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4 Essential Steps for an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy
gnooko’s new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy, outlines a number of steps that can be taken when using your digital presence to promote your company. The first of those steps is performing an audit, which we explore a bit in this blog post. If you want to know more about it, and learn about what happens after the audit, click the link at the end of this post to download the complete white paper.
In today’s world, most companies have at least some form of digital or online presence. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to use it effectively. Some organizations maintain a website, a blog, a Facebook page, etc. without really having any idea what to do with it, or any specific goals in mind.
Therefore, if you want to improve your digital marketing efforts, your first step is to perform an audit of your current digital tactics. This will help you understand what you’re doing, what you should be doing, and the path you’re currently on. Here’s a brief guide to performing a digital marketing audit.
Take Stock of Your Digital Marketing Presence
What digital tactics are you currently using, and how effective are they in generating leads, sales, and revenue? Take stock of everything. Maybe you have a Facebook page which has hardly any followers and very little engagement. Perhaps you have a blog that you haven’t posted on in six months. Maybe your website hasn’t been updated recently, and has broken links, outdated information, isn’t optimized for mobile users, etc.
Keep in mind, your digital presence includes more than just the content you create and release. Your company may be listed on Yelp or a similar website, where people can review your business and post comments about their experience with you. People may be posting reviews of your products or services on these sites. Are the reviews more positive, or more negative? Include this data in your audit.
Now crunch the numbers. How many people are you reaching with each of these digital tactics? How many people from, say, your social media channels, are ending up on your website and its landing pages? How many are clicking links, only to find them broken? How many are accessing your site via a mobile device?
Most importantly, of the people who do read your blog, follow you on social media, etc., how many have turned into qualified leads? How many of those leads have you in turn managed to nurture into sales? This will help tell you just how effective your current digital efforts are.
Gather Audience Data
You’ve gathered information on your own company and efforts. Now it’s time to look at your audience. It’s very important to know who your audience is and what they want. If you’re a B2B company, then look at the decision makers in the companies you target. What social media are they most likely to be found on? What content do they consume predominantly? Will they respond better to short bullet points and how-to’s, or in-depth analysis? How do they research a problem online?
With this information, you’ll be better equipped to target them more effectively with your digital content. If you’re writing long, in-depth blogs to an audience who would rather skim bullet points, then you’re wasting your efforts. If your audience spends its time on Twitter, but you’re concentrating most of your efforts on Facebook, then you’re not connecting with them as well as you could. The more you know about your audience, the better you’ll be able to reach them with your digital marketing.
Identify Issues
Now that you have your data, it’s time to figure out what it means. What are you doing right? Where could you improve? Which of your efforts aren’t working as well as they should? What areas are you not exploring, which could have potential if you did?
On the other hand, which of your efforts are yielding the results you want? Where are you seeing the best turnaround? Which content is the most effective? Which social media channels get the most interactions? Make a list of your strengths and weaknesses, based on your data findings.
Create a Strategy
You now have all of your data, it’s time to put it to use. Create a digital marketing strategy, using what you’ve learned. Put more focus on your strengths. Work on the areas where you’re lacking. Create the kind of content that your audience is most likely to respond to, and develop a social media presence on the channels where you’re most likely to connect with them. Redesign your website, to fix broken links, optimize for mobile traffic, and generally make it more aesthetic and more user friendly, based on your findings. Do what it takes to reach your audience where they are and increase your lead generation, sales conversion, and overall revenue.
Once you’ve performed your audit and created your strategy, your job isn’t done. It’s an ongoing process, which you’ll do regularly over time. When your strategy is in place, perform another audit to see where you’ve managed to improve, and where you still need work. As technology changes, marketing evolves, and even your own industry changes, it’s important to evaluate your marketing methods continually, so you can optimize your tactics and generate more sales and more revenue.
An audit is just one step in your digital marketing strategy. To learn more about implementing digital marketing in your organization, download our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy.
Robert (Rob) Burns is a digital business development specialist in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Rob prefers to discuss a business strategy with his clients before talking about any technology, marketing or digital tactics. Once Rob understands a client’s business objectives, he will then advise them about gnooko services and solutions: including Digital Marketing Strategy, Audience Segmentation and Persona Development, Website Design and Development, Search Marketing and SEO, Social Marketing and of course Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, and Marketing Technology.
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How a SWOT Analysis Can Improve Your Digital Marketing
SWOT Analysis and How It Can Be Used to Improve Your Marketing
gnooko is proud to announce the release of our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy. One of the things we talk about is the SWOT analysis and how it can be used to improve your marketing efforts. This blog contains a small preview of the help contained therein. To download the full white paper and explore a variety of different digital marketing topics in depth, click the link at the end of this blog.
SWOT analysis is a great method of analyzing your business and how it’s performing at any given time. It stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Between those four things as they apply to your company, you can get a pretty good idea of your successes, your failures, and how you can improve going forward.
