proper analytics and CRM system can help you determine what customers do before they buy.

Knowing how your customers think and the path they take to making a purchase will help you determine where your buyers are online and how to get your message in front of them.

It can help you increase earnings

When you sell online and internet sales make up a large portion of revenue, marketing analytics become vital to company performance.

Personalized content and experiences made possible by data analysis allow you to keep marketing even after an opportunity is opened or a lea
d is handed off, increasing each customers lifetime value.

What is content marketing?

Most of the time when you hear someone say they’re going to invest in content marketing, what they usually mean is they will start a blog and try to post regularly.

Although that can be part of your content marketing strategy, a blog itself is not content marketing.

In the past, content and advertising were completely separate. Content creators created consumable content for their audience and advertisers, well… advertised.

In today’s digital age, the content is the advertising. It’s the input for every campaign that’s woven into every digital marketing channel and strategy.

It’s a highly strategic skill that every digital marketer should hone, even if they don’t plan on specializing in content marketing.

Today, content is king, because consumers are no longer wooed by flashy ads and impressive designs. They want value and they want it upfront.

This is why content marketing is quickly becoming the new norm. By providing your audience a continuous flow of valuable content for free, you position your brand as an authority and set the foundation for future deals.

To put it bluntly, advertisers are looking for the quick buck (which is sometimes what a business needs) while content marketers focus on building brand and long-term success.

Learn More about Content Marketing 

How to build a Marketing Funnel

Understanding the funnel is important. If your website converts at 3%, it means that 97% of the people who visit your website aren’t buying.

On top of that, new users convert at half the rate of returning visitors. What this means is that you shouldn't expect people to convert the very first time they see your brand or visit your website. Unless your product is an impulse buy, it’s just not going to happen.

That’s why you need to understand the concept of the top and bottom of the funnel.

As you attract people to your brand, you’ll want to walk them through a journey/story. This story looks a little like this.

You need to capture attention, show value, then push for the conversion.

The goal at the top of the funnels (prospecting or cold traffic) is to get someone to engage, click, or make a micro commitment. Optimize these campaigns to share ratio, Cost Per Lead (CPL), CTR and CPC.

The bottom of the funnels (remarketing or hot traffic) aims to drive the conversion and ROI. Optimize these to the conversion and focus on CPA and ROAS.

Make sure to keep these best practices in mind while building out your funnel, or contact the experts at iRevOps 360!