Whether you are a seasoned or new business owner there are always opportunities to learn more about digital marketing. The right strategy can help build a solid and loyal customer base. Today, let’s look at some of the basics of digital marketing to help you get started or take your plan to the next level.
Step 1: Consider Your Customer
Always start with your customer. You must first understand your customer in order to create a digital marketing strategy that will appeal to them. Consider some of the following questions in order to get better acquainted with your clients:
- What are their pain points?
- What do they care about?
- What do they need from your company?
- What are they willing to pay?
- What are your customers online habits?
- Do you have a sense for the online habits of your customers?
- Where do they spend their time?
- What social media platforms do they frequent?
- Do they respond to email or text messages?
As you get to know your customers better, you must also consider if there are different segments of customers that may have different needs or behaviors.
Step 2: Consider Your Objectives
Once you better understand your customer, then the next step is to identify how your product or service can help and to create your digital marketing strategy around what you can provide to clients. As you continue on your journey, consider some of the following questions to better serve your customers and flesh out your marketing strategy further:
- What problem does your brand solve for customers?
- What are your objectives?
- Are you looking to find new customers?
- Are you looking to get existing customers to buy more or purchase larger pack sizes, etc.?
- Do you still need to build brand awareness?
Now that we better understand our customers and our corporate objectives, we must consider how to put everything together in order to best market to our audience on digital platforms.
Step 3: Consider Your Own Website
While there are many places to start with a digital marketing campaign, the best place is likely on your own website. With the answers to the above questions in mind, go through your website and identify if it meets the objectives of both your customers and your companies.
- Can your customers find what they are looking for?
- Is your brand messaging clear (who you are, what you do, why you are better)?
If not, it might be time for an update. Also, check out your site’s metrics. That might help identify areas for improvement. Also, don’t forget to consider how your site presents on mobile devices in all of this.
Next, consider if your company is searchable on the major search engines. If not, you might consider boosting SEO (search engine optimization) on your own website.
Step 4: Consider Your Online Presence
When we talk about creating an online presence outside of our own websites, the list of tools is long. From social media to email marketing, there are many opportunities to create a digital campaign across a wide range of mediums.
Some pro tips and ideas for digital marketing include:
- Buying keywords and doing search engine optimization are good places to start.
- Consider paid search advertising and retargeting to get you in front of more qualified prospects.
- Display ads on Google and social media platforms may also be helpful.
- Good, relevant content like blogs, newsletters, or user guides will help you begin to educate and inform folks about what you do.
- You may even consider buying lists of names that match the profile of those who are well-suited prospects and add them to your customer relationship management tool.
- Stories from users or examples of your product in action can be powerful if they are honest, genuine, and believable.
- Customer or third-party reviews are also valuable.
Of course, these are only a few ideas. The good thing about digital marketing is it does not have to be expensive, and you can scale as much or as little as you want. The challenge with digital marketing is it can be extremely time consuming, so you must be careful to determine if something is working or not.
The key here will be to test and learn to figure out what works best—and then adjust if something just isn’t working. Digital marketing can be very tedious, so watching the metrics in this stage will be key. If you have an e-commerce side of your business, it is easier to connect your digital spending to actual sales. If not, more visitors consuming more content should translate into more volume. Watch the numbers!
Some tools for digital marketing to consider include:
- Google Analytics for web metrics (it’s free!).
- An email service such as Mailchimp or even Substack.
- Canva is a free online graphic design platform for simple marketing materials.
There are so many ways to measure and learn if a digital marketing strategy is right for you. But remember, you must always start with your customer and your company objectives and build out your marketing strategy from there.
