How to decide if my business needs a Digital Marketing Strategy, and how to go along?
Digital Marketing is no doubt becoming more and more important component of business success. Those who are already embarked on this journey has done an important step to digitise their strategy and those who are not yet embarked, are definitely seriously thinking about it. But the sooner you start the better it is. Nevertheless, for many, this concept is still unknown. It is difficult to determine how to go along with it or how to do it!
This article will guide through the essentials to help you understand why and how to go along with Digital Marketing.
Let us first understand why the digital is getting popular?? Online World is growing so fast. The below statement resumes it well:
“Consumers’ expectations that they can get what they want with ease & speed will continue to rise… this changes fundamental underpinnings of business & can create rising demand for flexible workers.” @KPCB
Now remember the very basic of Digital Marketing is MARKETING. As such first we recommend defining an appropriate plan. A simple principle allows doing it easily:
- WHY
- WHAT
- HOW
- WHEN
- WHICH
WHY: Is our audience online?
In marketing there is 2 basic strategies, push and pull. In digital, this is reflected by the fact that there are people searching for your products/services already or can we push it to them?
An example of pull would be keyword research. Google allows you to see average monthly search volume for keywords, which allows you to determine if there is opportunity online! See below a print screen for the monthly search volume for a keyword such as Mauritius Hotels:
Therefore if this is relevant to your business you might want to be positioned on top for keyword otherwise you might be missing out opportunities.
Push strategy in Digital means that you have an audience online but they are not searching for your product. Facebook would be the right example. Facebook can give you precisely how manypeople are in their database, and then you can create appropriate Ads to reach them and push a message to them. See below a print screen of how precise the segmentation of Facebook is:
So according to Facebook I can reach about 41,000 people who live in Flic En Flac or close around, aged between 21 and 40 years old, and whose interest is to go out for foods.
WHAT: Define your objectives / goals.
This is very important to measure success, define KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that will allow you to check if you are on the right track. It can be in terms of Sales, Sign Up, Engagement, Requests, etc.
HOW: Which strategy is appropriate?
Once you know how to reach your audience, and have clear objectives then it is time to define which online tools is appropriate to reach goals. Remember there are so many tools online, and it might not be appropriate to try to be on all of them and loose track. Some tools are good for pushing, some for pulling, use them wisely.
WHEN: Timing
As all proper planning, you need to set out when it the most appropriate moment to launch them.
WHICH: Proper measurements
Once launched make sure to measure achievements properly based on KPIs defined previously. This will not only help to know if you right on the right track but also take decision quickly to adjust.
The beauty of online marketing is that it is easy to measure the output or evaluate them. Some tools such as Adwords can be very precise. To compare, if you do a billboard campaigns, you can never know how many people have been reached, if the message was passed-on properly and if they’ve taken right actions (they might not be on their way to). Google Adwords allows you to reach people searching for you, thus increasing chance of conversion, tells you exactly how many clicks, when and who has converted. And the beauty is that you pay per click, which gives high control on cost.
So, to sum up, what we’ve describing in that article is what we call an integrated approach. This is the best way to go along with any Marketing strategy, even for Digital. It allows for coherent communication and consistency in contents passed on to your audience. DO NOT WALK BLINDLY, otherwise you’ll get more scared and might feel you’re getting lost.
