Let’s start by examining the world of marketing! What is it, what does it consist of, and how are the different components used? Marketing Explained helps you to grasp the whole context and content of marketing.
A digital marketing strategy is crucial for the overall marketing strategy of your business. According to Jason Matthew, the VP Research and Digital Marketing of Game Show Network, “Ignoring digital marketing is like representing your business without any audience.” By providing organizations with outreach strategies and unprecedented growth, digital marketing has in many ways changed the face of the modern business. However, there are a few points you need to consider when implementing digital marketing strategies to grow your business. Let’s take a look at the most essential digital marketing considerations to grow your business.
7 Essential Digital Marketing Considerations to Grow Your Business in 2021
No matter what business goal you try to achieve, whether it’s customer acquisition or retention, new revenue channels, or product discovery, you start with observing your audience and the contextual situation. Think of it as the shortcut to hit the bull’s eye.
Here are the best performing digital marketing considerations to unlock the true potential of your business.
1. Data is your best friend
Whenever you think of developing a strategy for your business, data should be your priority. Sure, you can create specific hypotheses based on your exposure to your ideal audience persona’s life. But, without validation, you are going to lose valuable resources.
Google Analytics is a convenient tool that lets you track your audience behavior online. From the number of unique visitors to bounce rate and dwelling time, there are powerful insights that you can leverage to meet your business goals.
So now, when you have the validated real-time data, what’s next?
2. Define your goals
The first thing that you should invest your time in after you deduce insights from research is to create anchors. SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based) goals are a great way to do so. You can distribute your goals in 3 broad sections: long-term, referring to one to 3 years targets, mid-term referring to quarterly goals, and short-term meeting monthly or even weekly goals. Documenting your progress over the period ensures that you don’t lose focus on your business goals. The key question is: What do you really want to achieve with your digital marketing strategy? Where should it support your overall marketing strategy? Ideally, you would consider your goals in an integrated way – your digital marketing strategy should blend into your overall marketing strategy to achieve your goals.
And remember, if it’s not measurable, it doesn’t matter. So, set specific and measurable goals. Track them over time. If your digital marketing strategy does not reach the goals you have set, readjust.
Now comes the biggest toil. How to market your product?
3. Marketing is your superpower
Having a great product or service makes up the core of your business. But, marketing protects it from falling flat. After all, you are not the only one trying to get the attention of your audience. Your competitors are in the same race.
Here are a few digital marketing considerations to grow your business in the form of ways you can acquire customers and keep them hooked on you.
How big are you on social media?
If you are already looking for ways to grow your business, it is safe to assume you are using social media for your business. If not, at least you are aware of its potential benefits for your business.
But that is not the point of discussion here. Existing on social media is just a starting point. If you have to win a loyal fanbase that converts into your customers, you need extra mileage.
Find out your target audience’s behavior.
- When do they come active?
- How do they react to specific content formats?
- How do they engage with other competing brands?
- What kind of giveaway campaigns works the best?
The answer to these questions will unlock your social media audience’s potential both concerning outreach and sales. You can optimize your created content by repurposing one format into another.
Consider making a social media campaign that focuses on having a conversation. You can later change it into a podcast. Later change that into a blog post. You can achieve that quickly with transcription services.
You cannot miss Search Engine Marketing
No matter how you do it, at the end of the day, you need to create value and ensure it reaches your audience at the right time. For this, Search Engine Marketing is crucial.
If you are missing on creating blogs, you are missing a lot of money on the table. But a word of caution here. To make this work, you need to keep the mission of search constant.
Your search engine audience is entirely different from social media. They are on Google to get their burning questions answered almost instantly. This means to make an impression, you need to solve their problems. And you need to do it a minimum of 3-4 times to earn them as customers.
You can try both organic and paid marketing like PPC to do this. In fact, distribute it in a 70-30 ratio to reach optimum results.
Are you still waiting to build your email list?
Gaining traffic is often a vanity metric. It is of no use to garner massive traffic if you lose the opportunity to turn them into customers. This is where email comes in.
The truth is no matter what content you publish on which channel, you are going to attract an audience from different stages of a buying funnel. Some will be closer to conversion, while others would need to warm up. Having an email list and building that with time gives you a window to have regular interactions with your audience and turn them into your customers eventually.
But creating generic one-size-fits-all content for all your audience is so last year. You cannot yield optimum results with that strategy. Now is the time to personalize and customize your content. You can do this based on two primary metrics: audience persona and the context you picked the conversation with them from. It is pointless to talk about smoothie makers to your subscriber when they want to hear about the coffee maker.
But a word of caution here. Your audience today is super sensitive about their privacy. Never forget to take permission before obtaining their emails. There are multiple laws that protect consumer data privacy. GDPR and CCPA are key players in this landscape. You should learn what GDPR vs CCPA is in detail to make a more informed decision.
