If you’re looking to transition your business to digital, you need a digital marketing strategy. However, marketing budgets aren’t unlimited, and you may not know where to start with yours! If that’s the case, we’ve put together a few tips for areas to focus on as you develop your digital marketing strategy.
Allocating your digital marketing budgeting correctly can help you make sure that your products and services are getting in front of your target audience, maximising your return on investment and increasing sales.
Review Marketing Goals
Set some goals and objectives. What would you like your marketing efforts to achieve? Is it brand awareness, is it generating leads, is it achieving more sales or driving traffic to your website?
Once you have established what your goals are for your marketing efforts, you can start planning your marketing strategy.
Identify Your Audience
To successfully execute marketing campaigns, digital or traditional, you must identify your target audience. Where does your target audience live? What are their interests, or their jobs? What are their pain points that your product or service solves, or value you add to their lives?
Once you have identified who your audience are, you can start to figure out where they might be online so you can target them effectively. For example, if you are a recruitment company, you might want to target people through ad campaigns on LinkedIn. If you are a hotel, you may want to target previous guests through an email marketing campaign or online loyalty programme.
Selecting the Correct Channels
You must evaluate the effectiveness of each channel for your brand’s goals. By ‘channel,’ we simply mean where your brand is online. This might be your own website, organic social media, paid search or paid social media campaigns, email marketing, or others.
For example, email marketing may not be effective for the product or service you are marketing. If you are a roofing contractor, you may not get a lot of value out of email marketing. However, if your business is a hotel, you could use email marketing for contacting previous customers about the latest offers.
SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. This is the process of making improvements to your website with the goal of increasing your online visibility and ranking in search engine results. SEO involves constant observation and modification, including practices such as keyword research, creating relevant content to appeal to your target audience, technical SEO and user experience, or how people actually interact with your website.
SEO specialists are in it for the long game – you can expect to see SEO improvement over a period of months or years, rather than day to day, but SEO is a vital part of the strategy for any company with a website.
Review & Refine
To make the most out of your digital marketing budget, you should frequently review and refine your digital marketing activities. Identify strengths and weaknesses in your campaigns, test new ads against current ads to see what works best, and stay up to date with new trends or changes in platform and algorithms. This will help to keep your marketing content effective, fresh and relevant.
Reallocate
Do not be afraid to reallocate your marketing budget or shift budget from one platform to another. For example, say your goal is conversions on your website, and you are running PPC ads on Google and Facebook with 50% of the budget being spent on Google and 50% on Facebook. If the Google ads are getting better results, maybe you should consider spending 80% on Google and 20% on Facebook.
In conclusion, there are a list of things that you need to consider before jumping into digital marketing. Digital marketing is constantly changing with the latest technology updates and user trends (for example, think about how much you use your phone for now vs 5 years ago). If you know your marketing goals and continuously review your digital marketing activities, you will be able to optimize your performance and maximise your return on investment.
If you’re looking to start digital marketing campaigns for your business and need some help, a digital marketing agency might be the right choice for you.
