Digital marketing isn’t an optional part of your marketing mix, it’s absolutely central to it. But having digital marketing and having effective digital marketing can be wildly different things. Here Javan Bramhall from marketing agency Digital Glue helps you achieve the latter.
How can you use digital marketing to better effect in growing your business? Javan Bramhall from marketing agency Digital Glue provides some ground rules.
1. Put mobile centre stage
Mobile is now absolutely crucial to all your digital marketing efforts. Yes, there’s the obvious elements of making sure your website is mobile responsive (this is now one of Google’s first ranking parameters for your site), but perhaps more importantly, you need to think about making sure all of your digital marketing efforts think mobile first and desktop second. That means making content easier to engage with, images and videos clearly accessible, and choosing the channels to distribute your content which are mobile suitable.
2. Embrace video
I could probably repeat this tip another five times, because video content is becoming ever more important, in fact according to Cisco, video content will account for 69% of consumer web traffic during 2017. Put simply, you need to be creating videos that explain your products and services and capture your business. Video content creation costs have fallen dramatically, and don’t be scared to use ‘home shot’ videos to supplement professionally produced content. Video is naturally engaging and quickly explains concepts and ideas.
3. Be content confident
While video content is becoming more and more important, good digital marketing places all types of content at the heart of a successful strategy. Making your customer more educated and aware enables them to make purchasing decisions and engages them with your business and brand. Content also plays a vital role in Search Engine Optimisation, so you want high quality, engaging content across various forms and mediums. Your blog should drive traffic from a variety of social media channels, your video content can do the same, and can you place your content elsewhere online by providing this to other like-minded businesses and websites?
4. Call to action
When customers visit your website, what action do you want them to take? This might sound obvious, but you need to ensure that wherever your customer lands on your site and social media channels they can take action. That might be purchasing, calling or emailing but ensuring you have sign-up forms on your site so that people can share their data is vital to your digital success. This can be giving away content such as whitepapers or how-to guides for contact details, to signing up to events or newsletters. Whatever the exact call to action is, there has to be more than just ‘buy’ as your visitors will not always be in a position to do so.
5. Segment your data
Gathering customer information is one thing - actually using it can be another. Sending apt and really relevant information to customers and contacts means that not only are they more likely to take action, but they’re also less likely to switch off from your communications at all because when they do receive something, it’s of use to them. Segmentation possibilities are many and will depend on your audience, but at a base level consider segmenting your data by interest, location, customer vs. potential customers.
6. Get personal
Personalised email messages improve click-through rates on email marketing by an average of 14% and conversions by 10%. This simple statistic makes adding people’s name to your digital marketing a no brainer. In addition to basic personalisation, what else can you do? Can you collect your customer’s date of birth and send birthday greetings? If you’re running a business with well known connections, can you make note of a customer’s wedding anniversary dates or children’s birthdays? Personalisation works, but getting really personal, and using digital to help you do it, will build better relationships and longer term customers.
7. Retarget
Very few users who visit your website will purchase first time around. By using retargeting, you can continue to communicate with these customers after they’ve left your site. Retargeting works by using cookies on your website to track the product or service website visitors view. Once they leave your site, they will be shown the product or services again via ads on other websites they visit. This is a very effective way of boosting conversion rates by reminding customers of products and services they’ve shown interest in, but for whatever reason didn’t at the time purchase.
8. Use social advertising
While Pay Per Click(PPC) via Google and other search engines has been successful for many businesses, the targeting offered by social media has changed the PPC game. Depending on your customer base, effectively using social media advertising via. Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, can drive highly relevant traffic to your site. This allows you go beyond just where your customers are, but what they’re interested in, what they like and their job roles. This can be a cost-effective addition to your paid search efforts.
9. Picture this
In the print world, this might seem obvious, but using visual content throughout your digital marketing is vital. Visuals are often the hook that bring customers in. Whether that’s on your Web homepage, or throughout your social channels, creating effective and engaging visuals is crucial. Web users have become increasingly impatient and studies have shown that they decide whether to stay on a site within the first 10 seconds of visiting. Strong visuals will achieve this, reams of text will likely put most people off.
10. Set objectives and measure
Henry Ford is famously quoted as saying that 20% of his marketing worked, but he didn’t know which 20%. Henry Ford didn’t have digital! Everything listed above can be tracked and measured, you can measure the impact of changes to your website pages, your email marketing and your social media channels. When you’re investing in digital marketing, be clear about exactly what it is you want to achieve, and use the tools available to learn whether those objectives are being achieved.