The digital landscape is complex, and navigating it can leave even the savviest digital strategist dizzy. Understanding how to best elevate your business’s online profile and reach your prospective consumers, as well as what marketing strategies you should deploy, are just a few of the questions marketers grapple with.
The reality is that there are a plethora of tools, at different price points, that are available to marketers. However, it will take a bit of trial and error before you understand which tools are most effective for your business. In the meantime, all marketers can benefit from the following founding principles:
1) Understand Your Consumers and Know How to Evaluate Their Behavior
Digital consumers interact with brands on multiple levels before they commit to purchasing. Consumers will take the time to explore similar or like products. Online behavior patterns indicate that they will visit your site multiple times and will explore your social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram. According to Graham Cooke, technology contributor at Mashable, “25 percent of sales cycles take more than a month to complete from consideration to purchase.”1 Measuring success on a one time click-through visit isn’t enough. In order to get a clear picture of what your target consumers are up to, you will need to look at interactions across your entire digital profile.
Cooke also notes that “three quarters of customers use more than two points of contact to make a purchase, whether that is multiple visits to a single site or using different online and offline access methods.”2 Understanding how your consumers interact with you, and learning their behavioral patterns when it comes to purchasing, will be key to your success.
What should you do?
- Develop multiple touch points for consumer interaction: your website, LinkedIn profile, Facebook page, Twitter, YouTube and Slideshare
- Leverage low cost advertising solutions like paid search on a CPC or a CPM basis to cast a wide net to your target audience
- Monitor activity on all your digital marketing channels (looking at things in a silo will only paint part of the picture)
- Develop personalized approaches for ongoing consumer retention
2) Speed and Easy Navigation are Key to Success
Slow speed and bad navigation are two things that can negatively impact your business. “Every second added to a website’s load decreases conversions by a massive 2% to 7% and reduces page views by 1% to 2%. Google makes no secret of the fact that speed is part of its ranking process, meaning that a slow loading site is going to suffer in search results.”3
What can you do to get ahead of this?
- Reduce the total number of large images and videos on your website
- Check your website hosting service to find out if they are able to provide you with enough bandwidth to meet your online needs
- Drive users to landing pages that align with your advertisements. Use a specific product page or a product category page. If you force them to click multiple times you’ll lose them
3) Optimize - Test - Optimize
Ongoing optimization is a crucial component to any marketing strategy. Launching and looking away won’t work. Evaluating the performance of your ads is essential for long term success. Look at the image, the copy and ad placements for each campaign. Remember, it isn’t just about click to conversion; you’ll need to look at the overall impact on your digital profile and conversions over a minimum of thirty days.
4) Plan Ahead
Creating a marketing plan inclusive of a promotional events calendar is essential for year-long success. This plan should be evaluated each quarter so that you can make adjustments accordingly. You need to determine when to launch your key promotional pushes, where you will target your campaigns and which digital marketing methods you will use. You will want to choose a solution, such as NTENT, that is able to target your products nationally, regionally, and locally.
*Mashable (2012). Digital Marketing. Retrieved from <www.mashable.com/2012/08/01/digital-marketing>
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