Marketing in the current day is far different from what we had experienced in the pre-internet era. The digital marketing landscape has especially attained a lot of importance, and businesses are striving hard to succeed in it.
Digital marketing comprises several components, and managing all of them together can be a strenuous task, but that is where the success lies. Organizations must focus on integrating their offline and online marketing strategies and making them cohesive.
When it comes to digital marketing success, four key building blocks are intrinsic to it and act as a framework for all marketers to set up, plan, and execute their strategies. A holistic approach to these will not only keep your competition at bay but will also induce more and more customers to connect to your story.
Top 4️⃣ critical elements to digital marketing success
1️⃣ Analytics
With around 60% of the world’s population using the internet, finding and reaching the right audience can be a tough nut to crack. It requires you to have a robust online presence, and you will need to excel at analytics to make a case for yourself.
Analytics is an integral part of digital marketing, and given the amount of information generated across the board, its importance is rising every passing day. Convert it into meaningful data to help you make informed decisions and figure out your target customers and also reach and engage them in an efficient manner.
Basics of analytics
Here are the key elements of the analytics landscape:
✅ Website
Every business, trying to make its mark digitally, has a website. It is the common link that connects your audience with your brand philosophy. It tells them what you stand for and the reason for your existence. Plus, you can generate valuable insights and data, which would help you in decision-making and other endeavors.
✅ Forums and comments
While rampaging through the internet, we realized most recognized brands have a blog. It is the place where they share critical insights about themselves, their products, and other vital information. It helps you build an organic audience and enables you to expand to new markets seamlessly.
It is also the place where visitors come and express their viewpoints about whatever you have shared. These can either be expressions they have after reading the information or suggestions to help you improve. Brands also build a community forum where people come together to share their grievances and find a solution. Filtering out the most talked-about topics would help you find new ideas for your blog.
✅ Social media
Social media is home to millions of people posting something every day. With so much consumer data to fiddle with, social media forms the core of analytics. With the help of requisite software, marketers can harness the prowess of social media and also excel at creating a unified cross-platform experience.
✅ Ads and campaigns
Advertisements are one of the key ways to reach your audience and inform them of your existence. The advertising analytics world allows you to deep dive into your campaigns and understands how each of them is performing. Plus, the presence of advanced tools means that marketers can unify each element’s performance and make meaningful changes.
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✅ App-based data
Brands use apps to ensure more and more people engage with them in the right way. Application analytics is the process of utilizing the available application data to generate vital insights from it. It includes customer experience, IT operations, and business outcomes.
✅ Utilizing email data to good effect
Businesses, irrespective of their size, utilize emails in some form or other for their marketing. Marketers utilize email analytics to understand the performance of their email campaigns. It includes email open rates, where the receiver clicked, and other critical insights. This would help them improve their future campaigns.
Why is analytics important?
Here is why analytics form an integral part of a digital marketing plan:
✅ It helps in understanding your customers.
For businesses, customer analytics is must-have information as it helps them figure out the right customers and the kind of information they seek from you. Data collected from them will help you generate key insights about what they perceive about the brand and how they react to its marketing endeavors. Analytics gives you the ability to bifurcate data based on several criteria, which helps in adding personalization to your pitches.
✅ It helps in making data-driven predictions and decisions.
As technologies evolve, customer behavior is also changing. So businesses will have to be proactive and adjust accordingly to survive. With a robust analytics tool, data can empower digital marketers and push them to create a positive customer experience that will drive more traffic and a higher conversion rate. It does so by pointing out the gaps between expectations and what you have been able to deliver. Depending on the pattern, you can make informed decisions to ensure you have the gaps covered.
✅ It helps in optimizing data.
Today, businesses have a plethora of information to play with, but it is what perplexes them too. Most companies have no idea of what to do with it and often end up employing tools that barely suffice for their needs. For brands to succeed in digital marketing, it is imperative for them to define their objectives and then use an analytics tool to generate enough usable insights out of the data available.
2️⃣ Creating meaningful content (it is not only creating but promoting content).
91% of B2B marketers utilize content marketing to connect with customers. “Content is king” is a phrase that digital marketers religiously believe and follow. Content marketing is one of the most vital pillars of a successful digital marketing campaign. With meaningful and valuable content, it drives people to become a part of your sales list and eventually convert into customers.
What is content marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as a “technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Curating an efficient content marketing strategy requires the use of site analytics, keyword research, social media chatter, trends, the latest happenings, and targeted strategy recommendations in a utilitarian manner. Most brands with an enviable online presence own valuable content to connect with their audience and build meaningful relationships. For marketers, content marketing strategies like podcasts, infographics, videos, ebooks, webinars, etc. are essential ways to drive traffic and continually keep them hooked.
