Editor's Note: Teena Thach is Socedo’s social media and marketing specialist. To celebrate the launch of our new Digital Fundamentals Certification, she joins us today to discuss the most important digital marketing techniques to master in 2017.
You’re ready to get started in digital marketing – but how do you know where to begin? If you’ve done some research already, you know there are dozens of potential avenues to pursue, and you could fill a dictionary with terms you don’t fully understand. While it can be dizzying to navigate all the information you’ll run into, there’s a good place to start: master the key principles and techniques that will get you on the path to building your online presence and growing your client list.
In this article, we’ll spell out the basics of digital marketing strategy so you can get your feet in the water and start figuring out what will work best for you and your brand.
Strategy
What your digital marketing strategy will look like really depends on your goals. What do you hope your business will accomplish with an online campaign? How wide of a focus do you want to have? At this point, you should take account of simple factors like the size of your business, the scope of your campaign and your target audience.
When figuring out your target audience, you should construct a buyer persona – who are the people who likely want the product or service you are offering? Hubspot suggests collecting information such as location, age, income and job titles. This information is particularly important if you are targeting decision-makers, and those who can choose whether or not to buy into your offering. Analytic tools allow you to quickly sort your prospects based on the above factors, many of which can be gleaned from social media profiles. They can also build your social media audience – another key strategy – based on interests and keywords, thus increasing your traffic and growing your potential client list.
Once you’ve determined who you want to target, you will use multiple techniques to develop a strategy for capturing your audience wherever they are on the web. To accomplish this, digital marketing strategy has three main pillars: social media, your website, and email lists. Since almost everyone has a social media account, social media is a fantastic place to start building your online presence and connecting with your prospects.
Understanding the major social media platforms and knowing how to build a presence on them is a first step to communicating directly with the very audience you hope to attract. Knowing the style and personality of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat can help you decide what forum will work best for your brand. Blogging platforms or live streaming can also help you to drive traffic towards your site.
Anyone can build a social media presence, but the whole point for you as an online marketer is driving traffic to your website where you offer and advertise the products and services that you want your audience to see. Hosting content on your website in the form of helpful blog posts, webinars or whitepapers is a great way to engage your visitors. By maintaining a rich and living catalog of free content, you can vitalize your social media posts, and most importantly, build an email list.
Email lists form a very important part of every online marketer's toolkit. When visitors are interested in your content, an opt-in form can be used to offer them a free taste of what you have to offer. After collecting email addresses, marketing automation tools and list managers can be used to send targeted emails based on customer’s unique tastes and interests. This is a great and long-term supplement to social media.
Here are other strategic components you’ll also want to master to get started:
Aesthetics
A good website is nothing without good design, and the same goes for your social profiles and posts. In the same way that print or televised advertising must catch the eye, your digital marketing must be designed in a way that holds your prospects’ attention and clearly demonstrates your value proposition. Even seemingly simple choices like color are important decisions: 85% of buyers say color influenced their purchase, according to Revenizer. Using distracting fonts, generic stock photography or failing to visually differentiate your brand are big mistakes when designing your digital marketing campaign. Ensuring you communicate clearly with your web visitor as soon as they land on your site and hold their attention afterwards are key techniques for the best digital marketers.
Analytics & ROI
You need to know if your campaign is working, right? You need to know that you’re getting a return on any investment of time and money into your digital marketing campaign. Analytics helps you to figure that out, and make smart adjustments as you go along. While you might think of analytics as data that measures web traffic – (think Google Analytics) Hubspot points out that’s only the beginning. More important is the connection between your social media and email marketing efforts, and measurable results such as prospective leads and conversion to sale rates.
Having a good handle on your marketing analytics lets you see exactly which channels are most effective with which targets – is your Twitter campaign strategy effective, or are you getting more volume from direct email? Or are they effectively tying in together? You want to know not only how many people clicked through to your website, but which ones were converted into clients.
SEO & SEM
When people are researching products, they’ll type keywords into Google, Bing or other search engines. Search Engine Marketing lets you use those keyword searches to raise your website higher on the list of results people see, and target digital advertising in the right places. Consider that 89% of consumers use a search engine to look for information before investing in a service or product, and 70% of buying decisions begin with those queries. You want to make the most of this fact. Getting to know tools which help in this area can help you improve your company’s search engine optimization (SEO), and thereby improve your target audience reach.
Search Engine Watch says that search engines seek factors such as quality content, fast web performance, and user experiences. While optimizing your pages can mean incorporating the most-often-searched keywords relating to your service or product, it’s about more than “keyword stuffing.” It’s also about having user-friendly content answers to the questions or pains that your prospects are looking to solve.
Can enhancing your SEO take time and expense? Sure. But Ballantine estimates the ROI on SEO in 2014 was $21.93 for every dollar invested. That compares with $6.48 in revenue for television advertising, $8.29 in telemarketing or $10.06 in newspaper ads. The investment is a good bet.
While the realm of digital marketing is complex and goes beyond the principles outlined here, these techniques form the foundation of every good digital marketing strategy. No matter who you are, what you’re selling, or who you want to reach, the Internet is big, and everyone starts in the same place. Now that you have the basic principles for building a digital marketing strategy, why not get started today? You’ll discover the effort is well worth your time, energy and investment.