Navigating The Digital Marketing Realm
Often in small businesses, managers and business owners try to get what they call “free online marketing” which is nothing more than doing it all yourself; it seems pointless to pay someone to work on your marketing with so many available tools online.
While some may think this, the reality is very different.
There are many factors to consider when trying to grow traffic to your website and lead conversion. How do you get customers to follow your journey without them going off track?
What usually happens after a period of time, despite all your efforts, is your sales begin to fall. You’ll of course try even harder doing the same things to increase sales, and you’ll do it over and over again without any significant results, until you eventually give up, lost and defeated in the complexity of digital marketing strategies.
In a time before GPS, people learned to navigate with stars, planets, the Moon, and the Sun. The positioning of the celestial bodies like the Moon, frequently move, so the people mostly put their trust in the fixed stars which are very high and hang in the sky all year long. These stars were really important in the good old days of navigation.
Navigating the complexity of a successful online marketing strategy and ensuring that it provides ROI, requires understanding of all the important stepping stones in your marketing plan. By sticking to these basic disciplines each month, you will be able to increase your ROI:
- Plan your strategy
- Implement cost-effective methods
- Be consistent
- Drive measurable outcomes
- Stay ahead of the competition
But it goes deeper than the basic disciplines. In order for an online marketing strategy to be successful, you will need a number of factors all working together to drive the strategy:
- Monthly SEO research updates.
- A secure and professionally built website designed with the user action, pain points and solutions in mind.
- Monthly website back-ups and content updates.
- Monthly Advertising – either on social media platforms or Google.
- A plan – you should plan your marketing strategy around a 6-month period.
- Customer engagement – on social media and via email marketing backed by quality content.
- An understanding of what metric you are using to measure your performance and understanding the analytics and insights on what to improve on for each month.
- Stick to one campaign at a time – you cannot market everything at once.
While the points above are as important as the fixed stars were to ancient travellers, there are many details within these factors that are constantly changing, depending on your business.
Staying up to date with your marketing strategy is a full-time job, and you need someone watching its performance constantly.
Business owners also need to be realistic about what they expect to get out of their efforts, and how much change they expect to see over time. Results are sped up by the amount they are willing to spend and getting results without a marketing plan and a budget takes a long time.
When last did you make the time to objectively assess your online marketing ROI?
