Welcome to 2021, the year in which your digital marketing strategy needs to ramp up!
As we mentioned in our final article of last year, the Covid-19 pandemic will continue to have an impact on consumer behaviour, forcing more and more consumers online to find information, buy goods or hire services.
And whilst the pandemic may begin to recede as vaccinations start to take place, it’s highly likely that the patterns and trends that are growing each day will continue to do so even once the world normalises again.
And for you, that means setting in place strategies and plans now so that you’re ahead or at least on the curve.
A quick recap of the key talking points from our last article titled “2021: A Year to Ramp up Your Digital Marketing Strategy”:
#1 You have to set goals before you do anything else
#2 Know who your customer is, where they are and how to communicate with them
#3 How good is your digital brand home? Will your customers be enticed to get in touch or make that purchase?
#4 Can you see and track your total sales or communication funnel?
#5 Kickstart the right cycle: budget, implement, measure, refine, repeat
Over the coming weeks we’ll focus on these key aspects of digital marketing, giving you in-depth guidance on how to implement each of these for maximum impact.
#1 Goal Setting is the number one priority
There is little or no point in embarking on a digital marketing campaign without having an idea of exactly what it is you want to achieve. So, before you do anything, ask yourself:
- Who am I trying to reach?
- Where are they?
- How do I reach them?
- What am I asking them to do?
- How am I facilitating that transaction?
- What impact will that transaction have on my bottom line?
- What impact do I want that transaction to have on my bottom line?
- How do I know what’s working, and what’s not working?
If you’re able to answer each of the questions above, you should end up with a pretty clear and defined set of goals for your campaign. So, what is the best way to get the information that allows you to answer each of the above?
Who am I trying to reach? This is a fairly simple one to answer – you’ll know your target audience in broad terms.
Where are they? And How do I reach them? For these questions there are a number of great online tools that can really help you, and many of them are free to use. For example, Facebook and Google Ads both have Audience Insights tools that give you loads of data on your target audience.
You’ll know more or less who you are trying to attract, but these tools will help you refine to a highly-granular level so that you don’t waste money and time serving ads to the wrong people. You’ll be able to identify and target your audience by location, age, devices, recent purchase intent, gender, parental status, employment title and more.
What am I asking them to do? And How am I facilitating that transaction? The responsibility for answering these questions comes back to you – you’ll need to be clear on what your goal is for the campaign – are you asking someone to buy something? Do you want them to send you an enquiry? Are you building your brand awareness and asking people to Like, Share or Comment on your piece of information?
Once you know what you want to achieve, you’ll need to put together creative marketing materials – whether text, images or video, or a combination of these – that let’s your target audience know immediately what you’re expecting them to do.
You’ll also need to be clear on where you’re sending your visitor – are you taking them to your website home page? If so, does your home page have the right entry points to guide a user to complete the goal? Are you sending them to an enquiry form? Is the form clear and easy to complete? Are you sending them to a phone number? Who is answering the call and is the information they have to hand clear for the customer?
What impact do I want the transaction to have on my bottom line? This is not only applicable to e-commerce campaigns – building a database of new customers will also impact on bottom line over the course of time, if that’s what your campaign goal is.
Building a new audience, making direct sales or building your brand should all ultimately add value to your revenue over time – if you know what your target is, be that £20 000 in sales, 500 new email contacts or increasing engagement by a target percentage, you’ll be able to set goals and see whether you’re achieving them or not.
How do I know what’s working, and what’s not? Well, simply put if you have clear goals and targets you’ll be able to see whether your campaign is reaching, over-achieving or falling short of those goals.
But measurement is the key – from Google Analytics and Ads Insights to Facebook Insights and more, the tools are there for you to track every step in the funnel. You should, over the course of time, be able to see:
- where customers are coming from
- where customers are coming from
- what they’re doing when they land on your goal page
- whether or not they’re completing the goal
- where they’re falling off if they don’t complete the goal
- what the value of the transaction is if they do complete the goal
Ultimately, getting your digital marketing campaign off to a good start takes a combination of good tools, excellent planning, in-depth knowledge of your audience and goals, and a great deal of implementing, testing, measuring, refining and re-implementing.
If you’d like to find out more about digital marketing and need some help or guidance on setting up campaigns that really work, contact Realnet today on 01223 550800 or info@realnet.co.uk.