Digital marketing requires more work than simply sending out an email or posting on Facebook. Like a print campaign, you need to complete a marketing strategy before creating content. If you want to avoid a frustrating, unsuccessful digital marketing campaign, follow the steps below to create a simple, but effective, strategy.
1. Decide on your target audience
You can’t reach everyone with one message, so defining a target audience is a crucial first step to designing your digital marketing campaign. Research shows that different demographics are more or less likely to respond to certain words, images and messages. The more specific your target audience, the easier it is to create a campaign that will get results.
2. Identify with your audience
Brace yourself for a harsh truth; no matter how much time and money you spend on marketing, people don’t have listen to you or do business with you. It is 2013 and people can easily ignore your messages and do business with your competitor if they don’t like what you have to say. How do you avoid this? When creating your campaign, think like a consumer, not a marketer. Think about what the consumer would like from you and how often they would tolerate hearing from you.
3. Find your audience
Chances are you don’t have the time or the resources to blast your message from every social media site; once you define your target audience, it will be easy for you to select the social media sites that are worth your time. For example, if your audience is businesses and industry professionals, you might be more successful on LinkedIn than on Facebook.
4. Tell your audience what to do
Don’t leave people wanting more; give them a way to get more information. Getting that information should not require a phone call. A digital ad should be met with digital details. There are few things more frustrating than seeing digital content, wanting to learn more, and then being told to call someone. Imagine someone is researching your company after hours. They are very interested in taking some sort of action immediately, but the only way they can get more information from you is a phone call. This will result in an instant loss of consumers. The person is going to go to a competitor that has all the necessary information available online and allows the consumer to take action online.
5. Remind your audience of what to do
Follow up with your audience. Many people check their email or social media while multitasking and may not be available to take action right away. Chances are that even if they wanted to take action, they will forget, so remind them. Obviously, bombarding them with follow-ups is not the answer; instead, be strategic about the few follow-ups you send. Send out the follow-ups at various times of day– that way your audience won’t be receiving the message at the same place every time. The variety of times will mean that everyone has a chance to receive your call-to-action when they are available to act on it.
Digital marketing is so much more than meeting your daily quota of social media posts. In fact, those posts are likely to reflect negatively on your company if you haven’t followed the above steps to create a digital marketing strategy. People can spot a company without a marketing strategy from a mile away and tend to be annoyed that a company would waste their time with such poorly thought out posts. Make sure you get your marketing strategy in order so you can impress, not annoy, your audience.
Leave a Reply