Before you can even venture into the digital marketing world, there are six essential steps you need for success. Once you complete them, you are ready to create a plan of action for digital marketing success and see the results happen without worrying about backtracking later in the process.
1. Define Your Target Market
Ideally, you will have already completed this task. Knowing your target market is essential to saving you time and money in your marketing process. To help define who exactly your target market is, you need to take a look at who your past customers are, the area around your business, and the digital marketing possibilities for this market.
Once you have a list of who your current customers are, you can think of the reason why they are your customers. These reasons and the attributes of these customers will show you a target market and how to approach it.
2. Write it Down
Take a few moments to write a paragraph or two about who you will be targeting with your digital marketing. Write down which emotional buying behavior triggers them to make a purchase. Also, conduct research and find out what consumers need and expect from your brand. This way, you can focus on the interests and needs of your customers.
3. Identify Value Proposition
Why do your customers choose your business for the services you provide? This is an important question to answer! You need to know what makes you unique from your competition. Is it the services you offer? Your products? If you have a hard time identifying these factors, ask several customers. Offer a gift card for a brief five-minute survey and you’ll have the answers you need to identify what is working and what isn’t.
4. Create Key Messages
Your key messages are the messages you convey when you put together a marketing strategy, online or offline. To put together your key messages, you need to make a list of the benefits you offer that your competitors do not. You can make this list with the information you already have and add in further research from your competitive landscape. Once you have this information, you will be able to use it to build your strategies in PPC (Pay Per Click), your blog, or other avenues of digital marketing.
5. Scope Out the Competition
The more you know about your competition, the more you can put together a better marketing plan. The most obvious list includes what your competitors offer for services and products. You also need to know:
- Where they advertise?
- What are their strengths?
- What are their weaknesses?
- How do you stack up against them?
- In what ways do they market that you should?
- In what areas do they lack that you could ethically take advantage of?
You may also take a look at the advertising platforms they use and in some cases, and with the right software, even see the details of their advertising campaigns the results they produce. Make a note of these resources to check them out later.
6. Check Out Your Digital Market
Research can feel like a lot of work. Still, it’s essential to understand better marketing opportunities, your competitors, and how you need to put together a successful digital marketing campaign.
Use search engines with keywords for your business and observe the results. One great way to do this is to use the Google Keyword Tool and generate a list of keywords (with their usage numbers) to find what keywords are the most effective. This way, you’ll get information about the most popular search terms around the topic and how other businesses use them. Keywords are invaluable when putting together a digital marketing campaign.
P.S. Also remember, to determine how likely your marketing is to convert, simply fill out my Conversion Equation Evaluator.
This evaluator has the unprecedented ability to predict the future success of any marketing collateral you develop… as well as predict whether that marketing will be profitable or not. And, it’s 100% free to use!
After calculating your marketing conversion level, I can show you exactly what to do with your website and marketing collateral that could double or triple the number of prospects who respond to your marketing.
Just schedule a complimentary meeting with me.