You can also use SWOT analysis to evaluate specific aspects of your company, such as digital marketing. Here’s how you can improve your digital marketing strategy using the tenets of SWOT analysis.
Strengths
Start with what you’re doing well, and what is important to your company: i.e. your critical success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs). There are a number of analytics tools that can help you determine this. How many people visit your website each month? How many followers do you have on social media? What’s your e-mail list like? How many leads are you generating?
Of course, it’s about more than just numbers. Are people interacting with your content in a meaningful way? When people receive your e-mails, do they open them? Do they click through to your website? Are your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) keywords effective in helping people find your website as they’re looking for help in your field?
Look at all of these numbers and statistics and determine which ones you’re happy with, and which ones are important to your digital strategy and goals. Those are your strengths. That’s not to say that there isn’t still room for improvement, but these are the areas where your efforts are most effective, and getting the best overall results.
Weaknesses
Now that you’ve determined your strengths, look at the results of your analytics again. Which numbers aren’t you happy with? Which statistics are lower than they should be? Which areas need improvement? Those are your weaknesses.
This too extends to more than just individual numbers, though. Maybe all of your individual marketing tactics are doing reasonably well. You’ve got a great social media presence, a popular blog, and plenty of people on your e-mail list. But somehow, you’re just not generating the leads that you should be, and your sales are falling short of your goals.
That in and of itself is a weakness in your digital marketing strategy, but it’s also indicative of another, underlying weakness, which is causing this failure to meet your goals. Find this weakness and figure out what can be done about it. At what stage of the buying cycle are you falling short? Do you have a huge audience, but still find yourself not generating very many leads? Do you have plenty of leads, but find it difficult to convert them to sales? Pinpoint your weaknesses and ask yourself what you need to do to improve in those areas.
Opportunities
One way to overcome your weaknesses is to look for new, unexplored opportunities that can be implemented in your digital strategy. And one of the best sources of opportunity is new technology.
Technology evolves very rapidly, especially when it comes to marketing. And as it does, it creates new ways to market your company. For instance, maybe there’s a new social media platform that your company isn’t on yet—but that your customers are. Now you have a new way of reaching out to and connecting with them.
You should also look at what your competitors are doing, and others in your field. And more importantly, look at what they aren’t doing. Is there an area of marketing that’s not being explored very much in your industry? Your organization could fill that hole. Maybe it’s video marketing. All of your competitors have blogs, but not many of them are making videos. By focusing on video production as part of your own marketing plan, you have the opportunity to stand out from the competition and reach people in a new and unique way.
Threats
Now that you’ve identified your opportunities, what’s to stop you from pursuing them and improving your overall digital marketing results? There are always threats to your company. It’s important to be aware of them.
The biggest threat is likely to be your competitors. What are they doing that you’re not? What do they do better than you? Maybe their prices are lower. Maybe their social media channels have more followers than yours. Look at their digital marketing tactics carefully, as well as the results they’re getting, and determine the areas where their success might be a threat to yours.
Technology can be a threat too, if you don’t use it correctly. If you continue to stay on top of evolving technology and use it for your company’s benefit, then it’s an opportunity. However, if you let yourself fall behind, then it becomes a threat. Or if you attempt to implement a new technology and do it badly. Are there ways in which the technology you’re using is dragging down your digital marketing strategy?
With the SWOT analysis, you can significantly improve your approach to digital marketing. Focus on your strengths, identify and eliminate your weaknesses, take advantage of new opportunities to grow and improve, and be prepared to overcome any threats. By performing this analysis regularly, you can achieve your goals more effectively and improve your overarching digital marketing strategy.
This is just one aspect of a much larger digital strategy, though. To learn more about the benefits of SWOT Analysis in digital marketing and other ways of integrating digital tactics into your company, download our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy!
Robert (Rob) Burns is a digital business development specialist in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Rob prefers to discuss a business strategy with his clients before talking about any technology, marketing or digital tactics. Once Rob understands a client’s business objectives, he will then advise them about gnooko services and solutions: including Digital Marketing Strategy, Audience Segmentation and Persona Development, Website Design and Development, Search Marketing and SEO, Social Marketing and of course Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, and Marketing Technology.
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How to Keep Your Digital Marketing Continually Optimized
Digital Marketing Optimization
gnooko has just released a new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy. It covers a variety of different tips and ideas for implementing digital marketing effectively in your company, from audits to analytics and more. Below is a preview of some of the ideas explored in the white paper. To download the full white paper for free, click the link at the end of this blog.
Your company has decided to delve into digital marketing. It’s a great way to generate leads and increase sales. But how do you go about it? You’ve got your marketing strategy mapped out, but how do you achieve it? Digital marketing is a very broad term, with a number of different facets. How do you find what tactics work for you, and make them work in the long term?
One approach you can take is PDCA: Plan, Do, Check, Adjust (also known as the Deming Cycle). It allows you not just to improve your digital marketing strategy, but to continue optimizing it over time, fixing problems and improving your approach in order to see better results. Here’s how you can utilize this tactic to help you implement your digital marketing strategy effectively.
