If your a small business or marketer working with a digital agency, here are some of the important elements you and the team should be thinking.
Like any marketing initiative it’s about defining the vision, the key objectives, goals and target demographic of your business. With digital marketing you should also be thinking about user experience, the online engagement experience, and beyond goals (KPI’s), how do you plan on measuring success?
“Digital marketing is more than a tactic”
Once you have built your dream campaign make sure you are converting that engagement/traffic into leads or new business or whatever “widget” you sell.
For a business to succeed in today’s world, it is important to have a strong digital framework. Therefore, when a business is defining its marketing plan, it must create a solid digital strategy. Without a digital marketing strategy in place, new client acquisitions, brand visibility, engagement, and revenue generating opportunities will likely be hindered.
The seven most important elements of a digital campaign consist of strategy, mobile considerations, Media/SEM, organic search, social media marketing, content marketing, Engagement and analytics. All of these elements combined make up a cohesive digital marketing strategy. How you define these elements have a direct correlation on a successful campaign.
Digital and Engagement Strategy – in order to develop a coherent strategy you first need to understand the landscape of your market. You should be doing an eLandscape to find out what is happening in the space. Find the gaps and opportunities. What platforms seem to be popular with that demographic? What are your competitors doing? Create a content map with assets you have and get a good 10,000 ft view before diving in the weeds.
Mobile Considerations – 88% of consumer transactions are started on one device and finished on another. Multiscreen or multiple device transactions are far overlooked in marketing to your audience. PCs and laptops are becoming a thing of the past. In 2014, smartphone and tablet sales grossly outnumber pc sales. Learning what is possible with mobile marketing is crucial in today’s digital world. Every aspect of your digital marketing campaign should reflect mobile considerations. Whatever you develop should be “responsive design.”
Media – for this category I’m combining paid search with display media (banner) advertising. These two items go hand in hand as they both drive traffic in 2 important ways. While this can be a costly venture, it is a guaranteed and trackable tactic. Any search media firm should be able to provide the exact amount of traffic they can drive, the SOV (share of voice) and for how much $. While banners are more of an awareness tactic, in many cases they can drive qualified traffic. Facebook ads still do very well in several verticals.
Paid search is almost a necessity. “Build it and they will come” never worked. You need to drive traffic – qualified traffic. Based on the proper keywords and terms for your product, you will get traffic to the right part of your website along the user journey.
SEO – Not to be confuse with paid search, SEO is the “free one” – sort of. Consumers get wanted information online through a variety of methods, the most prominent being search engine results. The first part of getting your website in front of potential customers and clients is to correctly optimize your website. Optimizing your website correctly will help the search engines identify what your site is all about, and how it relates to what the user is looking for. Implementing a solid organic search strategy will increase your website’s visibility within the search engines and help drive more traffic to your website, increasing your potential for a variety of positive opportunities.
Social Media Marketing – Social media marketing is a great medium for a business to build and increase brand presence throughout the Internet. It also provides a very powerful tool to share information and distribute content about products and services. Utilizing a variety of social media platforms creates new opportunities to interact and connect with potential customers and clients.
Engaging Visitors and Email Marketing – I know we all get too much email and think it is waste sometimes, but emails are still an effective tactic. Remember, if your sending the right message, at the right time, to the right person – you have ht a homerun. This is where a strategic email marketing campaign helps to provide an ROI to your company. Marketing research shows that over 65% of consumers are inclined to make a purchase in association with a well planned email campaign. Remember, the majority of emails opened today are opened via mobile device so be sure that all email-marketing efforts are mobile-ready.
Analytics and Measuring – It may come as a surprise that analytics and measurement should be thought of up front but that is true. I must quote Avinash Kaushik as he is the king of analytics and measurement. And a damn funny guy! Per Avinash, a complete, and competent, Digital Marketing & Measurement Model will focus on three key areas of your marketing, and in each answer the cluster of questions provided:
- Acquisition.How are you anticipating acquiring traffic for your website / YT video / whatever else you are creating? Did you cover all three components of successful acquisition: Earned, Owned, Paid media? How would you prioritize each? Where are you spending most of your efforts?
- Behavior.What is the behavior you are expecting when people arrive? What pages should they see? What videos should they watch? Should they visit repeatedly? Are there certain actions they should take? What is unique about your effort that ties to an optimal experience for a customer?
- Outcomes.What outcomes signify value delivered to the business bottom-line? A download? A phone call to your call center? A qualified online lead? Signing up for email promotions? People buying your product / services ? A 95% task completion rate? A 10 point lift in brand perception?
“Simply put: Why are we undertaking this digital initiative?”
The bottom line is that a good digital campaign is more than a tactic and takes some careful planning. It requires a digital team with knowledge of your business and audience. Marketing has always been about going where the eyeballs are. I don’t think I have to tell you the statistics on smartphones, tablets and digital habits of your kids.