Are you an individual or small team starting out in the digital marketing world? Or are you an online expert interested in topping up knowledge or refreshing your experience? Or somewhere in between? Hopefully, this will spark ideas for all readers as we go through some of the best Digital Marketing practices.
Keep Up to Date
With as fast paced as the world is nowadays, it can be a struggle to keep up with relevant trends or the ever-changing wants and needs of customers. Therefore, it is important to stay with it! Achieving this can be done in very simple ways. Like: signing up for newsletters, staying active on social media sites like LinkedIn, and subscribe to mailing lists of companies with similar aims and objectives. Not only then do you keep up with your competitors, you can notice changes in the market, discover new technologies and see software developments as they are introduced. All which will benefit progression for your organisation however big or small.
Some other blogs we recommend include:
Similarly, as mentioned before you can keep up with trends and changes in the industry. All while keeping up with other people/organisations, using LinkedIn. As you can see here on the #DigitalMarketing feed.
Know Your Audience
The most important step to being a digital marketing ‘pro’ is to understand who your target audience really is. What it is they truly want from either your products or services. Sometimes company lose sight of who they are working for, the customer. But there are many ways to ensure that you are always customer-orientated and therefore keeping the aim in sight. The below being examples of how to keep up to date with your audience:
- Look at your competitors, often – Evaluate their brand, their marketing strategies and what they are offering to the public that you are not. How are the customers reacting to these differing products and services or marketing methods.
- Monitor your social media engagements – watch their reactions, hear their feedback, and learn from what they say or show you. Analyse the data shown in the form of likes, shares, follows, comments etc. More often than not social media platforms offer a metrics page (e.g. Facebook Insights). Which makes engagement analysis easier and faster to collate.
If you wish to analyse in greater depth. You can compare social media results, website views, and leads in a analytics tool like Google Analytics or Adverity.
- Ask them – Using surveys to ask your customers directly what they want in a generally affordable way. Allows you to use a question format which is an easy way to collect information from your audience. Once created it can be submitted to your social media followers and email subscribers. We recommend using a tool such as Survey Monkey.
Some other plugins you might find useful for collecting customer opinions might be:
Consistency is Key
It is extremely important for a company to always be consistent in both branding themes and the brand personality. Consistency is one of the most important and easily overlooked factors in any company, especially digital marketing-based organisations. Often being completely online based it is harder to put forward a cohesive and complete brand identity together. It promotes a professional appearance and earns respect and trust from your customers. See below the top 3 points to remember in Digital Marketing.
“Consistency is the true foundation of trust. Either keep your promises or do not make them”
Roy T. Bennett
- Dependable Brand Personality – Always keep the same tone and personality for your brand across all channels. On both digital platforms and when using offline marketing methods. In order to achieve this, all staff should be receiving training on how to respond and post for the company. This ensures they post the same way with the same style of language to continue an overall ‘personality’.
- Unvarying Aesthetic Theme – The synonymous layouts across all channels and platforms. Along with the corresponding logo, colour schemes, fonts, symbols, style of imagery and illustrations etc.
- Reliable Quality – Having a constant standard of quality of products and/or services at all times is crucial. This creates a trustworthy, safe and respected brand for yourself. While also further complimenting the brand identity created in both point 1) and 2) above. So when mistakes are made handle them with impeccable service and professionalism.
TOP TIP! Use shared cloud storage services for general imagery, logos, downloaded font folders, colour charts/samples. This is beneficial so all staff can access the materials. An example of software’s you could use would be Dropbox or Google Docs.
Personalise!
Keep content for customers and contact with them, personalised. There are many ways of doing this and the simplest ones can help you drastically. When customers do not feel important to a company, they get bored. Ways of doing this can include mail merges in newsletters or email sends. Very simple to do but just feels as if the reader is being directly spoken to. Even using mail merge tags for email address or postcode, further personalising the content to them or their local area.
Similarly, in email or social media campaign content, it could be beneficial to target customers geographically with location-based content (e.g. City of Leeds aimed events or deals for a particular County). More on this would be, Geo-Location based targeting.
Which is identifying your site visitor’s location in order to connect with them. An example of how companies can use this their advantage, would be in online clothing/department stores websites. By tracking a user’s Geo-location they can tell if a user has visited the site before – if not? They can use this opportunity to showcase special discounts or offer for ‘first time shoppers’.
Another method for commerce sites selling products is to identify items in a customer’s basket and recommend complimenting products. Showing personalised and individualistic results heightens the possibility of a last minute ‘add to basket’ and boosting the sales total.
Focus on the Long Term Goals
Don’t be short sighted.
Remembering the big picture, always. Getting wrapped up in setting quick, short term goals to boost engagement and sales is easily done. But this is not always as beneficial as we’d first hope. While this can work effectively and may generate a momentary spike. It does not mean it’ll work effectively in the long run and is not certain to maintain that customer base.
There are ways to keep up with your long term goals and track success towards these goals. The site Perdoo.com who helps you set and track goals. Another one you can use to closely track your goals and your progression in immense detail is Google Analytics.
Conclusion
No one can be perfect at digital marketing however we hope this will helps you to improve yourself or your company, if only by a little.
Thanks for Reading!
For more information about digital marketing, apprenticeships or much more visit our site with the button below: