With so many ways to deploy your digital marketing tactics, your efforts can quickly become disorganized and misaligned. However, there are ways to take a streamlined approach to optimize your campaigns. Many businesses make the mistake of choosing the wrong tactics or utilizing too few of them, but the fact is that you don't need to know everything in order to succeed. The key is knowing which tactics work best for your business and how to deploy them effectively. Here are five ways to streamline your digital marketing efforts:
The first step to streamlining digital marketing campaigns is to create goals that your business can achieve. You should develop SMART goals: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Only around 3% of people set SMART goals for their marketing campaigns, but these diligent few achieve up to 10 times more than marketers without SMART goals in place.
Setting clear and realistic goals can also help you identify which metrics and KPIs to track. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, the metrics you would use to track your progress could include impressions and views instead of clicks and conversions. This will help keep your eye on what matters as you launch and track your digital marketing campaigns.
To help ensure your digital marketing efforts are successful, you need to have a well-organized and cohesive team that works well together. Ideally, you should have a team that's comfortable both collaborating and working independently. Everyone should be on the same page when it comes to the ultimate goal of your campaigns. At the same time, each member of your team should know what their specific role entails in relation to everyone else's. With a team of experts who understand how to approach your campaigns, they'll be able to drive success with streamlined efforts.
Some members of a winning team may include content creation experts, SEO specialists who can identify the best keywords, and social media managers who can share content and regularly engage with your followers.
Based on your goals and available budget, you should conduct a marketing audit to help identify the best opportunities for your brand. Through an in-depth audit, you can determine which channels to utilize and the best ways to optimize them to achieve your goals. You may find that digital video ads and retargeting ads are the best way to boost brand awareness for one campaign. Meanwhile, writing informative blog posts and other educational content might help you nurture leads via email marketing campaigns.
There are plenty of potential strategies you can use to connect with audiences and achieve the goals you have in place.
To help you understand how your digital marketing campaigns are performing throughout, you need to gather relevant data that gives you ample insight. You'll want to look at specific metrics depending on the stage of the buyer's journey your prospects are engaging with at the moment. The different stages include the awareness stage, when people are doing initial research around a problem and possible solutions. From there, prospects enter the consideration stage when weighing the options available to them. When they're ready to make a buying decision and settle on a company, they'll enter the decision stage.
At the awareness stage, you might look at impressions and clicks that indicate how many people are learning about your brand in a brand awareness campaign. In the consideration stage, metrics to look at could include conversions or email subscriptions as people enter the sales funnel, turning into leads. At the decision stage, the most important metric would be sales as you convert leads into customers. Based on these metrics and how they correspond with your goals, you may determine that you need to optimize your campaigns for better performance and to increase ROI.
Another way to streamline your digital marketing and increase ROI is to integrate tactics. For instance, using both SEO and PPC campaigns can help you maximize your reach via search engines and ads. While SEO helps you rank organically with good keyword optimization and other practices, PPC can help you secure ad placements to boost visibility. You can also combine social media and email marketing to connect with audiences in a variety of ways. You can nurture leads through email and direct them to new blog posts or offerings, while social media campaigns give you another platform to share those blog posts and products or services with followers.
By streamlining your digital marketing efforts with clear goals, a reliable team, relevant in-depth data, and multi-channel efforts, you can enjoy the success you've always wanted to experience. However, not every business has the resources or expertise needed to streamline their efforts effectively. To get the most from your campaigns and ensure their success, consider outsourcing to an experienced media partner who can guide you every step of the way.