Digital marketing is no more an option, it is essential and mandatory to survive in the contemporary era of cut-throat competition.
The internet has changed the way people think and make decisions. Consumer behaviors and buying patterns have changed drastically and it is time to adapt to the new market to encash the opportunities for your business. If you don’t have an effective, well-planned, and resourceful strategy for your business, you are missing something terribly important.
Digital Marketing Strategy
A strategy to promote your brand, products, or services on the internet and other electronic media effectively and efficiently is called a digital marketing strategy. Activities you do to implement the strategy is called digital marketing campaigns. An effective strategy will bring so many advantages to your plate.
There are many things you need to consider while designing your strategy. One-size-fits-all does not work here. You need to ensure that your strategy is personalized as per your target audience, the nature of your business, and other vital factors. You can always hire professionals to design and implement your marketing strategy that follow marketing best practices.
Different types of digital marketing strategy
Search Engine Optimization:
It is one of the most used and most proven strategies. It is also called an organic campaign as it attracts genuine customers to your website. You can hire affordable SEO services to run your SEO campaign or find a gig on Fiverr which can cover your needs.
Pay Per Click:
It is a more effective strategy where you pay per click. You can get good and quick results with it, but authenticity is a concern. It is not necessary that users who are clicking on your ad are really interested in your products or services.
Social Media Marketing:
It is also one of the most impressive strategies where you use different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and StumbleUpon to promote your products or services. It is a more engaging and communicative strategy than others as you can directly engage with customers.
What are Digital Marketing objectives
If you want to go on a treasure hunt, you need to have a map, don’t you? Similarly, you need to have a clear set of objectives that you want to achieve. Without a vision, a plan is nothing but a waste paper with no value. You need to ensure that you set your marketing objectives that are achievable, specific, manageable, realistic and time-bound. Once you have set your objectives, it will give you a clear idea where to head. There are many advantages of having marketing objectives in advance.
An example of a marketing objective:
Suppose a company XYZ offers a range of products to its clients. The company has determined its objectives as shown below.
- Increase the sales up to 35% for by 2019.
- Achieve a market share of 30% by 2020.
- Increase overall revenues of the company up to 40% by 2020.
Advantages of making marketing objectives
How will you measure the outcome of your strategy if you don’t have pre-determined marketing objectives? Obviously, there are many advantages of making marketing objectives. Here is a list of them:
- A set of marketing objectives plays a role of a compass that directs and guides you to go in a right direction.
- Your resources are best utilized in a right manner if you have pre-determined marketing objectives.
- You can track real metrics to check the progress.
- You will be able to improve the efficiency and productivity in your internal as well external business operations.
- Cohesiveness improves among the team as they are driven to a common, right path.
- Ultimately, increases your revenues and profits.
Digital Marketing Objectives
When it comes to objectives, there are many integrated strategies you can implement to achieve those objectives. Some strategies are search engine optimization, Pay per Click strategy, Social Media marketing, and content marketing. These strategies are interrelated and together, they will help you achieve your objectives.
Some of the objectives that any user would love to achieve are described below:
1. Positive Reputation
Reputation is a crucial thing for any business. People should feel good and positive when they hear your name. Same applies to the brand. The main objective is to create positive reputation among people who might turn into your customers in a long run.
There are many ways to create a positive reputation. By offering high-quality products or services, by giving them superior experiences with your products or services or by offering them right and relevant information.
2. Customer Engagement
It is one of the most important objectives to achieve as it will create brand recognition for you. It requires content creation, sharing, and marketing. Your content should be educating customers who are looking for some information. By sharing valuable and relevant education, you are making a big blow. Always ensure that you offer them what they are looking for and half the battle is won.
Customers should engage with your brand genuinely. There are many ways to do it. By creating unique, engaging and informative content, they will find that you are authentic. They will engage easily and happily. By evaluating a number of comments and registrations, you can get an idea whether customers are responding to your efforts or not. You should ensure that you reply to such comments to make them feel that you care.
3. Online Market Share
What online market share you want to achieve in one year? It is an objective you should focus on. Online market share is a percentage of revenues you have earned compared to offline revenues. However, for some industries, it is a difficult thing to calculate.
4. Online Profit Contribution
It is an important parameter to consider to evaluate your strategy. It simply means your total profits earned from the campaign. By comparing with offline profits, you will be able to identify how your strategy has helped you to earn more online profits.
5. Online Revenue Contribution
It is a percentage of revenues you have earned with digital marketing efforts. Once you compare it with your investment, you will get a clear idea about the effectiveness of your campaign.
6. Site Performance And Availability
You need to ensure that your site performs superbly. The first thing a digital marketing professional does is to optimize your site in a way that Google finds it easy to crawl and identify. Make sure that your site is well-designed, attractive, responsive and loads quickly. Meta titles and meta descriptions should be engaging, relevant and original. A good website is the first step to get more traffic.
7. Brand Metrics
Do people favor your brand? How do they respond to the content you share on digital platforms? It is very important to know. There are many brand metrics available to check it out the brand favorability such as visibility, universal interaction rate, persuasion, retransmission, and others.
8. Site Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are very critical to increasing revenues and sales. There is no use of people leaving your website without making any purchases. You need to set your strategy in a manner that your site conversion rate is higher. There are various actions you can take to enhance your site’s conversion rate.
9. Activity Or Participation Levels
As we discussed before, it is important that your customer participates in a way you want. It might be filling the registration form or chatting with your online customer representative to find a solution. According to a research, customers who get answers quickly are likely to buy from the same supplier. Ensure that you come up with plans to engage your customers more effectively online.
10. Loyalty Or Churn Metrics
As they say- Loyalty is hard to get and very hard to sustain. According to a study, it is very difficult for a business to retain a customer who left due to inappropriate services or incompetent products. You need to ensure that your customers stick to your brand.
Churn is a word business don’t like to hear. The churn rate is the metric that shows how many customers you lose for a specific time interval. If the churn rate is higher, it means there is something seriously going wrong in your campaign. It is easy to calculate. At the end of the campaign, the churn rate will indicate how many customers you have lost during a campaign. Identify the reasons and try to address it with a firm and effective campaign.
Conclusion
Marketing objectives will help you to determine the success of the campaign you have run for a specific time period. By identifying and evaluating successes and failures at getting to your objectives, it would be easy for you to understand the strength and weaknesses of your strategy. Run those digital metrics to check the Return On Investment (ROI) you got from your efforts.
The ideal way is to outsource your digital marketing as experienced professionals know how the market functions and are updated with the latest trends and practices.
