Online sales accounted for 21% of all retail sales in 2020. That was mostly due to the coronavirus pandemic, but that statistic signifies a larger shift.
People are comfortable researching and buying products online. It doesn’t matter if you have a pure ecommerce operation, brick-and-mortar store, or a hybrid operation.
You need to meet your customers where they’re at. Reaching your business potential through online marketing channels has to be your top business priority as the economy rebounds.
Keep reading to learn how to improve your entire online presence with these digital marketing tips.
1. Revisit Goals
Digital marketing needs to start with your business goals. Figure out what you want online marketing to do for your business.
For some businesses, digital marketing is a lead generation machine. The sales team books appointments with those leads and closes them. It’s a better use of time than chasing hundreds of cold leads.
Other businesses use online marketing channels for direct sales.
Take time to outline your goals because they will help you make other important decisions in your online marketing plan.
2. Develop an Online Marketing Strategy
A strategy isn’t posting content on a handful of marketing channels. Strategy is the overall way you’ll reach your goals.
The best marketing strategies follow the customer journey path. Your customers take different actions at each point of the customer journey.
Your strategy should address how your brand interacts with customers at each point of the journey.
For instance, in the early stages of the customer journey, customers are blissfully unaware of your business. They’re likely to find your business on social media channels.
As they develop a need for your products and services, they’ll do an online search and click on the first few search results.
They’ll do more research, look at reviews, and read product comparisons. They might sign up to your email list. They’ll reach the point when they’re ready to make a purchase.
The best way to figure out your strategy is to create a buyer persona and customer journey map.
You have to know who you’re trying to target with digital marketing. A buyer persona is a fictional customer. You give them a name, job title, and other demographic information.
Go into detail about their day and why they want a product like yours.
A customer journey map is a detailed look of every customer interaction with your company.
3. Choose Your Online Marketing Channels
This step should be pretty easy if you did a good job developing your strategies. You don’t have a shortage of options when it comes to choosing online marketing channels.
You’ll still have some decisions to make after you draw your customer journey map. You might have discovered that your customers prefer to use search engines to discover new products and services.
You’ll wade into the SEO vs. SEM debate. Remember that SEO is focused on organic search results, while SEM harnesses the power of PPC ads.
Your buyer persona makes it easy to decide your social media marketing channels. Men tend to use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Women predominately use Pinterest along with Instagram and Facebook.
4. Create Incredible Content
If you want to make the most out of your online presence, you can’t write a post and publish it across online marketing channels at the same time.
You need to tailor your content for each marketing channel. Think about the customer and why they use that marketing channel to begin with.
Use plenty of quality images and videos with your posts to make a personal connection with your audience.
5. Be Consistent
It may seem like an uphill climb to create outstanding content. That’s not the most difficult thing about digital marketing.
It’s being consistent.
That’s how you’ll develop a following and grow your brand online. Just about every online marketing channel has a compound effect when you post regularly.
The most consistent you are, the more likely your content gets found. That’s how people come to know your brand.
6. The Journey Doesn’t End at the Sale
Have you heard that it costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep your current customers? That’s why you need to keep your customers happy at every step of the customer journey.
How you treat customers after the sale is just as important as what you do before the sale.
You should also ask customers for online reviews to help boost your online presence.
If you left the after-purchase part out of the customer journey, make sure that it gets included.
7. Measure Success
What doesn’t get measured doesn’t improve. Without some set of analytics, you won’t know if you reached your business goals or not.
You always have to measure your results. That allows you to tweak your strategies and get better results.
It’s important to choose the right metrics to start with. Let your goals and strategy define which measurements to use to define success.
If your initial goal is to get sales from your website, you’ll need to look at your sales numbers, average order, cost per acquisition, and conversion rates.
You can then look at metrics at each step of the customer journey to improve the customer experience on each marketing channel.
The Top Digital Marketing Tips
How would you like to have a strong online marketing presence? It’s entirely possible when you follow the tips in this article.
You need to have specific goals and a strategy in place before you pick the online marketing channels to promote your business.
Most of all, you need to know your customers and align your marketing channels with their journey to become a customer.
For more tips to build your online reputation, check out the other articles on the blog today!