With the ever increasing competition in the digital world, brands, big and small, will have to continuously measure their campaigns to ensure right ROI. Digital Marketing is quickly becoming a specialised field with a high level of expertise involved. There are some great challenges for brands looking for digital marketing agencies to drive their business online. With a widespread acceptance of online marketing, countless entities have sprung up every where. As a brand owner, it is tough to evaluate someone for the job. In a nutshell, you should have a team/agency with a well blended SEO, mobile marketing, and social media marketing expertise.
Here is a comprehensive list of digital marketing aspects that should be on the top of your priority if you are looking to launch a digital marketing campaign. This checklist will help you in assessing your in-house marketing team, or a Digital Marketing Company that you are looking to hire for running digital campaigns. Make sure that your online marketing agency / team can do the below mentioned points well.
1. Research Your Customers Well:
Digital Marketing has turned into a highly competitive and dynamic zone already. To stay on the top, start with a detailed research on your prospective customers. If done right, this should form the basis of customer acquisition down the sales funnel. With a high performance data-driven marketing technique, you will need to take frequent and relevant surveys or appoint credible surveyors for the same so that you are always on track in knowing your customers. You must have the buyer personas ready before you jump next.
Many a times, agencies come up with a handful of gut-driven buyer personas. But, developing buyer personas – you need at least 2-3 to start with – takes considerable time for research, social listening, and others. The deliverable must also include something we call negative buyer personas. In short, negative personas are the ones who do not suit the buyer profiles for your products/services.
2. Get Started with an Well-rounded Website Audit:
The starting point for any digital campaign is ensuring that your online presence by the virtue of Google is healthy. SEO is the enabler of that. But, a good digital marketing company spends a considerable time in doing a thorough SEO audit of your website. There are many tools – free and paid – that will generate a very generic, templatized SEO Audit report. Most often the SEO service provider chooses to automate this process. You may get wowed with the polished, professional look of the report, but you should look for more depth in these reports.
Good Digital marketing companies usually keep a charge for this comprehensive SEO audit report of the website. You must understand that a lot of success down the line depends on this audit. Also, getting your SEO audited every 5-8 months is now advisable. Make sure you update your SEO with an adaptive approach to keep your SEO maximised. Understand the importance of two primary approaches for bringing your website to the top ranking on Google – on-page optimization and Off-page optimization. While On page factors make a lot of impact on the search results, off-page optimization is a long drawn process, and takes time to bring in the changes you are looking for.
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3. Adopt Keyword Research 2.0:
Success in sales/leads generation online heavily relies on the quality of keywords you choose before jumping guns on the campaign. It’s imperative for your online marketing team to find keywords that are low on competition and high on conversions. With the internet being flooded with the outburst of brands, businesses, and digitally marketed data, it’s very likely that the keywords you derived out of guts will get peanuts for you. Various tools that are available in the market allow you to research on keywords. It is not that simple task though.
In order to get a list of profitable keywords, the Digital Marketing Company must know the layers of intrinsic research process – a combination of tools, business understanding, and great content marketing capability. Just throwing a few broad level topics into a keyword tool to get a list of keywords is something that most digital marketers do these days. That unfortunately is pre-historic stuff. Today’s cut-throat digital marketing landscape demands far more sophisticated approach. Expand your keyword base. It is important to review the keyword base and also generate new ones for the future, on a periodic basis.
4. Lead generation campaigns need an integrated approach:
Today, the whole idea of doing business online hinges on the deep understanding of how your prospective buyers research online – desktop or mobile, and then make a buying decision for a specific product or service. Apparently, the final conversion of a buyer into sales is more impulsive, as s/he makes the final choice influenced by a mix of several factors like price, perception, and persuasion. While you, as a brand do not have a full control on creating perception (a long drawn branding process that slowly and steadily influences buyers), persuasion is something that you can bet your time and money on. Art and science of lead generation is fundamentally changed – it’s about appealing to the RIGHT digital buyers with in-time, contextual, and relevant content (information), and persuade them with different forms of content in order to make that final push.
The way you interrupt your audience repeatedly to push through your messages has gone through a fundamental change. Television still works that way, but the other channels of messaging have started blending sponsored content seamlessly so that they are able to generate demand for a product using social cues and behavioural traits. It is advisable for you to design your lead generation campaigns in such a way that when buyers seek information about the category of products/service you offer, you’re in the best position to provide that information.