5️⃣ Ways content helps in digital marketing endeavors
✅ Building a brand’s reputation
Content is like a bridge. It is one way to inform your viewers about who you are and why you exist. Given the boom in the digital marketing landscape, it is imperative to build trust with your leads and customers. With time, it evolves and helps in building your brand’s reputation.
The content you build is a mirror image of how you think and aspire to be a brand. If the readers find it engaging, valuable, and insightful, they will opine the same about you as a business entity. It also results in a favorable brand image, making it easier for them to enter your sales funnel and convert.
Plus, if you are continually publishing such value-driven content over time, people will start treating you as a leader in your industry. It will replicate how they look up to you and expect you to be the torchbearer for critical changes. All of it helps in building up a valuable brand reputation.
✅ Augments have a higher conversion rate
A Curata survey reports that 74% of brands surveyed found content marketing useful. It helped them rake in more leads, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Content marketing not only helps in curating an informed relationship but is known to push the readers to make their purchase decisions.
✅ Improve your SEO game
An Advanced Web Ranking survey reported that the top 5 results displayed in search engines get 67% of all clicks. If you want a majority of viewers too, you will have to focus on your SEO. With content marketing, you can create different blogs, videos, and other elements to woo your target customers to your website. It will gradually boost your SEO and will enable you to rank higher in search engines.
✅ Differentiate yourself in a largely homogeneous market
If you are out in the world creating and publishing content, it is an indirect way of informing your readers that you are an expert in that particular field. Say you are in the smartphone industry. Talking about processors and camera sensors would demonstrate your grasp of the subject. With time, the value further gets a boost when others start linking to your blogs, and you start getting traffic from link building. Gaining authority is one of the easiest ways to differentiate yourself in a largely homogeneous market.
✅ It elevates your marketing tactics throughout the funnel
Digital marketing is as complete without content as a human body without a heart. Content is the foundation of everything you are looking to build online. You will rank only when people find your content valuable. You will have a lower CPC only when your landing pages draw ample traffic. Content is an integral part of your funnel and forms the basis for your marketing strategies.
3️⃣ CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
The CRM software market is the largest of all software markets and has overtaken database management software in revenue. With the help of an able CRM tool, you can get an insight into your customers’ online behavior. It will allow you to target your ads better. For your digital For your marketing endeavors to succeed, you will have to muster a thorough understanding of your target customers. When you understand your audience better, it also results in higher conversion and stronger brand loyalty.
Why is CRM an integral part of digital marketing?
CRM tools, especially mobile-based ones, are gaining a lot of traction. A Forrester report states that 50% of marketing teams improved their productivity using a mobile CRM. Here is why CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an integral part of your digital marketing success:
✅ Curate tailor-made strategies with CRM
If you look around yourself, every individual is hooked to one or the other social media or different modes of digital connectivity. A capable CRM tool gives you the leeway to judge each individual separately and design marketing content that is most likely to excite them.
✅ Get meaningful insights about your customers
A CRM is more like a cheat sheet. It gives your digital marketing team an edge over your customers. With the tool, you get access to raw customer data and critical insights such as their connections with contacts in your database, their position, and other personal and official details. Plus, you get access to sales, emails, invoices, and other activities they delve into with the company.
✅ Manage your KPIs efficiently
Businesses use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to evaluate their success. It gives them assurance that they are serving the customers the right way. By utilizing efficient CRM software, they can assess common as well as extended KPIs effortlessly. A digital marketing team uses CRM to track all the possible touchpoints with the customer, and it goes well beyond sales and marketing. It also acts as an early warning sign when your efforts go astray.
✅ Make reporting meaningful with the inculcation of crucial metrics
A business has a myriad of data to play with, and that can often be a disadvantage. Employing CRM tools helps them distill the same and makes it more presentable. Due to their versatility, multiple categories in the business hierarchy can benefit from them.
With the help of an able CRM tool, you can ramp up your sales by up to 40%. It can not only provide you with a profitability report, but it will also include metrics to let you figure out the real value of a customer.
Similarly, CRM’s sales forecasts include scenario analysis, which can help you make early investments and mitigate risks simultaneously. Likewise, it can also draw up goal progress reports with performance evaluation alongside critical financial metrics to give you a detailed insight.
✅ Manage customer experience with a social CRM strategy
Your marketing team has been working hard and is creating a slew of content for each available channel. Plus, they are also encouraging your consumers to take specific actions to enhance engagement, such as sharing and retweeting.
