This post talks about the things that are different when you’re planning your digital marketing, compared with the traditional type of marketing.
Start by thinking about the specifics of selling your products digitally. First, think about your customer’s journey, from the moment they first get the idea of buying your product to the point where they submit that five-star review.
Answer the following questions: What do you want them to do at each stage? What would you want to do if you were them?
Let’s break this down into stages. The typical customer journey starts before they reach your website. They need answers to a problem, so
- where do they go to solve it?
- how do they narrow down their choices?
The answers to those questions should be driving people to your site. Then comes the part where they interact with you directly: this is still marketing in the sense of presenting the brand properly and sending a consistent message. More about this in other blogs, but it should continue the customer journey smoothly and consistently.
Finally, as a customer who’s made a purchase, what do they do once they’ve got their product? Post a photo? Submit a review? Reorder? Recommend to friends? Use a hashtag? How easily can you enable and encourage all these things?
Having at least sketched out answers to the above, now imagine you are already up and running with the new system. People are visiting, and you are selling them your products. How do you know whether you’re succeeding?
This might seem like an odd question, but if you were in a large organisation, the first thing your boss would do is set targets for you. There’s no reason you should let yourself off just because you’re your own boss (although if you slip up you can go somewhere private to shout abuse at yourself instead of doing it in full view of your colleagues). If you don’t work out beforehand what success is, you won’t know whether you’ve achieved it. Moreover, you won’t as easily be able to identify the good and bad parts of your campaign and do something about it.
If you don’t like the word targets, use the word Indicators instead. Define clearly what your indicators are, in terms of audience reached, conversion rates and any other interactions relevant to your business. Agree how they’ll be measured (Google and Facebook make this bit easier). Make sure they’re realistic and achievable – after all, you want to have the satisfaction of hitting them! Finally, write down dates for starting, measuring progress and finishing.
This might seem like a lot of overhead before you’ve even written a single line of your new campaign page, but planning your digital marketing properly will pay dividends in future. All the parts of your strategy link up and feed into each other, helping you build a larger and more secure client base.