Here’s a statement that shouldn’t be surprising:
Everything has gone digital.
Given how non-shocking that statement is, here is one that should be both surprising and troubling:
Up to 75% of businesses don’t have a digital marketing strategy.
Digital marketing has become an imperative component of every business’ development and growth. It gives your customers access to you 24/7 and it makes it much easier for you to create awareness about your company and its offerings.
Digital marketing, though, has grown to include much more than just your website, SEO & Facebook. Text messaging, mobile app development, podcasts, display ads, all social media and more are forms of digital outreach.
Here are three tips to help you master digital marketing:
Be consistent across all channels
This applies to all aspects of your marketing, really. Whether it’s your brand, your pricing or your message, do your best to make sure it’s the same everywhere. Say a prospect sees your sponsored Facebook post. They offer you’ve made appeals to them so much that they click the ad to be redirected to the landing page you’ve created to support the offer. However, if the language isn’t the same as it is on Facebook, your prospect may be confused. Unless they’re willing to figure out what’s what, you’re going to lose out on the business. In addition to eliminating confusion, consistency in marketing — digital or otherwise — helps your company differentiate from competitors, build brand recognition and makes your business more relatable.
Monitor customer interactions & respond appropriately
Not only does digital marketing give your business a platform to communicate your message, it gives your customers the opportunity to communicate their message to you. In order to make sure you’re in control of the message, you need to make reputation management an ongoing part of your digital marketing strategy. Keep an eye on every place customers could talk about you; good starting points are Facebook, Twitter & Yelp. If you need to get started with this, check out Tagboard, Hashtagify.me, SocialMention and TweetBinder to monitor what people are saying about your business on social media sites. Google Alerts are helpful for tracking the rest of the Internet. When you come across comments, respond quickly and professionally. If the comments are positive, simply say thank you! This may be an opportunity to collect a great testimonial, too. If the comment is negative, don’t delete it and don’t respond defensively. Do some research to see if you can gain some insight to the situation and use that to try and resolve the problem. If necessary, take the conversation offline by replying that you or one of your customer service reps will give the client a call.
Track & analyze results
At IVR Tech, we like to say, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” As difficult as gathering data on all our initiatives can be, it’s vital to the success of our digital marketing strategy. The only way to know for sure if you’ve developed a winning strategy is to track it. If you’re looking for big picture tracking, there are many tools available to help you pull that data. Google and Yahoo both offer analytics, as well as Moz, Crazy Egg & Kiss Metrics. For social media, tracking check out Facebook Insights and Twitalyzer. (They’re both free!)
To monitor the progress of your initiatives on an individual basis, look into the call tracking metrics. Call tracking allows you to assign a unique phone number to each piece of your digital marketing puzzle. For example, put 555-1111 on all of your Facebook ads, 555-1112 on your PPC ads and 555-1113 on your landing page. When you look at your call tracking reporting, you’ll know exactly how many phone calls each advertisement achieved.
This information will help you fine-tune your digital marketing strategy by showing you where you reach the most people. It can also help you create stronger messages, share your messages at better times and prove ROI.