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?