Marketing is crucial to any business, it means connecting your audience to your product. Doing it right means communicating to the right people, at the right place, and right time. This is where digital marketing does it best - online advertising allows brands to constantly connect with their audiences. It’s targeted, measurable and can be successful and cost effective if done right. So here are the basics to get you started:
· Marketing Starts with you customers
Like always, think of the bigger picture. Develop your consumer profiles, know their likes and dislikes. Who are they? What do they value? Why are they looking for your product? What was their journey to get there?
· Think in campaigns
Now that we have had a conversation with our customers and have understood their path to purchase, we can begin to see where our online strategy fits in.
Much like each media channel has a job to do so should each campaign. Spray and pray is not a marketing strategy. Every campaign needs to be a part of a goals-driven framework. Know what you are out to achieve - Set your objectives and build a marketing strategy to give you the right results. Compartmentalizing campaigns into the following core areas will help: awareness, engagement, acquisition, and retention. Understand which of these four functional areas your campaign is looking to achieve and start implanting ways to attain it.
Owned Earned and Paid media
Ensure your online strategy has synergy. To put it simply, online usually comes down to three main pillars. Owned, Earned and Paid.
Owned: This is pretty much what is says on the label, the media you own. This can be your website, your blog, youtube channel, Facebook etc.. Leverage this to reach new and existing customers funnelling them from awareness, engagement and then directing them to acquisition.
Earned: By far the most valuable, this is when word of mouth advertising takes place. When customers, press and the public start sharing your content. Leveraging this will means offering your audiences enough value where they feel it will benefit them to share your product. This may be done through positive reviews, sharing posts that they align with them etc. Thus, this should be looked through the lens of consumer engagement. Paid: Intuitively paid media is simply paying for your online advertising. This by far the most vast and complex topic, hence for this exercise I will stick to the fundamentals. The most common paid pricing models are: CPM – Cost per millennium or cost per 1000 impressions This is the measurement of the number of times an ad has been displayed. CPM’s are relatively inexpensive and guarantee your ads will be shown the number of times you pay for. This makes them easy to account for. In saying that they are difficult to measure ROI. PPC – Pay per click or, Cost per Click (CPC). These are ads that display and are only paid for when clicked on. The price is determined by the market place value of the keyword you are interested in. Unlike impressions, these are extremely easy to track and measure, however as you are competing with for keywords and raising their value, PPC’s can be expensive. CPA – The less common cost per acquisition is model that looks at paying per lead generated.
Retargeting - Retargeting works through cookie-based technology. The cookie is dropped on each visitor to your site, then later, when your cookied visitor is browsing the web, your ads are served to them. This is a highly targeted approach.
