By Arif Kazi
Marketing has been perennially elevating enterprises to thrive on the back of understanding customer pain points and providing them with meaningful solutions. The age-old mass communication tools paid a little homage to measure the engagement proposition of the marketing efforts, however. In the new digital age, wherein an adult averagely spends about 5-6 hours on the internet across devices, be it PCs or mobiles, digital marketing has played a role in garnering attention for brands. It has been so given its functional and real-time, interactive environment that it provides both, the brands and customers to communicate with each other efficiently.
As the internet penetrates further into the world to help connect it better, the continually changing consumer behavior and novel business models are paving way for the requirement of a more robust and dependable marketing mix that the new-age digital marketers can rely on. With the changing times, a robust digital marketing strategy requires a new marketing mix that has accentuated its centricity from producers to consumers. Here’s how you can create a meaningful digital marketing strategy to maximize your branding impact:
- Know Your Customer
As a business, you must know who your target audience is before you start marketing your products/ services. You can learn about your customer through analytics recorded by your brand website, email marketing tools, the brand’s social media profiles, survey, and feedback-related queries, and knowing about the common queries through conversations with the Sales and Customer Service teams of the company. This will help you improvise your product and allow you to promote the key USPs of your products and how they answer the consumer’s common woes.
- Know Your Goals
More than just growing your user base and expanding the business, there must be a larger purpose that your firm strives to get at. Marketing by setting SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals approach will help you reach your goal/s in a controlled and linear environment. For example: Targeting 10,000 leads to subscribe to the Brand Newsletter in Q1 of the fiscal to increase the consumer database for quarterly product Newsletter showcase/ offers.
- Evaluate the Previous High-Performing Campaigns
Starting something from scratch can sometimes feel like you are taking a shot in the dark. Revisiting your past high-performing campaigns can be a refresher to let you understand what you need to do to market appropriately. You can also repurpose the past materials and marketing assets and conduct if there’s something similar that you need to engage the new and existing consumers with. Let’s say you need to draw a caption for your product to be promoted on social media. You can pull some excerpts from the blog post on the topic that was recently published on the website.
- Measure Your Costs
How much are you able to spend on your digital marketing efforts is quite important. You must not bleed your revenue to promote your products. There’s a high risk of things leading to shuttering the business in that case. Be mindful of how much can you spare on your digital marketing efforts in terms of capital investment. Look at the various channels of digital marketing – content marketing, SEM, SEO, Affiliate marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, etc., and choose which one/s will maximize your branding effectiveness against the sum of cost that you are ready to incur in the digital marketing spending.
- Measure Your Efforts
With all the aforementioned points to consider in place, get started with measuring how your efforts are aligning with your anticipated results. From earmarking your audience to setting your goals, to finalizing the channel and the cost that you are ready to bear, it is time for you to piece everything on a canvas and see how the performance of the overall campaign is going forward. Keep records by calendarizing the performance of the campaign over a fixed period. Things may not fall according to your expectations but you need to have a head and tail to your campaign and learn from its achievements and shortcomings.
Digital marketing is predominantly covering all industries in the current scenario, be it telecom, travel, IT, publishing houses, and much more. Let’s witness some examples of some brands that are leading their way in performing better by considering the aforementioned points in their digital marketing strategy.
- Zomato
We all have known this food service aggregator major’s game in the social media sphere and how it plays relevance with the ongoing global/ national events using puns now and then. Being aware of its audience’s preference for content consumption on social media, Zomato engages with them by posting on popular subjects in a Meme format. This increases user interaction and discussions and also helps them revisit certain posts. Hitting on the entertainment button, the aggregator focuses on Meme content for increased brand recall and sharing among the user’s social media community. Zomato also constantly engages with its customers by using effective subject lines and call-to-action in its email marketing strategy.
- Booking
This online travel agency (OTA) has been leading its way in content marketing. Providing calendarized blog posts on the website to generate curiosity among the avid travelers to plan their next vacation while also suggesting some key takeaways to consider, the content marketing strategy also hints at knowing the customer better and helping them with what they seek to know through the OTA as the channel.
- The Hustle
A daily email newsletter providing brand, it is subscribed to by several for its relevant and personalized important news about technology, commerce, and culture. Proving as a comprehensive and to-the-point information repository, each newsletter from The Hustle is thoughtfully curated with minimal words which are simple yet intriguing. One thing leads to another and The Hustle knows it just rightly. It engages with the recipients in just a 5-6-worded subject line. It is clean and intriguing enough for someone to open the newsletter. Once done, the rest of the body content follows suit, i.e. clean, de-cluttered and colloquial style of writing with more information neatly embedded in the call to action button.
The author is founder and managing director, Dust Value.