Modern marketing happens online. Marketers have discovered that the best way to capture the attention of consumers is to meet them where they’re at—to find them where they’re spending their time. Also crucial is getting attention when your potential customers are ready to make a purchasing decision.
Precisely how it happens is a science. Successful internet marketers monitor the customer journey, watching for buy signals, and optimizing their marketing spend to get the impact that provably converts shoppers to purchasers. If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is.
Some of the most sophisticated machine intelligences known to man are engineered for predictive analytics, and they’re breathtakingly efficient at it. Consider who three of the top five largest technology companies are: Meta (formerly Facebook), Alphabet, Inc. (Google), and Amazon. These businesses have literally engineered their own success by harvesting every possible bit of data generated by their users, and by leveraging these mountains of information to predict and affect consumer behaviors.
We can harness this power ourselves. Through the clever application of technology, we can take advantage of the science behind the modern art of marketing. This blend of practices can supercharge your reach and give you a leg up on the competition.
How Much Should I Spend On Digital Marketing?
We get this question a lot, and the answer is less straightforward than the person asking typically wishes it was. While we can’t easily give even a range of what effective digital marketing services might cost for your business we can give you an idea of some of the types of services (digital marketing channels) typically involved in a successful campaign. Hopefully this information will equip you to do better research, to ask more incisive questions, and to start to recognize what digital marketing strategies might make the most sense for your business.
Social Media Marketing is the process of building and activating audiences via social media platforms.
Social Media
Your customers are on social media. Full stop.
Building and activating audiences on social media means having a presence that gets attention, and using that attention to influence purchasing decisions. Your business will need effective social media management to create a content plan and execute consistently.
Your business can also leverage paid advertising via social media to try to reach consumers. Successful paid social media marketing can often require a lot of time and ad spend to determine what works most effectively. Having effective market research and proven strategies can help you get a running start.
Search Engines
Google can be a marketer’s best friend or worst enemy. Sometimes it’s both at the same time. Online businesses live and die by the search results returned by search engines, and so making the search engines a target of your digital marketing is an absolute must for your success.
Search Engine Optimization is the ideal long-term strategy for search engine success. It’s a mix of technical and artistic disciplines which requires deep knowledge of how websites work and how to write quality content that gets the attention of search engines. An SEO campaign can take months to start to truly bear fruit, though, and so it will require consistent investment.
Paid search advertising can be a lot like paid ads on social platforms. Google Ads will drive traffic to your doorstep, but getting quality traffic that converts to customers can be quite another story. It can end up being extremely costly to get the types of results you’re looking for, and though Google makes it simple enough to dabble a modest investment will often realize no returns.
Search Engine Marketing is the key tool in the kit of any successful digital marketer. Today, capturing your customers’ attention when they’re ready to make a purchase means that when they go searching they need to see you!
A quality, informative website will provide prospective customers with everything they need to engage with your business. Your web presence is open 24×7, landing business while you sleep.
Websites
Imagine one of your competitors sent one of those spinny sign guys over to hang around in front of your business. You’re inside minding the till, and he’s out there dancing around the parking lot, trying to lure your customers to your competitor. This sounds absurd, and it’s exactly what it’s like doing business online.
Your company’s website is your home online. Think of it as your digital storefront. It’s your property, to decorate and arrange your stock the way you choose, and to try to make your customers feel welcome and ready to commit to you.
A customer journey may start on a search engine, on social media, or perhaps even in physical space with a billboard or a radio ad. The hope is to funnel your prospective customers to your site as quickly as possible—to the only place online where you’re purely in control of the messaging.
Email Marketing
Who doesn’t love email marketing, am I right? In all seriousness, though, email marketing as part of an overall marketing strategy can help to establish or maintain a connection with customers and to drive brand loyalty or repeat business. Capturing contact details and consent for contact at the appropriate point in the user journey is essential to this.
If we try to initiate engagement via email before we truly have someone’s attention we risk turning them off to us and damaging our brand. If we only follow up post-sale with surveys to try to measure our success we might miss critical opportunities to communicate information that’s valuable to our potential customers. It’s a delicate process that needs to be data-driven to achieve success.
Marketing via email lists is about so much more than spam. The clever application of email marketing can help you understand your ideal customer unlike any other tool.
Ready to Talk Digital Marketing Strategy?
Get in touch with us. We love these types of projects. Together, we can take a walk around your business, your goals, and your budget to help you maximize the impact of your digital marketing spend.