Your sole aim should be to satiate the needs of the buyers during their buying cycle research. They need information that they can trust. To get that they turn to online searches and social networks. Since, the race to convert leads will take up a very concentrated approach; you should look for bespoke Digital Marketing Services that are sufficiently equipped with skills for a robust business- specific lead generation campaign.
5. Retargeting Whom You Already Have – Your Visitors:
At times, it takes more than a single try to hit the bull’s eye! It is proven beyond doubt that it takes an average of 6-7 marketing touch points before buyers convert into sales. Imagine the lengthy battle you need to do to reach to a critical mass in order to get them into your sales funnel. Why not concentrating more onto the segment that you’ve already touched through your messaging – the visitors to your website. This existing segment needs a careful lead nurturing mechanism in place, so that they can be converted far more easily than the new ones. We give it a great deal of effort to tag visitors depending on their nature of visits and number of touch points. By doing so we can customise our messages differently to each segment of returning visitors. From slow leads to warm leads, you need to serve your prospects more content with relevance.
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6. Make A/B testing a habit to experiment:
Frankly speaking, testing is one of the most essential Digital Marketing methodology to generate highly qualified leads. It is extremely important to make sure that the marketing team tests each component of the campaign and measure its performance. An experienced digital marketer must know the in-depth functioning of the entire cycle – designing campaign message(s), hypothesize the responses, make room for predictable outcomes, and analyze each outcome. There are many good tools that can help create multivariate testing framework easily. For social messaging, you can test an individual communication by creating multiple ad groups with a number of varied design and copy, and track the output in the form of how much engagement (likes, shares, comments, clicks) each individual group could generate.
7. Spend a great deal of time in Optimisation of Your Landing Pages:
A digital marketing campaign rides on the back of the masterfully crafted landing page(s) on your website. The purpose of a landing page is to tell who you are, and why the visitors should buy from you. Simply put, as Kissmetrics says, “Your leads are only as good as the website that produces them.” A great landing page exudes the sense of urgency with a convincing CTA (call to action). It should ideally also highlight only the highest value propositions.
Keep your landing page optimised with visually attractive graphics, clear call-to-actions, and appealing content in the right sequence to ensure the success of your digital campaign. And oh, did we forget to say that make sure that your landing page is mobile responsive. Though it has now become a standard norm, still it is worth noting that mobile based search is picking a great deal of momentum, and making your landing page seamlessly opening in all kinds of devices enhance user experience, and the lack of it will essentially lead your lead generation campaigns to a miserable outcome.
8. Leverage Social Media to Simulate Word of Mouth Marketing:
Every Digital Marketing company in India will tell you how important is to have Social Media Marketing as a part of your digital marketing campaign. It is obvious. Till now, Social Media was all about creating brand awareness, and to an extent, customer support for the new age buyers. But, a majority of the marketers is yet to find out the right tactics to generate leads through social channels. The fact that all of your prospective buyers are active on social networks, it is very important to create a right communication strategy to reach the right mass.
Social Media can be leveraged to generate demand for your products or services. With the ability to get detailed information about the audience on each evolved networks, you can build relationship with your prospective buyer profiles through multiple social interactions. A seasoned digital marketer is able to dig down deep into the buyer persona research and find the cluster of audience that harbours the high-value leads. Then you can reach out to existing or prospective customers through paid advertising to persuade them with your offerings.
9. Create Authoritative Content and Popularise it:
There is nothing called great content unless your target audience thinks it helps them in some way. So, your content marketing team must figure out what the target audience wants to consume, and be benefitted from them. Again, most of the content writers create content based on what they think their audience would like. Do not make that mistake in the first place. But how do you find that? We’ve talked about the importance of investing a lot of time on keyword research, right? That in-depth research should find out what the popular content is in your industry or niche. Once you figure out what type of content works well with your audience, it’s time to build something better than those. Yes, that’s the key. Creating improvised content consistently is a formidable job, but then content is your real asset that your digital campaign banks upon.
Visual content is a must-have to drive better engagement. Include infographics to capitalize on your content marketing campaigns. Creating Infographics needs a well researched approach. It is pretty time-consuming as you need to pull out some meaningful data, and creating an easy to remember flow. Hence, it is advisable that you find experienced designers to do the job. For start-ups or brands that are looking for an easier way, hook up with a Digital Marketing Company and plan out a great content marketing campaign. Video marketing is on the roll now, and 2016 will see a greater role being played by animated gifs and short span viral videos. Videos can easily convey a whole load of information in a quick, interesting and comprehensive way. Make sure Videos are included in your online marketing budget.
Check out our awesome creative showcase. If you want to get in touch for a discussion, or an digital audit of your brand, write to us!
