Digital Marketing Demystified

You’ve heard the stories—little businesses experience rocket-propelled growth due to clever online marketing campaigns. It seems like a simple concept, yet your digital marketing efforts haven’t yielded even a modest boost in sales. What are you doing wrong? You’re pretty clever. The problem may be with your planning. Digital marketing shortens the time between when you start developing a marketing concept to the time you implement it. You are not strapped with large production budgets and expanded schedules; just get the content together and go. However, just because it is certainly less expensive and faster to market digitally than any other means doesn’t mean that it is simple or more effective.

In order to create an effective campaign, you should come up with a clear plan and set objectives. Marketing on the Internet today gives you many ways of running a campaign that communicates your message and offer, including email campaigns, PPC (pay per click) ads offered by search engines, and community sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and other social media sites. The following are some helpful tips to guide you through the process of structuring and implementing a marketing campaign using the Internet.

1) Clean house. Make sure that your website is up to date, error free, and easy to navigate. This is where most of the clicks from any digital marketing campaign will end. Consider constructing a landing page specific to your campaign so that there is immediate relevancy.

2) Clean data. Revisit your contact database and be sure that your marketing list is segmented to reflect your customer/prospect profiling. As you add new contacts as a result of your campaign, you will want a qualifier to indicate that this campaign was how you attracted them. For example, label the contact “Facebook Feb 2010” if the contact came through a Facebook campaign. This will give you valuable data to aid in managing that account and also when planning future campaigns.

3) Define your target. Who exactly is your prime target? You can best answer that question by defining who your best and most profitable customers are today.

4) Define your trigger. This is also known as a call-to-action. Do you want them to place an order? Other options to consider, especially if you have a longer sales cycle, would be downloading a how-to guide or whitepaper, signing up for a newsletter, or requesting a quote. Having a trigger, and focusing on engaging the audience to respond, is key to measuring your campaign’s success.

5) Know your keywords. If you haven’t been keeping up to date with your website keywords, it is time to take another look. Use Google’s free tool at google.com/sktool/# to search for the keywords and phrases that are working in your market. Your marketing campaigns should use the same keywords that you are using for your website, as this increases hits with the search engines as they rate your website for relevancy. If you choose to use PPC (pay per click) advertising on Google or Bing, or social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, the keywords in your advertisement will help your ad appear when it is relevant, and it will also improve your overall organic website rankings.

6) Select your channels. Knowing more about your current customers and which sites they are most likely to visit on the Internet can guide you toward making some better choices for where to advertise. Ask yourself these questions:

Are there industry or association sites where a banner ad might make sense?

Are there industry magazine sites or popular blogs where it would make sense to have your ad appear?

Are there other complimentary sites where cross-promotion will work?

Would it make sense to advertise on an e-newsletter sent by trade or industry associations, magazine sites, or other complimentary vendors?

Would it make sense to take advantage of PPC opportunities with LinkedIn and Facebook?

Pay per click (PPC) is not just for the large search engines like Google and Bing, where the bidding may drive the price up beyond your budget. Look into social networking sites for advertising opportunities, too. You can set your daily spend rate, and monitor the results daily. If you are paying by impressions or clicks—you need to know if they are responding to your triggers. By tracking your conversions daily you will be able to determine if your campaign is working and if this channel is right for you, and if it’s not working, maybe it’s time to change your message or switch channels.

The advantage of Internet marketing is that you can change on a dime. There’s no sense in spending more money if the campaign is not working. Be sure to research site traffic and demographics for the sites you are considering to help you determine the value. Look at the quality of existing ads to evaluate if this is a good fit for your campaign.

7) Create your content. Whichever venue you choose, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or a campaign using social media such as Twitter and Facebook, do your homework and look at how others are using that medium. Your message should be crafted to be in harmony with the venue you are choosing. Twitter only allows for 140 characters so it will have to be a brief statement or question and a link to a landing page for more information; Facebook can be crafted to engage a community, and if it is a trade association newsletter, address that industry directly. One ad or campaign does not fit all platforms.