How to assess your brand’s digital marketing needs
Let us begin with a definition: digital marketing is the promotion of your brand online with the aim of generating leads and converting viewers to consumers. Every brand needs a unique digital marketing strategy, but before diving in, it is important to evaluate your goals and requirements. This is where Seren Global Media can help. Here, we focus on four ways to assess what your brand needs before you spend time developing your digital marketing strategy.
Determine the right goals
Good digital marketing goals include actions to set, review and control the performance of your business, and they should always relate to the overarching goals of your brand. Typical actions you may want to consider include:
- - Creating transactions that are most likely to generate and convert more leads.
- - Improving communication with your target audience.
- - Assessing customer satisfaction.
- - Increasing traffic on your social media platforms.
Ensure that goals are SMART; specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. Regularly review progress against these goals and you’ll be on your way to a more successful digital marketing strategy.
Identify suitable tools
Once you have suitable goals, you can choose what tools you will use to help you measure them. There are many different online tools that can help you. For example, Google Analytics helps quantify your return on investment (ROI) and HubSpot contains a Reporting Dashboard that collects data from your sales and marketing departments and presents them in a unified way. To hold yourself accountable to goals relating to communication, you could try a social media management tool such as Sprout Social. Alternatively, the goals regarding advertising might benefit from ChoiceStream, which can improve the relevance of your campaign. Take home message: there are plenty of tools out there, be sure to research the ones that will best serve your needs.
Create buyer personas
Develop a detailed description of your intended audience, including whether they are B2B or B2C, their age and location, level of education, job title, the biggest challenges they face and any tools they may need to complete their job or enhance their personal life. Tools such as HubSpot exist to help create these buyer’s personas. Once you know and understand who your potential customers are, you can effectively communicate and create the best digital marketing strategy to target them. Remember, it is important to conduct real research rather than making assumptions.
Evaluate digital marketing techniques
Evaluating both past and current digital marketing techniques against your desired goals can provide a measure of how successful they could be moving forward. After all, you don’t want to reinvent the wheel! Does a particular type of content generate significant lead conversions? Perhaps your target audience responds well to a certain kind of survey? Which part of your website has the most traffic? Asking these types of questions will help you decide whether to continue with some of your current digital marketing efforts or investigate doing something new.
Investigate current digital media channels
Also in your toolkit are the digital channels you currently use. To successfully analyse these for effectiveness, it is useful to split them into owned, paid and earned media. Owned media are channels you control, for example, websites, social media accounts and blogs. Paid media involves paying to promote your brand via adverts on places such as social media and Google AdWords, or hiring influencers to promote your brand. Finally, earned media is publicity from word of mouth, some forms of which include social media mentions and shares, content showcased by third-party sites, reviews and recommendations. Through an in-depth analysis, you can arrive at combinations of these three media types that will optimise your progress against each of your goals.
Make sure you follow these top tips to assess the needs of your brand before designing a digital marketing strategy – you may just save yourself valuable time and effort!