DIY Digital Marketing Strategy – Part 2

Category : BlogByte Online Marketing

In my previous post, 7 practical steps towards a digital marketing strategy, we explored 3 actionable prerequisites towards a digital presence. Before we move on to the next few steps, it’s time to look at important conceptual bedrocks of digital marketing strategy.

Key Performance Indicators & Customer Personas

You should be able to derive quantifiable performance indicators, from your business goals, so you can measure the progress of your marketing activities. Sales targets, number of email leads collected, number of conversions, are examples of KPI’s that allow you to gauge the success of your campaigns.

Refer to this post by digital marketing & analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, on how to create measurement models for your digital marketing strategy.

Once you have defined your KPI’s, identify the type of customers most likely to help you achieve those KPI’s. Knowing the character traits and motivations of your customer makes it so much easier to focus various digital marketing assets, towards effective customer acquisition and retention.

e.g: If you’re selling your original paintings of flowers, one ideal customer is probably a home owner (more likely to invest in original paintings), university educated (higher income bracket), female (allow me to indulge in stereotypes to make a point) and older (to account for time required to accumulate education and earnings).

Dig deeper to define other personal preferences like love for travel (which often comes with stable incomes and asset buildup), fine dining, reading, classical music, etc.

Try to put together, 3-4 such ‘profiles’, of customers most likely to need/desire, afford and buy your products or services. These profiles help create content like blog posts, that your target audience can relate to.

It’s a good idea to refer to Heidi Cohen’s well written post on creating marketing personas.

With the added perspective that comes from creating customer personas, why not revisit step 1(keyword research)? A university professor and a high school student may have strikingly different ways of using search phrases, especially long tail ones.

With that done, let’s pick up from where I left off in the previous post…

4) Content Marketing

As discussed in the earlier post, it is no longer sufficient to have static content like a 4-5 page site or even a multi-product catalog, if you expect customers (and search engines) to find your site relevant.

You need to build up interest for your site, over time. How?

By using inbound marketing tactics to give your customers reasons to return to your digital platforms.

An effective way of doing this is by consistently creating article posts, videos, photographs, ebooks, illustrations, audio podcasts; anything aligned to your product/services that target visitors will find helpful, relevant, informative & interesting.

Quality content can also help you retain customers, when you provide value-adds like educating them on complementary products.

The three C’s that define your content marketing strategy are

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5) Social Media Marketing

Creation, curation and conversation are the foundations of any social networking activity too. It often takes time to build quality audience for your own site. Social networks offer the advantage of having a built-in audience for your message (and potentially, your site). It’s also easier to setup and manage social profiles compared to a self-hosted blog or site.

‘Conversation’ enabling features are the most useful part of social networking. To be effective on most social networks, participate in conversations instead of using them as a soapbox to pimp product and services.

Be interested in others and be interesting yourself. Your defined customer persona is who you are primarily trying to connect with.

Maybe you have to start building audiences from scratch because your friends and family may not be your target audiences. The advantage then, is that you have a blank canvas to build a product/service centric audience
e.g.: A business Facebook page.

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6) Email Marketing

While we have all seen those ‘email is dead’ statements, email is still an important, direct connection to customers. Some demographics like boomers, may still prefer email over other forms of digital communication.

Capturing email id’s of current and potential customers via your digital assets should be an important tactic in your digital marketing strategy.

When your targeting and content marketing is accurate, you will not have trouble with voluntary subscriptions to your email list.

Services like mailchimp and aweber facilitate email collection and campaign executions. They also provide tools that help measure the effectiveness of email campaigns including conversion rates, open rates and clicks throughs. Information that allow you to segment your audience according to their interest level.

e.g.: Someone who clicks on a link in an email campaign is probably further along the conversion funnel than someone who opened the email but did not click any links. The former may convert to a client if targeted again with a ‘sweeter’ deal.

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7) Digital advertising

While growing a digital presence organically is ideal, it is sometimes necessary to gain traction quickly. A short term promotion is one such reason.

Digital ads can help you draw considerable attention to your business, relatively fast. Ideally, digital advertising should be another tactic in your digital marketing strategy arsenal. Once your ads bring visitors, an extended digital presence should help connect with them and convert these visitors to customers.

Most digital platforms, including social networks, now allow you to buy advertisement space to target their users. The increased visibility boost you can achieve, from such ads, can be quite significant to your KPI.

Depending on your strategy, you can also phase out advertising (cpc/cpm) campaigns while phasing in your inbound marketing (social, content etc) strategy. Earlier, I wrote a related guest post on using google analytics to develop a social media strategy.

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Summary:

Your digital marketing has to be aligned with your business goals. You can implement and execute a digital marketing strategy yourself, most of the tools are easily accessible. All you need to do is to practice and learn.

Strategize, implement, measure, segment and measure again. Adapt.

There is no free lunch, digital marketing can be very time consuming. It can be cost-effective allocation of resources, to bring in specialists to help implement and execute an effective digital marketing strategy.

If you need help, contact us for a free customized digital marketing strategy. We’re happy to help you get started.

I know it was a long read but there’s so much more to say. I’ll be putting together an extended 🙂 version, with checklists, more tips and tools suggestions, for a DIY digital marketing strategy. Subscribe to the newsletter and we’ll send you an email on when and how to download that free digital marketing ebook.

I help my clients with digital strategies that grow their business. My digital marketing campaigns leverage appropriate technology choices, targeted communication methodologies and metrics driven marketing tactics (SEO, SEM, Social media outreach etc) to amplify brand/product messages, build brand/product-centric communities, establish partner relations and accelerate customer acquisition. For more visit: Digital Marketing Consultant, Ottawa, Canada.