Marketing products and services has gone digital or virtual with the advancement of modern technology. The ads, blogs, emails, and other website content people see online when they open their mobile devices and computers are products of digital marketing. They inform, help, and empower consumers before making a buying decision.
In simple terms, digital marketing is promoting products and services online, which are accessible via digital devices, such as smartphones, tablets, wearables, smart TVs, laptops, and desktop computers. Hence, it’s also called online marketing. Digital marketing doesn’t seem to be an option anymore. Now, it’s important for every business to have a digital marketing strategy set in place to reach more potential customers and attain their marketing goals and achieve more sales.
But what makes a digital marketing campaign successful? The success of your digital marketing strategy depends on many factors, which will be discussed in detail below.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key factor in the overall success of your digital marketing campaign. But what is SEO?
SEO refers to the research, placement, and utilization of the right keywords and links to optimize your content for easier scanning and ranking by search engines. In short, SEO ensures you rank in search engines.
Without keeping an eye on your SEO, all other digital marketing efforts may be useless. Just imagine a ship heading to the ocean without its captain having a sense of direction. SEO directs your marketing efforts toward the right target audience, marketing channels, and key business metrics.
Whether you follow a business-to-customer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) model, you could apply SEO to your digital marketing campaigns. Are you offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) services? You may want to check out tips like the entrepreneur’s guide to SEO for SaaS businesses to help you kickstart your SEO strategies.
But basically, you need to know the key SEO factors that could help you drive your digital marketing success. Here they are:
Keywords: These words and phrases aren’t a result of guesswork or even personal experience when searching for answers online. A successful SEO campaign entails in-depth keyword research. It’s knowing what your target audience and competitors use.
Recommended: The best tools to do keyword research
Links: You probably see links anchored on text when reading blogs or articles. Like keywords, these links are important for driving the ranking of a website or web page on search engine result pages (SERPs). They give search engines a hint on whether your content supplies supplementary information to online users to help them find and enhance their searches.
Quality content: SEO isn’t just about the technicalities of using keywords and links just to be seen on search results. SEO algorithms prioritize the relevance of your content to your intended audience. If your web content isn’t relatable, your visitors would likely leave your website and go to your competitor’s site.
Website Performance
Having a website is a prerequisite to launching your digital marketing campaign. And to drive your digital marketing success, your website’s performance plays a crucial role. If your website is slow loading and difficult to navigate, chances are you won’t earn a significant number of visitors and leads.
For your website to have good performance, it must have the following qualities:
- User friendly
- Engaging
- Helpful
- Fast loading
Test your website with Page Speed Insights by Google
The Right Timing
There’s a right time for implementing your digital marketing strategies. You can’t just enforce whatever strategy you could think of any time you want. If you want to be successful in your sales endeavors, you need to hit the perfect timing for every strategy you use.
Check the following factors that could affect the right timing of your online marketing campaigns:
Consumer peak buying times: Consumers tend to buy products and avail of services at certain times of the year. For instance, you could expect a high demand for beach products, like swimsuits, during the summer. Therefore, you need to have an all-out digital marketing strategy for summer products during this peak season because of tight competition and high consumer demand.
Business downtimes: There are also certain times when your business is at its lowest performance because your products or services may not be in demand in those times. You could take this chance to offer great discounts and other promotions via email marketing and paid ads. This would encourage consumers to avail your products and services because of the great promotions you offer.
Emerging consumer needs: Consumers have varying needs, and they tend to change every now and then. Therefore, you need to have a dedicated team to monitor emerging consumer needs so you could create a strategy to promptly meet these needs. You could seek the help of digital marketing experts like BCC Interactive digital marketing agency and similar companies to accomplish your sales and marketing goals.
Integration
It’s not enough to settle with one digital marketing strategy at a time. You need to integrate various strategies to attain synergistic power to drive success in your digital marketing campaigns.
Some examples of integrations include the following:
- Web content and social media integration by sharing posts on social media platforms
- Email marketing and social media integration by adding clickable social media icons or links to your email
- Customer relationship management system integration with your digital marketing campaign to help you create better buyer personas or ideal customers
- Giving branded merchandise as freebies or prizes to your social media contest winners
Personalization
Personalization is a vital aspect of any digital marketing campaign. Consumers recognize advertisements and businesses with a heart or concern for people. Therefore, you need to personalize your digital marketing campaigns to be more impactful and align with consumer intentions and needs.
Here are some of the ways you could personalize your digital marketing campaigns:
- Address people by their first names when sending emails.
- Use personalized greetings in chatbots and emails.
- Avoid generic answers when responding to consumer complaints.
- Use power words appropriately.
- Change the content on the website per visitor / company
Key Performance Indicators
Every digital marketing campaign has a set of key performance indicators (KPIs), which serve as a basis and progress-monitoring medium for your marketing efforts. If you don’t set your KPIs, it’d be harder to gauge the weaknesses and strengths of your marketing campaigns.
Lay your groundwork of KPIs and determine if you need to retain, improve, or eliminate a specific digital marketing strategy. You want to ensure your efforts would result in great outcomes for your business and provide great value to your target audience.
The KPIs of your digital marketing strategy may include the following:
SEO marketing: organic traffic, leads or conversion rate (the number of people availing your products and services), bounce rate (the number of people leaving your website after a few seconds), and page load time
Social media marketing: number of active followers, profile visits, comments, shares, likes, clicks, and brand mentions
Email marketing: subscribe rate, unsubscribe rate, number of emails delivered, number of emails opened, bounce rate, social shares, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, and spam complaints
Pay per click (PPC): average click-through rate, quality score, impression share, the average cost per click (how much to spend per user click), and conversion rate
Testing Methods
It’s crucial to test your digital marketing campaigns before, during, and after sessions to drive
success. In this way, you’d know if you’re meeting your goals and objectives, as well as your KPIs.
The different testing methods you might want to consider implementing in your digital marketing campaigns include the following:
A/B testing or split testing: This testing strategy involves creating two versions of a digital marketing campaign with the same set of goals and KPIs and determining which of the two yields positive results. For instance, you could create two types of articles for your content marketing—one short and the other long. Publish both articles, and after a week or two, check which of them gained more readers.
Agile testing: This testing practice follows the principles and rules of agile software development. Before the agile method, business owners and marketers used the waterfall approach, in which they set goals and objectives and work on meeting them. With agile, it’s not sequential. You set goals and objectives along the way. They may change, and so as your testing methods. In digital marketing, you need to create and implement a test plan for every campaign launch.
Budget
Your budget allocation for each marketing campaign also plays an important role in the success of your online presence. Before you even think of pursuing a digital marketing campaign, you need to determine how much the strategy would cost you to avoid any delays or interruption while the campaign is ongoing. In this way, you could maximize your efforts and gain the best results.
Conclusion
The factors that drive digital marketing success include an interrelated set of strategies. SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, PPC, influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and other digital marketing campaigns should have the right timing and KPIs to gain positive outcomes