You have been able to ramp up the talk around your brands, but the customers are not getting the answers to their questions. Inculcating a social CRM would help you get rid of these shortcomings. With its help, you have a real-time track of your customers and can respond to them promptly instead of forcing them to switch channels.
4️⃣ Making the most of the available channels
The term “digital marketing” was coined in the 1990s, but it has gone mainstream only in the last decade. Like any other form of marketing, digital marketing has a slew of channels, and you may find it confusing to choose the right ones for your business. Well, the choice of a requisite medium depends on several factors, such as your target audience, marketing goals, budget, business goals, and others.
What are the digital marketing channels?
Digital marketing involves reaching your customers online. Human beings, being hooked to multiple websites, offer a plethora of mediums to contact themselves. Each such medium is called a “channel.” These channels not only help you push your offerings, but are also a mode for the customers to communicate their queries.
One size doesn’t fit all. It is imperative to understand that it holds true even in this case. Some channels are more suitable for a part of your target audience, whereas others may cater to the rest. What you utilize depends on your budget and the versatility of your digital marketing. team too. But if you want to succeed at it, you will have to understand the best practices and implement them effectively.
4️⃣ Most effective digital channels
Effective digital marketing is a congregation of multiple channels, all of which come together to satisfy your goals. Even though there are quite a few of them, here are the top 4 you are most likely to use:
✅ Websites
If you are running a business, it is imperative for you to own a website. It is a congregation of product listings, blogs, and other information you want to communicate with your audience. A few years back, brands were mostly catering to creating sites optimized for the large screen experience.
But with PDA devices, especially smartphones, gaining so much traction, the focus has quickly shifted to a mobile-first UX. There are stats to prove the same too – 74% of users are more likely to revisit a website optimized for their smartphone screens.
Users’ investing in optimizing their site’s user experience can result in up to USD 100 return for every dollar they spend. Your website is one of the most happening places for your brand. It can provide critical insights to your existing and potential customers, solve their issues, and recommend the products/services that will benefit them the most.
✅ Emails
Even though there have been multiple new-age marketing channels gaining a lot of traction, email marketing is here to stay. With 87% of marketers using email marketing, it has stood the test of time, primarily because of its versatility.
With email accounts topping 3.9 billion users in 2020 and expected to topple 4.3 billion by 2023, it offers a massive digital marketer’s scope. Email marketing is an excellent way to create brand awareness and deliver branded content right to the user’s inbox. It creates opportunities for higher conversion and is an apt medium for lead nurturing and building trust.
Unlike most other marketing channels, email marketing offers you deep personalization abilities. It is the reason why it also makes for the highest ROI among all marketing channels.
✅ Social media
Social media started as a virtual meeting place for friends and other acquaintances. With time, it has now evolved into a marketing hub for brands. With 73% of marketers terming it as “somewhat effective” to “very effective” for their digital marketing endeavors, it has grown in stature every passing day.
The most basic use case of social media is as a place to share what you create. It can be any form of content, such as blogs, videos, infographics, and others. But it has also become an excellent way to develop and nurture a personal relationship with your customers. For marketers, it has also been an impeccable source of lead generation, with LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook accounting for 80%, 13%, and 7% of qualified B2B leads, respectively.
✅ Video marketing
Even a decade back, the internet wasn’t readily available to the masses and cost a bomb. In the last few years, broadband and mobile internet rates have come down considerably, allowing users to consume far more data than before. It has resulted in brands resorting to video marketing to drive success in their digital marketing endeavors.
With Gen-Z getting more impatient with text-based content and resorting to skimming most content rather than paying attention, video marketing has garnered more attention from them because of its versatile nature and being more graphics-rich.
Getting all the elements right is the key to digital marketing success.
The success of your digital marketing tactics depends on a myriad of factors. You will have to get your basics right, optimize your endeavors, and connect with the customers via their preferred channels. The pandemic has reiterated the importance of digital marketing, and we can safely conclude that it is going to be at the forefront. You cannot ignore it, and if you do, prepare yourself to be ignored by the rest of the world. Today’s marketing is a continually evolving process. You will have to be on your toes and be prepared to imbibe the changes.
Integration of these principles to success in digital marketing is a vital component. Also, this isn’t a Chinese menu where you select one item from column 1 and one item from column 2. You must manage marketing activities across most, if not all, of these success factors while avoiding cheating in one or more areas. We’d love to hear your thoughts, so please share them in the comments section below. If you have any suggestions for future posts, we’d also love to hear them.