Active Digital Marketing
Discover How To Use ACTIVE Digital Marketing Strategies To Growth Your Business
Discover How To Harness The Power of Digital Marketing To Grow Your Business
Digital Marketing Strategies Can Be Confusing and Overwhelming
For small businesses, digital marketing can quickly become overwhelming. There are so many opportunities there for your business to exploit, but just how do you actually go about taking advantage of them and fitting them all into your schedule? Which digital marketing strategies should you be using, and how do you go about implementing them successfully? What about tracking the results of your campaigns?
If you are feeling more than a little weighed down and confused by digital marketing, you’re certainly not alone. Thousands of small business owners just like yourself are feeling overwhelmed and confused; so they aren’t achieving the results they would like from their efforts.
Despite the opportunities digital marketing provides to small businesses, many choose not to use it at all; and those who have tried it felt that their efforts were a waste of time and just not effective.
If digital marketing is making your head spin, we’ve put together a useful list of ten ways you can overcome digital marketing overwhelm and start working towards using it to your advantage
Here’s Why You Need Digital Marketing
Create a Digital Marketing Action Plan
There is no doubting that digital marketing is becoming ever more important to the success of your business, but actually knowing what to do and where to begin can be rather confusing. Before you even think about any kind of implementation, you should put together a simple digital marketing action plan.
Why create a digital marketing action plan?
Many businesses approach digital marketing without giving much thought to what they are actually doing. It’s all too easy to throw up a website or a Facebook page and simply hope for the best.
Before you begin, it is important to get clear on exactly what you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts and then set out a realistic plan for achieving your goals. By putting together a simple strategy, you will be able to take focused action and therefore be much more likely to be successful.
1. Do your research
The first stage is to gather as much information about your customers as you possibly can. Who is your target audience? What do they do and what motivates them? Most importantly, where do they hang out online?
2. Set an overall digital marketing objective/goal
The next step is to decide on exactly what you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts. Your overall goal might be something like:
“Generate 50 new leads each month and convert at least 20 of those leads into new customers.”
3. Decide on your digital marketing channels
Based on the information you now have, you can then decide on what digital marketing channels you will use to achieve your goal. For example:
- Your website
- Social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- For each channel/campaign, you should set a specific objective and key performance indicator.
For example: - “Increase website traffic by 20% before the end of the year”
- “Add 500 new subscribers to our email newsletter each month and convert at least 20 of them into paying customers”
- “Generate 200 new leads from Facebook advertising in the next 30 days”
4. Plan your actions
You should set out exactly what you are going to do – each day, each week, and each month. Make sure that these actions are realistic and manageable so that you don’t get overwhelmed.
5. Closely monitor results
It is important to closely monitor and measure your results, so you need to decide on exactly how you’re going to do that. As an example, website traffic can be tracked through Google Analytics, or your email marketing might be tracked through your autoresponder service (e.g. MailChimp).
Here’s How To Use Digital Marketing
Increase Your Brand Awareness With Digital Marketing
One of the best ways to grow your customer base is to help more potential customers learn about who you are and what you do.
Prioritize Your Digital Marketing Strategies
There are so many different digital marketing strategies out there that it can sometimes be difficult for businesses to know exactly where to begin. From SEO, to social media marketing, PPC advertising and content marketing, there are tons of highly effective ways to find new customers and better engage with existing ones…
But the problem is that although all of these tactics can work very well, there is usually nowhere near enough time (or budget) to do it all – and do it successfully. In order to make digital marketing work for your business, it is necessary to prioritize your digital marketing strategies and get clear about exactly what you should be concentrating on.
Find out where your customers hang out online
It is important to find out exactly where your target audience hangs out online so that you can prioritize marketing in those places.
As an example, there is little point in advertising on Facebook if you know that most of your primary target audience isn’t on Facebook. On the other hand, maybe you are selling a B2B service and decide that LinkedIn is the perfect platform for marketing your product. Those same people might also use Facebook at home, but by marketing to them through LinkedIn you could hit them when they are in ‘work mode.’
How do you find out this information?
One of the best ways is simply to ask them. Consider sending out a short questionnaire, or just ask your customers when you speak to them.
In addition, it’s well worth looking at online communities and forums related to your business as these can tell you a lot about your audience.
Finally, you can also use online tools like the Google Display Planner. There are also many paid tools that can analyze your competitor’s websites and tell you from what sites they are receiving traffic.
Prioritize your website
Your digital marketing should really be centered around your website. As an example, you might use social media marketing, PPC and email advertising to find new prospects, but ultimately you will most likely be directing people back to your website. If your website sucks, you aren’t going to achieve successful results from your campaigns.
Your website should:
- Have a professional visual design
- Be user-friendly (logical navigation, clear categories, etc.)
- Be mobile-friendly
- Contain relevant, up-to-date content
Your website forms the backbone of your digital marketing strategy, so make sure that your website does justice to your brand and creates a good impression to visitors.
Avoid These Five Common Mistakes
If you’re looking to take your digital marketing to the next level, here are five common mistakes to avoid…
1. Having no strategy
Perhaps the biggest mistake businesses make when it comes to digital marketing is having no clear strategy in place. It’s simply not enough to create a website, throw up a Facebook page and then just hope for the best.
To be successful, businesses need to get clear on what they want to achieve with their digital marketing efforts and then put together a realistic plan for achieving their goals. Don’t attempt to do anything without firstly knowing WHY you are doing it and WHAT you want to achieve.
2. Trying to do everything
Many businesses try to take advantage of all the opportunities digital marketing offers without firstly prioritizing what would work best for their individual business. It is much better to start small, find out what works and then expand your strategy from there.
In addition, it is a big mistake to try and do everything yourself. Again, don’t be afraid to outsource tasks or partner with an experienced digital marketing freelancer or agency (if you can afford to).
3. Not taking consistent action
A big mistake many people make with digital marketing is not taking consistent action. You only have to look at the number of dormant company Facebook pages or out-dated websites to see that this is true. It’s not enough to do some digital marketing for a few weeks and then expect to see successful results. You really need to take consistent action over the long-term.
4. Putting out poor quality content
If you are engaging with content marketing (and you really should be!), always make sure that the content you are putting out is actually relevant and useful to your target audience. Many businesses think that ‘content marketing’ means making a blog post that contains one ‘useful’ tip and then rambles off into a long, boring sales letter. Make sure that the content you put out is of good quality.
5. Not tracking your efforts
In order to be successful with digital marketing, you need to constantly track your results so that you can refine and improve on your strategy over time. If you don’t track your results, how will you know when you’ve achieved your goal?
Avoid these five mistakes and you’ll be ahead of the vast majority of your rivals!
Conclusion
Digital marketing can do so much for your business, but it can also be extremely confusing, time-consuming and ultimately overwhelming.
As we have discussed in this report, the key to success with digital marketing is having a clear plan and then implementing that plan consistently over time. In order to successfully manage your digital marketing and prevent overwhelm, you should break down your actions and make time for digital marketing by creating a schedule that you can realistically keep up with. Take consistent action, continue to push forward and celebrate your achievements in small bits.
In addition, don’t be afraid to get external help with your digital marketing. By tapping into the special skills and expertise of digital marketing professionals, you are much more likely to succeed than trying to tackle it all on your own.
Need some advice about your digital marketing today? Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you finally get the results you deserve.
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