Plan
Create a plan. This shouldn’t be confused with a digital marketing strategy. What’s the difference? A strategy lays out the goals you want to achieve using digital marketing. It covers the What, Why, and Where: what you want to do, why this would be beneficial to your company, and where you want to focus your efforts. For instance, generating more leads, converting them to sales in order to increase revenue, using digital content, e-mail, and social media, would all be important aspects of a digital marketing strategy.
Your digital marketing strategy goes hand in hand with your overall business strategy, but it evolves over time, based on what’s working and what’s not, as well as things like evolving technology and new ideas. This allows you to optimize your digital marketing and continually improve what you’re doing.
A plan covers how you intend to achieve those goals. What tactics do you plan to use, and how will they help you? Unlike a strategy, plans don’t change over time. If a plan isn’t working, you get a new plan.
So how do you create a digital marketing plan? First, you may want to identify what your customers are looking for. Next, you may want to understand who they are and how you can best reach them? For example, what problems are they looking to solve, which your company can help them with? Use this information to create buyer personas, to reach them on a personal level and address their needs and concerns at each stage of the buying cycle.
Then, determine content that will help you reach them at each stage. This may include blogs, white papers, videos, social media, customer reviews/testimonials, and a host of other types. What are they most likely to respond to? How can you best get through to them and nurture them towards a purchase?
You’ll want to try several different approaches, to get a feel for what’s most effective. One way to do this is using A/B testing. Choose two small groups from your target audience (group A and group B), and give them two different but similar options, to see which one gets a better response. For instance, on your website, will you get a better response from a call to action button that’s big and flashy, or smaller and more muted? Give Group A the bigger, flashier button, and give Group B the smaller button. Then see which group has a higher lead generation rate.
You can perform A/B testing for just about any aspect of any plan you implement, from e-mail blasts to blog structure to social media, and much more. You can even test several different variables at a time (multivariate analysis). And it can be applied to the Do, Check, and Adjust sections as well.
Do
Once you’ve got your plans in place, it’s time to implement them. This means creating the content that you’ve outlined in the previous step, but there’s more to it than that. The point is to use that content to achieve your goals. You’ve published a blog post and people are taking notice of it on social media. But how do you turn the people reading it into qualified leads, and ultimately sales?
For one thing, your content needs a call to action. Now that your target audience has read your blog post, what’s the next step? How do they get more information? Include links to landing pages. Invite them to contact you if they have any questions or concerns. Invite them to join your e-mail list and receive regular updates about your company, your industry, etc. Invite them to download additional, premium content, in exchange for their name, e-mail address, and other contact information.
Once you’ve obtained their contact info and a basic idea of what they’re interested in with regards to your company and the products/services that you offer, you can start to nurture them. Send them additional content. Reach out to them and ask if there’s anything you can help them with. Use your buyer personas to target them with content and guide them through the buying cycle. Show them how your company is best positioned to help them meet their particular needs. Implement your plan and use it to turn viewers into leads and leads into sales.
Check
How effective is your strategy? Are people actually being driven to your site by the content you release? Are you generating more leads? Are those leads being converted to sales? It’s time to check and see what’s working and what can be improved.
For this, you need some good analytics tools. These tools can tell you how many people are opening the e-mails you’re sending, and how many are clicking through to your site. They can tell you how many followers you have on social media and how many of those are actually interacting with each piece of content you put up. They can tell you how many people are viewing your blogs and other content, and how many of those are actually following the call to action and becoming leads.
Furthermore, analytics can help you determine if one piece of content—or one type of content—is more popular than another. It can show you what search terms people are using to get to your site. Through analytics, you can monitor every aspect of your digital marketing strategy and receive concrete data on how successful it is, at every stage in the buying cycle.
Adjust
Once you have your analytics information, it’s time to use it to improve your digital strategy going forward. If some tactic isn’t working the way you had hoped, determine why not, and fix the problem. If one type of blog is getting less traffic and another type is getting more, focus your efforts on more of the latter type. If your social media followers seem to be migrating from Facebook to Twitter, then put more effort and resources into Twitter. Your digital marketing strategy should be constantly evolving, based on the data at hand, in order to optimize your results and help you better achieve your overall strategy.
PDCA is a great guide for implementing digital marketing in your company. The step by step approach allows you to continue to improve and optimize over time, to help you towards your goals. How will you use PDCA in your company?
This is just a small part of what you can do to develop your digital marketing strategy. Learn more about how to implement PDCA and other digital marketing tactics, by downloading our new white paper, The Anatomy of an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy!
Robert (Rob) Burns is a digital business development specialist in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Rob prefers to discuss a business strategy with his clients before talking about any technology, marketing or digital tactics. Once Rob understands a client’s business objectives, he will then advise them about gnooko services and solutions: including Digital Marketing Strategy, Audience Segmentation and Persona Development, Website Design and Development, Search Marketing and SEO, Social Marketing and of course Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation, and Marketing Technology.
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