Digital Marketing Strategies
Not every dollar spent on digital advertising has to produce a conversion, and your marketing strategy online shouldn’t aim for such an unrealistic goal. Most digital marketing strategies will “fail,” in the sense that the majority of people who cross paths with your company online, or even visit your website, will ever pay you a dime. Far too many advertisers have abandoned their digital strategies because they didn’t see immediate results – but targeting immediate results was the first mistake.
It can take weeks, months, even years to convert first time website or social media visitors into paying customers online. Sell instruments? Guitarists don’t buy new guitars often, but when they do they’re willing to spend a lot of money for what they want. Getting in front of a potential buyer early on in the buying stages through a strong digital marketing strategy will produce sales for years to come. Just because they aren’t ready to buy now, doesn’t mean that their click isn’t valuable for your long term digital marketing goals.
That’s not saying that every click has value though. Creating content or using hashtags just for traffic isn’t going to give you the results you’re after. In fact, it could hurt your efforts by taking up resources and diluting the audiences that you’re working so hard to build online. I always suggest that companies figure out how to create a digital marketing strategy that will work for your company should really start offline. Start by defining your target customer age, gender, shopping habits, etc – but realize that the customer may redefine these specifics for you.
Understanding Your Audience
Thorough tracking through Google Analytics and anecdotal business learnings have often helped to shift initial digital marketing strategies to allow the customer audience to define the true target market for companies online. I’ve seen clients who think that their customers convert immediately when reporting shows that they don’t purchase for an average of two weeks after their first interaction. Had companies assume that smartphone traffic wouldn’t convert on their current site, but produced more calls via mobile than ever before. Starting with a baseline is good, but being flexible to allow your customers find you is important as well.
This is why a full stack digital marketing strategy that includes brand awareness to grow your audience, website optimization to improve user experience, mobile marketing to target users on the go and a clear Lead Gen / Sales approach are all necessary to grow exponentially online. Nurturing your web leads through every step of the buying process is essential when planning for long term company growth and meeting those expectations.
Exploiting Their Every Weakness
That sounds a lot more evil than it actually is. With testing, tracking and optimization you can effectively target potential buyers online with precision like never before, more and more. And this works in both directions. Figure out that people under 25 years old rarely buy your product online, you can spend less in your PPC campaigns on this age group. Find out that a certain keyword produces a high goal conversion rate via paid, but doesn’t rank organically – create content to increase free traffic. Learning from Analytics reports and updating digital marketing strategies accordingly is key to continuing to improve your brand effectiveness online.
Articles below highlight a variety of different strategies I’m working on or have used for clients / personal projects. Please reach out with any strategic suggestions or questions.
