Probably the most important phase of any marketing campaign is the bit at the beginning, the less glamorous time consuming part. A lot of businesses are keen to get started and don’t set out clear objectives and this is where things can get messy.
What are you trying to achieve?
Initially you need to decide what it is that you want from Digital Marketing. It usually boils down to one or more of the following areas:
Lead Generation
This is all about putting you in front of the right people, hundreds of leads is really not going to help you if they aren’t from the kind of prospects that you are targeting. Ensuring that you are providing potential customers with what they need to make a buying decision and then making sure that they can find you online are the most important elements in online lead generation.
For most businesses lead generation will comprise of a combination of both PPC (paid advertising) and SEO (search engine optimisation). Getting this right is the key to success for those companies that are focused on increasing their customer base.
Brand Awareness
Brand awareness requires different approach; with lead generation you are targeting those people that are in the market to purchase your product or service. With brand awareness you are trying to reach the right people to make them aware that you exist, but they aren’t necessarily looking to buy right now.
The key is to become known as ‘the’ brand in your chosen field so that when the time comes those people already know who you are and come to you first. For brand awareness you might look at transposing more traditional types of marketing from offline. You can do this through display advertising, content marketing and having a strong social media presence.
Customer Retention
We all know that keeping a customer is cheaper than trying to gain a new one and yet so many businesses neglect to focus on their existing customer base. Lack of communication can create opportunity for your competitors to swoop in. Your customers want to feel special, they want to feel wanted and so using Digital Marketing to keep in touch and interact with your customers is a great way of doing just that.
Providing relevant and interesting content, interacting via social media and email marketing are all ways that you can keep that relationship a good one!
Once you have decided which are you want to focus on you can move into the next phase which is looking at the tools and techniques that you will use to help achieve your objectives. We will look at this is a future blog post, but in the mean time if you have any questions or comments, please do leave them below or email us at [email protected] we would love to hear from you.