A whopping 66% of marketers have reported that their business’s credibility and trust has grown through digital marketing techniques. It’s no wonder then that more people are joining the digital marketing party. But, because it’s so competitive in the digital marketing world, if you aren’t pursuing the right tactics against your goals, you may be wasting your time.
Not sure where to start? Well, the first step is to define your digital marketing goals. From there you can drill down into each digital marketing channel to see which channels are right for your goals.
Identifying Your Digital Marketing Goals
The success of a marketing plan is directly tied to the goals you set for your digital marketing engagement. Often overlooked are the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your brand which could be:
KPIs give a clear direction to everyone on the team so they are all moving toward the same goals. Remember, these goals need to directly correlate to your larger business objectives or else the results you achieve won’t be beneficial.
Setting Clear Objectives
To avoid the digital marketing team going around in circles without any direction, you will want to create SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound) goals. These goals are a fantastic way to ensure your objectives are not just vague to-do items, but clearly defined goals that are being aimed for. For example, instead of setting a general goal of driving engagement on social media, set a goal that equates to an actual outcome, and something you can measure with Google Analytics. This could be button clicks, link clicks, likes, follows, clicks to landing pages for conversion, etc.
Defining Your Target Audience
The second step in setting digital marketing goals is to identify the target audience(s) for your marketing. Research your market to understand very specific demographics, interests, and behaviors of your audiences so that you can tailor your online marketing content to align perfectly. When you reach each of these audiences with the right message at the right time, engagement rates and conversions will soar.
Overview of Digital Marketing Channels
There are a range of potential digital marketing channels you could use and each one offers a different approach to efficiently reaching people. Comprehending these channels is essential to creating an effective digital marketing strategy suited to your company's goals.
Social Media Marketing
BEST FOR:
Social media marketing utilizes platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Twitter to engage with audiences, boost brand presence, and encourage interaction. With 72% of adults on at least one social media platform, your potential audience is large. Social media shines in establishing brands and for providing detailed analytics that offer insights for refining strategies and meeting social media goals. To enhance your social media endeavors develop a content schedule, actively interact with your followers, and make use of the platforms tracking tools to monitor performance.
Email Marketing
BEST FOR:
Email marketing is often an overlooked tactic but it continues to have a great average return on investment of $36 for each dollar invested. Email marketing is the process of sending personalized messages to targeted audiences to let them know about important offers or news. Email marketing success comes down to having a high- quality subscriber list that allows you to send offers to the right people at the right time. Many email platforms offer ways to help your team in these endeavors by offering data analysis, personalization and automated marketing campaigns.
There are a few potential downsides of email marketing that you should be aware of. Emails can easily be marked as spam, be unopened, or undelivered. It is also easy for users to unsubscribe from your emails if they feel they are getting too many or irrelevant messages. For this reason you want to pay close attention to analytics and list quality.
Content Marketing
BEST FOR:
Content marketing involves developing and sharing fresh content frequently to draw in and keep a specific audience engaged. Delivering top notch content that tackles the challenges and questions of your audience can improve interaction, lead generation and credibility. Whether it’s through blog posts, videos or visual data representations the goal of content marketing is to enlighten, educate and engage. Creating content can take a large amount of time so you will want to make sure you have a content calendar created to stay ahead and organized. Once created, you can use many channels to distribute your content including social media, blogs and more.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
BEST FOR:
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Increasing Organic Traffic
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Enhancing User Experience
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Building Credibility & Trust
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Sustainable Results
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Supporting Content Marketing
A solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is vital to your business goals. The work you put in towards your SEO strategy will help improve the visibility of your website on the search engine results page, drive organic traffic, and improve user experience/engagement. When making updates to your website you will want to focus on on-page and off-page SEO. On-page SEO includes adding keywords, redirecting 404s, optimizing page content and adding schema code. Off-page SEO includes building credible backlinks, reviews, and optimizing your Google My Business profile. It is important to remember that your SEO strategy will not see success overnight. SEO will show bigger results over time so its best to wait it out.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
BEST FOR:
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Targeted Advertising
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Brand Visibility
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Measurable ROI
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Geo-Targeting
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Faster Results
Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is when your website appears at the top of the search engine results page, above the organic (non-paid) results. The link will have a “sponsored” label next to it, so people will know that you have paid for that advertisement & space. There is a bidding process for these ads so the company that spends the most money and has relevant/optimized ads will land at the top of the page.
Running campaigns in Google Ads and Bing Advertising offers several advantages, such as highly visible placement on search engine results pages, effective targeting of users with specific needs related to products or services, and the ability to reach the right audience through precise segmentation. Best of all, PPC advertising provides detailed performance data, enabling advertisers to optimize their campaigns in real time and control their budgets precisely. The downfall to PPC is that the visibility is temporary, expensive and doesn’t always result in the performance you’d like to see.
Work With ZAG Interactive to Bring Everything Together
Always remember that your business goals can help guide you toward the right digital marketing platforms. The worst thing you can do is hop on the digital marketing bandwagon without a clear strategy or roadmap. Start by setting clear, measurable objectives and from there you can work on understanding the unique strengths and limitations of social media, email, content marketing, PPC, and SEO. ZAG Interactive knows this can be overwhelming. The good news is, we can help! Contact us for help with your integrated marketing strategy.