Your digital marketing strategy should first and foremost strive for results. Whether this is sales, leads, donations, reach etc… always have a way of measuring success. That’s one of the greatest aspects of marketing in the digital age, the ability to track and test. Another great reason to use digital techniques is that they work, and they’re clever. Whilst we work on digital campaigns every day, we come across frequent gaps and elements missing from company’s strategies that are often relatively easy to fix.
I’ll try and outline some of the best 5 ways to super charge your digital campaigns. Here, I’ll try to avoid super generic and unhelpful advice like ‘great content’ or ‘use more video’ or ‘get more engagement’. WELL YEAH, OBVIOUSLY 🙄. So let’s get started…
Email automation flows
Email automation is very cool – email marketing software has continued to make significant improvements over the past few years to remain relevant . Automation flows can work intuitively and make decisions for you based on how your contacts interact with your marketing. You can create content flows where emails get pinged out to contacts over time, and then tailored emails are pushed out to users who click certain links on those emails or visit specific blogs on your website. You can create endless spider webs of automation that effectively create a robot email sales person.
Still don’t get it? Here’s an example:
Once someone buys a product on your website, they get a thank you email. This is either a thank you for a first time purchase or thank you for a repeat purchase, based on the amount of products the user has previously bought.
First time buyers then get an email with content heavily featuring upselling, repeat buyers now get future content that is centred around referring new customers using a referral scheme. Email specific software such as Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp can handle automation flows like this, but also in particular CRMs like Hubspot, Active Campaign and Pipedrive. If you ever have integration issues with connecting up specific software, I’d highly recommend Zapier. Brill at filling in the gaps.
Retargeting social ads
Social media advertising has been a cornerstone of many marketing strategies for at least 5 years now, and for many businesses even longer. A powerful area of the platform has been retargeting ads, or ads that ‘follow you around the internet’. I get that some people will hate this by principal, but for marketeers they offer a great way of highlighting your products and services to genuinely interested customers, hopefully getting people to make a sale/enquiry after showing initial interest. Basically after you’ve visited a website you’re then tracked via a cookie (you can do this with Google ads as well) and then ‘hey presto’ you’re seeing that exact product or service on social media.
Retargeting ads offer great value for money, and are often the highest performing ads when it comes to paid social. Especially when combined with Google Ads/social media awareness campaigns to do the harder heavily lifting targeting work, retargeting ads are warming up those leads for you. If you’re not currently running social retargeting ads I’d recommend giving them a go, to at least test the technology to see if they work. If you’re already a seasoned retargeter then I’d recommend updating the creative as frequently as humanly possible, to keep those leads interested.
Abandoned cart marketing
Specially for E-Commerce businesses this one. Getting those people who reached the checkout and then, rather rudely, left your website, to come back and make the sale is a potential gold mine. Think about it, these are the potential customers who are your warmest leads. They were going to buy but then they back tracked. Maybe the cost of shipping was too expensive? Likely. Maybe they realised they could get the product for cheaper elsewhere? Possibly. Maybe their 3 year old shut down the browser window whilst drawing a pretty picture on paint? Unlikely, but not in my case.
We can now target these people specifically with social/Google display ads or, if you managed to grab their email, send them an email asking for them to complete their purchase – or offering an incentive to do so, this often helps you to get that purchase over the line and turn them into a customer.
Chat bots – Website and social
If you’ve used online chat before, then you’ve probably chatted to a bot before talking to an actual person. They can help funnel the query to ensure it goes to the right team, similar to a ‘Press 1 for sales, press 2 for support… etc’ pre-recorded message when you call a large business. The great thing about chat bots, is that you can use them to save you a hell of a lot of time.
For example, if you’re a restaurant and you constantly have people messaging your Facebook page to ask if you’re open, you can set an autoresponder with your opening times. Looking to nurture leads a little better on your website? Lots of the web chat software comes with the ability to automatically pop up with a message depending on what page they’re viewing, if they’ve visited the site before or if their mouse hovers out of the window. Pretty cool eh?
This software is often free, but some providers offer some of these awesome features for a relatively small monthly fee. We’d recommend Tidio, LiveChat and Zendesk as great places to start.
Focus on one area of marketing, and make it work
With it comes to marketing, there’s a tendency to cover as many bases as possible in an attempt to either tick boxes or massage egos. In an ideal situation you’d give all marketing channels hours and days of time per month and endless budgets to make them work, but sometimes this isn’t possible. You don’t have infinite time or money, so sometimes it’s good to strip it back to what works.
Sounds simple doesn’t it? But sometimes it’s not super easy to let go of those marketing ideas you had.
Firstly, you need to make an educated guess on which platform is the best route to market. Sell products to the general public? Probably best to try and master Facebook/Insta ads. Looking at getting leads for your insurance firm? Make sure you’re top of the search rankings for your desired location and target markets.
Now, dedicate time and money in getting this marketing platform to work for you. Give yourself realistic time frames. 3-6 months is a reasonable time to review and see how well it has performed. Have you gained loads of sales or enquiries? Time to up the budget, spend more time and make some more money. Spent a load of money and you’re 6 months in, still no results? Probably time to swallow that pride and move on to something different.
The most important point to take away here, is to spend the most time and money on the marketing platform that puts your products or services in front of your ideal customer. Whether that’s using a multi pronged approach, or simple whacking a load of money of Facebook ads, it doesn’t matter – as long as you’re reaching out to that target market!
So, here’s some stuff to be beavering away at over the coming months. Need any more help or support, drop me a line on our live chat😉.
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