Digital Marketing for Your Business in 5 easy steps
Digital Marketing in today’s technological society is a must. Put simply, Digital Marketing is selling, promoting and marketing your product or service online. It uses tools such as SEO/SEM, search marketing, social media marketing and content marketing to attract, monetize, and engage customers. Done properly, a digital marketing strategy can turn prospects to leads, leads to customers and customers to promoters.
Step 1: Your Business
“Situation analysis” is the first step of your digital marketing strategy. This is your opportunity to evaluate yourself, your business and your industry. In effect, you are asking “Where am I now?”
The SWOT method is one of the most efficient ways to answer this question. Analyze your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Ask yourself, “What is working? What are the buying patterns/behaviors of your existing customers? Are they coming back, buying more, generating buzz? What does your industry sector look like? What are the trends in your target market? Who are your competitors?” Questions like these are invaluable to understanding what your digital marketing strategy should look like.
Step 2: Your Customer
The next step is understanding your customer. In this step you create a 3D profile of your target audience. You will create different profiles for each client. For example, Emerge Marketing Strategies might have a separate customer profile for home-based business owners, small business owners, corporate clients, etc. In creating these personas, you would of course include their demographics: age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, education, political preferences, etc.
Additionally, you’ll want to consider their experience level; products they ordinarily buy; where they get their information- newspapers, news stations, books, magazines, etc. Do they have any niche interests?
You’ll want to know where they network: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, etc. What are their goals and values? How can your product or service help them reach their goals? Why would they pass on your product or service? The creation of a customer profile is essential to answering the question, “Where do I go from here?”
Step 3: Your Goals
Now that you know your business and your customer, you are ready to start your digital marketing campaign. Once again, this is a multi-step process. It is a good idea to keep in mind that all digital marketing strategies are a process, not a single event. The ultimate goal of your digital marketing strategy is optimizing your campaign for the best results. Emerge Marketing Strategies can help you decide whether your DMS needs small tweaks, large pivots, or something in between. This depends largely on the goals of your campaign, and like all goals- your digital marketing campaign goals need to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timed.
There are 3 main types of digital marketing campaigns: acquisition, monetization, and engagement. The specific goal of an acquisition campaign is to raise awareness of solutions you provide. A monetization campaign has the goal of generating revenue from existing customers- enticing them to buy more and to buy again. It is aimed at those who already know and like your business. Finally, there are engagement campaigns. They provide a value service to the customer and a call to action, such as subscribing to your website, or liking/commenting on your social media. This is the step to ask and evaluate, “Where do I want to be?”
Step 4: Your Channels
The next step in your journey is deciding which channel will most effectively help you reach your goal. There is the SEO/SEM channel. SEO and SEM are two different branches of digital marketing aimed at increasing your search engine ranking. SEO focuses primarily on key words and other ways of optimizing your web page to appear in search engine results, including inbound links and outbound links. SEM also seeks to increase search engine ranking but uses several routes to do so, including SEO and PPC (pay per click) advertising. In an SEM campaign, buyers are targeted within search engines as they search for solutions through specific key words.
Another channel is content marketing- which is digital marketing that offers a value to your customer: such as blogs, videos, podcasts, eBooks, newsletters and more. Social Media marketing can find customers and build customer loyalty through the various social media platforms- such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn or others.
Targeted email marketing is another channel for marketing to specific customer profiles. It may use copywriting techniques to discover the best language to describe offers in your emails and ads. Paid traffic is another option for your digital marketing campaign. It involves determining which ad platforms you should buy traffic and how to target those advertisements. Your digital marketing campaign answers the question: “How do I get where I want to be?”
Step 5: Your Results
The final step in your DMS is to track, analyze, and measure your results. What were your Key Performance Indicators for your campaigns? What was your Return on Investment? Which campaigns were most effective? This is the chance to ask yourself, “Did I get where I wanted to be? Why or why not?”
Whether your business is growing in Sacramento, Roseville, Rocklin or beyond, Emerge Marketing Strategies can assist you every step of the way.
