The key to a thriving digital marketing plan lies not in adopting the latest trends or making assumptions about your clients’ preferences, but rather in relying on evidence-based observations.
According to Jess Reilly, who serves as the chief marketing officer at Rebel Interactive Group, the best marketers are aware that digital marketing is now based on individuals and is scalable. This means they know precisely when, where, and what message to deliver to the correct audience.
The process of selecting a digital marketing approach entails developing buyer avatars, determining objectives, selecting appropriate digital marketing instruments, and evaluating the efficiency of the strategy.
Build buyer personas to understand your target audience.
Fictitious characters that embody the typical consumers your brand is targeting are known as buyer personas. Their purpose is to aid in the promotion of your products and services to this particular demographic.
Reilly stated that developing buyer personas can assist in establishing a marketing plan by revealing the identity of your buyers, the dilemmas they encounter, and, above all, the objectives the audience is striving to achieve, which can then be used to shape your messaging strategy.
When constructing customer profiles, take into account the subsequent details regarding your desired audience.
- Job type
- Interests
- Age
- Gender
- General demographics
- Most-used social platforms
- Beliefs and values
Afterward, tailor your approach according to these particularities.
Examining how your competitors aim at reaching potential customers can help you understand your own target audience. Brett Prentiss, who co-founded Instinct Marketing, shared that his team scrutinizes various aspects of competitors’ strategies, including their landing pages, ad title tags, website structure, and beyond.
According to Prentiss, understanding these elements enables us to reverse-engineer their strategy in conjunction with the expertise of business owners’ vision to create something spectacular that generates excellent results.
Identify your goals, and align them to your strategy.
What objectives do you have for your marketing strategy? Some examples could be enhancing brand recognition, boosting product purchases, or expanding your social media audience. It’s important to define your objectives clearly so that you can focus your actions towards achieving them efficiently.
If you aim to increase your brand’s visibility:
Is your intended audience limited to trustworthy brands? Do they have knowledge about your brand? Is their level of comfort and trust in your brand sufficient to facilitate a purchase?
If you want to prioritize building brand awareness and enhancing your company’s reputation, focus on the following:
- Content creation. Create a significant amount of high-quality content, both written (blog posts, Instagram posts, website articles) and video. Excellent content will establish your brand’s personality and mark you as an expert. Consider using humor, comments, and striking images to catch people’s attention and make your content more shareable.
- Traffic generation. Focus on generating traffic to your content. Use digital advertising and social tools, such as Facebook marketing strategies, to expose the maximum number of potential customers to your brand.
- Co-marketing. You can also collaborate with more established businesses with complementary products by co-marketing, creating an affiliate program, or running an online giveaway publicized via digital advertising.
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of a brand awareness campaign is difficult, despite the use of hashtags and social media promotion engagement. While it may not be possible to identify every person who became acquainted with your brand as a result of your campaign, creating awareness is crucial in establishing a larger consumer base.
If the aim is to increase consumer knowledge:
Low search volumes for your target keywords may indicate that consumers are not aware of how your product or service can enhance their lives, thus resulting in a lack of interest in your company.
If your sales process or website traffic isn’t causing any issues, it’s possible that you’re facing a lack of awareness among consumers. In such a scenario, your aim should be to use your digital marketing strategy to inform potential customers about a particular problem they might encounter and to present your solution.
Occasionally, having trust in the brand alone is insufficient. It’s imperative to inform clients about what you offer, how it will be advantageous to them, and why your solution is superior to their existing one.
If you aim to boost the number of visitors:
Most business owners prioritize traffic as it is a valuable key performance indicator (KPI) that leads to more high-quality sales leads and actual sales.
To achieve more traffic, concentrate on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, effective search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, and email marketing.
- PPC advertising. PPC advertising allows you to control the amount of traffic flowing to your website, depending on your budget. To get a good ROI on your PPC campaign, use longtail keywords (longer and more specific keywords), pinpoint your target audience, and continually use A/B testing to find the most effective combination of audience, headline, image, and body copy. Monitor your results, and tweak them as needed.
- SEO. Unlike PPC advertising, SEO is a long-term investment. You must wait at least six to nine months to see a positive return on your investment. Companies can do SEO in-house or hire an agency. SEO’s upsides include perceived lower costs, recurring “free” organic traffic, and all the other benefits of being at the top of Google’s search rankings.
- Email marketing. You can use email marketing as a tool for many digital marketing goals. When it comes to increasing traffic, use email marketing to a large, established customer base to drive traffic to your website for content and contests.
If your objective is to boost lead generation:
It’s impractical to anticipate customers to make an online purchase of an expensive or intricate product on their initial visit. Instead, concentrate your attention on producing prospects that your sales department can follow up on.
Here are a few pointers on how to boost leads:
- Polish your website copy. Ensure your website copy adequately explains the product and establishes your company’s expertise and experience.
- Offer incentives. Offer a reward to prospects who fill out a form with their contact information. For example, provide a discount for consumer products or a whitepaper for business-to-business products.
- Include social proof. Include plenty of social proof, including positive customer reviews (the more, the better), testimonials, celebrity endorsements, and awards or certifications.
If you aim to boost sales:
Utilizing email marketing strategically and driving traffic to your website landing page are likely essential steps to increasing sales.
Choose digital marketing tools based on your primary goals.
Marketing encompasses a range of tools, such as templates for content marketing calendars, social media platforms, and software for email marketing. Their unique benefits and objectives make it imperative to choose the appropriate tools that align with your objectives.
According to Prentiss, each business has its own unique shortcomings or requirements. These could range from deficient reviews to poor Google rankings or an urgent need for website overhaul. Whatever the specific needs, every business requires distinct tools to address them effectively.