PR is your damage control
Malfunctions are natural in any business. This is the very specific reason why companies invest in building brands from day one. Brand equity is just one perk of the investment.
PR and press releases can get your business the most coveted reputation and domain authority quickly. If you are a startup, the budget can be a challenge for traditional PR. You need to get creative here.
One of the best ways to do digital PR is to guest post on popular channels where your ideal audience hangs out. If your business operations are local, investing in micro-influencers is also a smart choice. But if you are on a shoestring budget, consider partnering with a complementary business. Go ahead and propose a commission-based incentive for your partners. It’s only going to create robust networking for you.
4. Reinvent your sales strategy
If you thought marketing is your endgame, then think again. You have developed a superlative product, created a loyal fanbase, acquired customers, and retained them. But is that enough for growth hacking your business targets? A solid sales strategy is the booster element in this spot and one of the most essential digital marketing considerations to grow your business. With a well-defined strategic sales plan, you will retain customers better and get more out of your complete customer base. Here are a few ways to do this.
Social proof gains trust
Ever heard about the herd mentality?
Well, yes, if you hear 10 people saying all things are good about a program, you start believing it to be ‘good’. Having real customer reviews is therefore critical for fast sales. You need to put out a user-generated content strategy here. Incentivize your early adopters for leaving a review. This will help to boost sales from your existing customer base, ensuring you gain new business opportunities with their reviews.
Time can do wonders on your conversions
Have you ever noticed that people tend to have more profound affinities for unique, special, and rare things? Fear of missing out, commonly known as FOMO, leverages this human psychology. Here’s what you can do: Create offers that are both enticing and time-sensitive. This will give you spiked sales hours readily.
It’s time to upsell
What is your average customer’s lifetime value today? If it’s lower than 36%, then you are underutilizing your customers.
Closing the first sale with a new customer is the most challenging part. You got to earn their trust—no wonder why customer acquisition is 6 times more expensive than retention. The latter part is cream. This is where your business starts making money on your audience.
Upselling your product chain under a similar category makes sure you utilize this. You can create a push sales strategy for this. Give your customers reward points to redeem in the next sale. It creates the opportunity for the transaction. You can generate insider programs too.
5. Your website is critical for your growth
Your website is more than just an electronic address of your business. It can double as a growth machine for your business. From understanding customer buying behavior to cart abandonment rate to most popular products and most prominent pain points, it can do it all. What’s more? You can make it your prime engagement tool too.
Here are a few things you need to consider:
Your site speed and design can cost you money
Your audience’s attention span is less than the memory of a goldfish today. This means if your site takes more than 7 seconds to load, you can forget business.
Ideally, your website should load within less than three seconds. Within the first seven seconds, you have two jobs to be done. Be present in front of your audience and create a reason for them to dwell a little longer. Declutter your design, optimize image sizes and create a focus on just one element at a time. This can create a sense of good design to start with. The core motive here is to reduce friction between your audience and brand.
Build for a mobile-first audience
If your site is not responsive, you will lose the audience in the long run. Most of your audience interacts on the phone now. If your site design is not optimized for that, you are tampering with the user experience. Be mindful of the colors you choose, the image quality and sizes, and the site architecture.
6. Set up a referral program
One of the most effective and convenient ways of growing your business is by introducing a referral program. But it’s not enough to create a referral program, you need to track it as well. When you introduce a campaign, you need to track it closely to see the results it has achieved, and whether your message has been communicated effectively to your target audience. As you track your referrals, you will also be able to view where most of your referrals come from and what the specific incentives you offered are that captured the largest number of actions.
Take for example, the Starbucks referral program, which is hugely popular among its loyal follower base. This program offers a Gold status to its referees and an additional 60 bonus stars to all the people who referred the customers to this program.
7. It all falls back on teamwork
Team building is perhaps the most overlooked entity when it comes to business growth goals. Yet, it should not be forgotten when thinking about essential digital marketing considerations to grow your business. Here’s a reality check for you.
If you can’t deliver it, does any of it even matter? Your team resides at the heart of delivering value to your target audience. This means to truly unlock growth, your systems, your product teams, marketing teams, and sales teams all need to work in a closely-knit landscape. Team management and productivity become critical to consistently perform while scaling. Invest your time in finding the right set of people in terms of both hard and soft skills. It will save you a lot of resources in the long run.
Parting Advice
Having a blueprint to guide your startup’s course of action is always helpful. But here is a word of caution.
Your business is as unique as your personality. There will be situations that are unique to your business operation. A generic blueprint cannot cover this. Sure the best performing practices of your industry can lay down a foundational advice board. You would be aware of the dos and don’ts. But there is no one size fits all strategy that can soar your business to the next level.
To unleash the maximum potential of your business, always stay inside the feedback loop of your people. From customers, teams, collaborators, to vendors, each of these people contribute to the success of your business.