How to Boost Your Digital Marketing Success

Marketing in the digital age requires skills from the ‘traditional’ marketing sector, as well as entirely new skills that are aligned with the requirements of digital commerce and digital media. As such, your business needs to be operating with the very best skills and the best techniques for your digital marketing output to be second to none. Read on to learn how to achieve a competitive edge with your digital marketing output this year, using modern techniques and industry wisdom to drive your campaigns to success.

Analysis

When you’re considering setting up a new digital marketing campaign, you need to begin with analysis. It’s only with a clear view of your objectives and your targets that you’ll be able to measure the success of your marketing campaign. You should analyze all the following targets:

• Who is your target consumer? What are their digital and spending habits?
• What can you learn from your existing customers – what do they have in common?
• Who is responding to your brand on social media and in other marketing materials?
• What are your closest competitors doing – and what can you learn from them?
• What are your competitors missing – and how can you outcompete them?

The best way to answer these questions authoritatively is to get to grips with data analysis. Much of the data you need to understand exists within your company – and just requires skills and know-how to examine. You should consider taking Aston University’s MSc in Business Analytics to bring data analysis skills into your digital marketing campaigns. Click here to learn more.

Brand Communication

Next, let’s look at a timeless element to your marketing campaign: the branding. If your business is well-branded, it should communicate directly and succinctly precisely what your company is offering. You should also have a ‘brand book’ on hand to help you know what tone to use, what fonts your use, and how your brand should depict itself in the modern era.

If you’re not operating with a succinct brand, you can confuse consumers, leaving them less likely to trade with your company. As such, you should focus now on your brand, and how you can make sure that all your communications are on-brand and on-message throughout your upcoming digital marketing campaign.

Use Key Skills

Now, there are several critical skills that your business will need to perform a successful digital marketing campaign. It’s these skills that’ll ultimately set your company apart from its competitors, guiding your marketing materials to more people over time. You need creative skills – like video design, animation, copywriting, and graphic design –to make your marketing materials pop. And you’re going to need specific digital skills, too – like Google Analytics and SEO know-how.

There are, as always, three main ways in which you can get these skills on board for your team to use in their digital marketing campaigns:

• You can outsource, finding these skills in specialized agencies
• You can hire searching for these specific skills in your job description
• You can train by investing in your current staff and their skills

It’s up to you which option you choose – but digital marketing success really boils down to how well-trained your team is in these critical skills.

Overarching Strategy

Most marketing campaigns last months or even years and overlap with other sales drives and smaller marketing initiatives within your business. To direct all these efforts, you need a grand strategy, headed by your head of marketing and devised with your core team of senior managers, to help you understand exactly what you’re trying to do.

When you have a sound strategy, you’ll be able to target specific markers of success in your digital marketing campaigns, like:

• How many views you’d like to amass on your website from week to week
• How many sales and click-throughs you’d like to see completed on your site
• Your position on Google’s results pages, driven by accurate and smart SEO strategies
• The gaining of social media follows, likes and shares
• Coverage of your marketing campaigns in the mainstream media or industry-specific journals

Setting these targets, and building a strategy around them, will help keep your whole marketing team pulling in the same direction as your campaign is live.

Adjustments and A/B

Another aspect of digital marketing is your ability to adjust and tweak your campaigns depending on how they are received by your target audience. There are hundreds of excellent comparisons, on digital marketing websites, in which you can see how A/B testing works. It’s a simple way to continually use trial and error to refine your message to the hardest-hitting, and the most enticing, communications with your target consumers.

When you’re conducting A/B testing, your digital marketing team must be able to track every single change that you make. All these changes, and their different levels of reception, should be noted in a spreadsheet for your future campaigns to refer to. Often, the wisdom you extract from one campaign will apply to your future campaigns.

Novel Methods

Finally, you should keep your options as wide as possible when you’re running a digital marketing campaign. You should be able to reformat all your marketing materials for social media, for email correspondence, and for use on your e-commerce platform, too. You should also be open to new, developing fields in the world of digital marketing, including programmatic marketing.

It would seem that initiatives like programmatic marketing – where your adverts are shown to your target demographic, online, via an instant-auction algorithm – are the future of the field. Driving your return on investment and enabling you to show your adverts only to those who will be interested in your brand and your products, programmatic marketing is just now finding its feet in the world of advertising online. It’s one to keep an eye on as it develops and matures in the 2020s.

When you’re next drawing up a digital marketing strategy, use the tips outlined above to give you a competitive edge, and to guide your thinking for future success in your digital campaigns.

Category: Online Marketing Topics