In today’s digital world, every marketer must have a digital marketing strategy. The problem is that most people don’t even know where to begin when trying to enter the digital realm of marketing. To help you out, I put together the top 7 best practices for your digital marketing strategy.
1) Have Clear Campaign Goals
This should be one of the first things you do when building your digital marketing strategy. In order to measure the success of your campaign you must set clear goals. These goals can be in the form of sales, leads, downloads, page views, comments or pretty much anything else you can think of. Just as long as it makes an impact on your business and is measurable.
Without clear goals and a way to measure them, it can be difficult to build a well thought out digital marketing strategy. Once you have clear goals, you can then decide the best way to go about your digital marketing strategy. For example, if one of your goals is to generate new leads and build a better relationship with your customers, then content marketing may be the best route to take. But if you wouldn’t have defined your goals ahead of time, you may have not realized that content marketing would be a good fit for your strategy.
I believe having clear goals is the best place to start. If you end up finding out you want to go a different direction you can always change your goals later. But trust me, it is better to start with goals rather than the marketing strategy itself.
2) Have a customer-centric mindset
Always focus on thinking like your customers. Every time you build an ad or a piece of content think about what you would want to see if you were a customer. Sometimes shifting to a customer-centric mindset is as simple as asking different questions. Instead of asking how to increase sales, ask how you can delight and “wow” the customer. This will help you shift your thinking and your strategy to become more customer-centric.
Another way to help you become more customer-centric is by getting your customers involved. Regularly ask for their feedback on their experiences and your products. Picking your customers brains about their industry can help tremendously when it comes to building your digital marketing strategy. The better you understand your customers, the better off your digital marketing strategy will be.
3) Have good social media practices
While this may seem like a simple practice, a lot of brands fail at social media. The number one thing to remember is that social media is meant to be used for more than just broadcasting your message. Social media should be used to engage and build relationships with your customers and people within your industry.
Don’t be afraid to reach out and personally engage your audience on social media. But always remember not to spam people’s inboxes. With a majority of today’s society being social media savvy, they will immediately sniff out spam and your brand will lose all credibility.
Another social media best practice is to keep your social media manager in house. No one knows your brand like your employees do. Your own employees will pay attention to the necessary details and not make careless mistakes that can damage your brand. The example I’m referring to is the time when the official Blackberry account accidently tweeted from an iPhone. That is not a mistake an in house employee would make. While it may be cheaper to outsource social media, I suggest keeping it in house if you have the choice.
4) Remember that mobile is the main screen
Placing your messages where your audience is, is one of the most important parts of your digital marketing strategy. In today’s digital world, most of your messages will be seen on mobile. So this is where you are going to want to focus your messages.
Making everything mobile friendly is the absolutely basics of your digital marketing strategy. There is a lot more you can do to incorporate mobile into your digital marketing strategy. If you’re a retail store, you can use beacons and mobile wallet to build a better relationship with your customers and dramatically increase your conversion rate. If you’re an online business, you can place ads within apps and different social media sites so that you can better reach mobile customers.
With the rise of buy buttons, mobile is going to continue to be a major factor in e-commerce. Not building your digital marketing strategy around mobile could be a huge mistake.
5) Personalize as much as possible
Personalization is a growing trend within digital marketing. There are many levels of personalization and I believe it’s best to do it whenever possible. This may be as simple as personalizing emails or be as in-depth as personalized offers and discounts. Remember, the more you are able to curate to each individual customer, the higher your conversion rate is likely to be.
6) Target the right audiences
Your digital marketing strategy won’t do any good if you don’t place your content in front of the right audiences. Once you learn who your customers are(by having a customer-centric mindset), you need to figure out where they hangout. Are they on Twitter, Linkedin, or YouTube? This is extremely important. If your customers aren’t on Instagram than that is not a channel you should focus your resources on.
Ultimately, being able to target the right audience will come down to how well you know your customers. The more you know and understand your customers, the easier this will be.
7) Measure everything
Measuring brings us back to number one. Since you have clear campaign goals, you need to measure them to see if your digital marketing strategy is working. But don’t focus on only measuring your campaign goals, rather try to measure as much as possible. The more data you have, the better off your strategy will be.
Good analytics will help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t. This way you can revisit your strategy and fix the areas that are lacking. Many marketers make the mistake of only measuring the main goals such as sales. But then once they meet their goal, they can’t figure out exactly what lead them to meeting that goal. So one of the most important digital marketing best practices is to measure everything thing you can.
Have more digital marketing best practices that have worked for you? Share them in the comments below.
