Creating A Better Digital Marketing Strategy For Your Business
It’s no secret – digital marketing is the big brand battleground for most companies. Especially for small or medium-sized businesses, most of your time, effort, and potential reward are all going to be web-based, and getting your digital marketing strategy right is often a sink-or-swim proposition. For example, whether you’re an auto repair and maintenance shop, car wash, or dealership, Atmosphere is the only entertainment solution designed to help grow your business. You may visit the AtmosphereTV homepage to learn more about digital marketing and signage solutions.
But what exactly does that entail? Digital marketing is a vast, vast world, and one remarkably short on silver-bullet solutions. It’s difficult enough to get any traction at all on social media or PPC ads, and even harder to maximize ROI on them.
So if you find yourself struggling to justify the money and time you’ve spent on marketing to date, it’s time to refine. Switching up your strategy can call for an enormous amount of effort and flexibility, but it beats throwing both of those away on a completely unsuccessful plan. Start with these steps if you’re ready for a change.
Define Your Goals
The first place every business needs to start, and the first place that many go wrong. And when I say goals, I don’t mean “increase revenue” – literally everyone has that goal, and it won’t help you. Really dig into the nuts and bolts of how you want to promote your business.
For example, let’s say you’re a company. You could raise your profile by simply advertising cheap shirts on a Google PPC campaign, but that’s only going to get you so far. Instead, decide exactly which customers you want to approach, then exactly how you want to approach them. Johnny Cupcakes, a successful clothing brand, grew customer base enormously by segmenting their audience by age and gender, then sending tailored email ads fitted to each group.
In this case, the company identified a channel (email), identified several demographics they wanted to target, then dialed up specificity to create ads that would appeal to them on an individual basis.
Kill Unsuccessful Channels
All too often, I see companies struggling to maintain a million different social media accounts, not to mention a PPC campaign, and maybe a banner or two. It’s too much. Be realistic about your resources, and don’t hesitate to remove unproductive accounts.
Try to focus on what you’re actually good at, and give less attention to mediums that you’re working with simply because they’re new, interesting, or have worked for other companies. This goes double for social media – nothing looks worse to a curious client than an empty Instagram or a lonely Pinterest page. Few companies have the time and resources to make these high-labor visual platforms pay off, and they actively detract from your brand’s image if they’re left to accumulate dust.
Draw Up and Use a Budget
We’ll wrap with one of the great sins committed by small businesses. Ad budgets are vital, vital things to have. This isn’t so much because you’ll risk spending too much without one. That’s a risk, but it pales in comparison to the real threat: that you won’t spend any money at all.
Marketing costs, no matter what you’re doing. Even social media needs some cash to run properly. You can certainly run your pages yourself, but to actually see results, you’ll often need to hire or contract out a competent manager, set them up with appropriate software, and support them with paid marketing drives, or just tickets to the right conferences.
That can come with a price tag, but the difference between a funded digital marketing campaign and an unfunded one is almost absurdly large. Marketers have succeeded in the past on a shoestring, but many, many more have succeeded because money was spent where it needed to be spent.
My best advice: set a budget, then find one or two channels to invest heavily in. Success on a channel is often self-perpetuating. Once you know what works, it’s easier to to account for the time and money it needs to keep working, then start to advance on new ground. | Images via Shutterstock