Firstly, arrange your objectives in order of importance and thoroughly analyze your finances to identify the most advantageous investments. If the sale is not imminent, utilize low-cost alternatives like email and social media posts since there will likely be significant loss in your sales pipeline. It’s permissible to re-evaluate and test additional tools available.
Audit your current digital marketing strategy.
To audit your strategy for digital marketing, you need to establish what has been effective previously, experiment with present approaches, and identify necessary adjustments.
- Discover the true ROI of past efforts. You’ll need to measure ROI for digital marketing campaigns you ran in the past. Reilly advised business owners to ask how much “lift” each marketing channel provided in previous seasons. “Using a combination of customer purchase data, digital tracking data, and any traditional media buys you have, you can dive into the data to discover what your true ROI was in the past and opportunities to grow in the future,” Reilly said.
- Test new strategies. Before going live with your new strategy, test it to see what might work and what won’t. Spend time figuring out if there are aspects of your strategy that can be fixed or improved.
- Determine what needs tweaking. Prentiss recommended monitoring your progress to determine what might need shifting. “We set daily, weekly, and sometimes even monthly reminders to check on the progress we made,” Prentiss said. “The daily and weekly check-ins on what we created are very important in the beginning so we can adjust what we are doing. This truly ensures the success of the campaign.”
LinkedIn Tips to Help You Generate More Leads
- Network With Others by Hitting “Connect”
Although it may seem obvious, most people do not fully utilize its potential. One of the most effective ways to generate more leads on LinkedIn is to increase the number of your connections. With more connections, you will be able to collect more leads.
It’s important to remember that the quality of your connections is just as important, if not more important, than the quantity. Increasing your “friend” count just for the sake of it isn’t worth it if the connections aren’t worthwhile. Only focus on establishing meaningful relationships.
It is important to have a purpose behind your desire to connect with someone, such as a shared industry, potential business opportunities, or a mutual acquaintance.
LinkedIn offers the choice to include a personalized note when adding a new connection. Otherwise, an automatic default message will be sent. Taking advantage of this feature allows for a tailored touch and sets your request apart from others the recipient may receive.
Expanding your network can also potentially increase your lead generation.
- Join Relevant Groups
Have you always believed that LinkedIn isn’t a very social platform? That’s not true! Like Facebook, LinkedIn has groups, and it’s advisable to become a member of the ones that align with your interests, company, and objectives.
Here’s an opportunity to expand your network and socialize with individuals who share similar interests, potentially leading to beneficial connections. Gathering a large group of like-minded individuals has never been easier.
It could be advantageous for you to initiate your own group which can assist in establishing your leadership skills. Nevertheless, it is important to make sure that you reserve enough time to maintain and expand the group.
- Ask for — and Give — Recommendations
Referrals hold immense importance as they are akin to personal testimonials. Nothing speaks louder than others singing your praises. Touting your own accomplishments pales in comparison to the impact of positive feedback from others, as potential customers and prospects are more likely to trust the opinions of others over your own self-promotion.
The importance of recommendations cannot be overstated!
Remember to reciprocate when someone gives you a recommendation by offering one in return if you can. This not only demonstrates kindness (which is justification enough), but it also boosts your image as a skilled and respected professional.
- Publish Articles on Your Page
On our list of LinkedIn tips, at number four, is a feature that is unfortunately underutilized. If expanding your reach, enhancing credibility and expertise, and advancing lead generation is your goal, then publishing articles on LinkedIn is highly recommended.
The reason why this feature is so impressive is that it behaves like a miniature blogging platform embedded in LinkedIn. By fashioning captivating and optimized articles, you can provide your followers with answers to queries, expand their knowledge on a particular subject, or offer them other beneficial information.
Remember that, similar to blogging, SEO is significant. Ensure to incorporate significant keywords, headings, appropriate alt texts for images, and reliable links that lead to external sources and your website. For enhancing user engagement, you can utilize tools such as the Rebrandly URL shortener to shorten links and establish brand recognition in your content.
Does it take up some time? Absolutely, but the potential of acquiring new leads makes it highly beneficial in the end.
- Post Consistently — Aim for Once a Day
Similar to other platforms, on LinkedIn, if you don’t post frequently, your content is likely to go unnoticed in people’s news feeds.
If your page is almost silent, what approach will you take to generate more leads?
Do not worry about creating unique and comprehensive content on a daily basis as it is quite a manageable task. You can switch between writing blog posts and presenting pages from your website, utilizing resources from external platforms, and reposting content shared by other users on the platform.
Remember that, similar to other platforms, visuals play a significant role on LinkedIn. Ensure that you incorporate photos and videos. However, it is worth noting that compared to other platforms, text-based posts have shown better performance on LinkedIn, and they may even perform the best. Experiment with them and assess the response.
Remember to add some visual appeal to your posts. If you have a lengthy caption accompanying your content, consider breaking it up into smaller paragraphs and adding emojis. This will enhance the post’s aesthetics and make it easier to read.
Do you want to hear about another nifty trick of the ninja kind? Give a thumbs up and leave a comment on your own post, regardless of whether anyone else has done so already. This isn’t a matter of conceit! You may see an increase in interaction. People are more inclined to react to posts that already have likes. Take the lead and secure your first like, from yourself.
Simplify your work by planning and scheduling multiple posts in advance, which is commonly referred to as “batching.” Set aside a small amount of time each Friday to schedule all of the posts for the upcoming week. Once complete, you can relax knowing the task is finished.
Remaining noticeable and pertinent is the objective.
