Digital Marketing Resources
Introduction
The internet is here to stay and digital marketing services are in demand more than ever. Did you know that your customers use the internet before making 80% of their buying decisions? Therefore, your potential customers must be able to find your company on the internet. And having a sound digital marketing strategy is how to do that.
Digital marketing is a broad topic that can be pretty confusing. Additionally, digital marketing services are always changing and evolving. The hot marketing trend of yesterday is a complete waste of time tomorrow.
Today's business owners and marketing professionals must be able to change with the marketplace. Those who don't change with the times will be left behind.
What are Digital Marketing Services?
Marketing comes in many different categories. Traditional marketing efforts include outbound phone calls, print advertising, and physical marketing. This is known as outbound marketing. Basically, marketers and sales professionals go to prospective clients and customers and convince them to become customers.
Digital marketing is different. Digital marketing includes email, search engine optimization, social media, online advertising, and more. With digital marketing, the marketing direction is inbound. This means that potential clients and customers come to your business. In fact, inbound marketing strategy is based on attracting, engaging, and delighting clients and customers. This means that your potential customers are already interested in doing business with you when they contact you. This generates more customer loyalty, more repeat business, and more profitable business.
A business without customers cannot survive for long. Without customers, your business is just an expensive hobby. So, how do today's business owners and marketing professionals find and keep new customers in the digital age?
"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."
-Peter Drucker, Legendary Business Management Consultant
If you have never heard of Peter Drucker, he invented the framework for today's marketing and business management.
Read here for more information on Peter Drucker and his legacy.
Identify Your Target Markets
Remember the excitement you felt when you started your business? It was as if nothing could stop you. Then, the phone didn't ring. You hung your proverbial shingle and nothing happened. It was if the world didn't care about your business. The truth is that the world didn't know about your business.
In the beginning, you probably took on every customer you could find who would listen to you about your business. This is a great strategy for getting started and building an early reputation. However, it soon becomes time to make money. After all, you've got bills to pay. If you offer bargain basement pricing in a competitive market, this is not a great strategy for long-term business success. Your business simply won't make it.
That's why you can't do business with just anyone. You have to decide who you want to do business with. Which customers will fit into your long-term strategy to grow your business? That is why it is crucial to identify your target market.
Who Do You Want to Do Business With?
Targeting your marketing is as simple as this. Who needs your services? Who can afford your services? For example, if you are selling a high-ticket item such as a Mercedes Benz, you don't want to target anyone. You want to target people who can afford to buy a Mercedes-Benz. Remember that not everyone who can afford a Mercedes-Benz may want to buy one. This being said, you want to target people who not only have the means to purchase a Mercedes-Benz but who also want to own a Mercedes-Benz.
The same is true for your product or service. Every prospect won't be a good fit for your company. If your business has a short sales cycle, you don't necessarily need an elaborate marketing campaign. However, if your business sales cycle takes more than ten contacts, you will need to take more steps to ensure your potential customers know who you are and what services you offer.
Define Your Buyer Personas
One way to help define your target market is to think of your current customers and prospects. Some of your prospects like to think things over and make buying decisions slowly and methodically. Other buyers like to make decisions quickly and get it done. One way to help determine who these buyers are is by developing buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your customers and prospects. Buyer personas can help you determine who your buyers are, likely actions they would take, and whether or not each persona is a good fit for your business' offerings.
Developing Your Ideal Buyer Profile
Do you know what your ideal buyer looks like? If you have been in business long, you probably have an idea of those customers you like and those customers you would recommend to your competitor. An ideal buyer profile defines the perfect client that your company solves for. Mapping out your ideal buyer profile allows you to identify problems that you haven't noticed before. This helps you determine new opportunities to solve additional problems for your customer or client. Where there are new opportunities to solve, there are new opportunities for additional revenue and profits.
Get More Leads
Lead generation is one of the mysteries of being in business today. If you are a marketing manager or a business owner, finding and attracting qualified leads is the lifeblood of your business. Without new leads, your business won't last long.
Here are some methods for you to start attracting clients and customers with digital marketing.
Content Strategy
If you have been creating content but no one is paying attention, it could be time to take a look at your content strategy. If you don't have a content strategy, then it is time to develop one. The days of putting just any content out there and hoping people see it are over. And if they can't see your content, they can't engage with you and their business goes to someone else.
Creating a content strategy is essential for ranking on today's sophisticated search engines and attracting customers. Content strategy goes beyond just web content. Maybe you can offer an eBook to attract sign-ups. Maybe you are thinking of starting an email campaign to nurture your leads and help them find your products and services.
Content Creation
When most people think of content creation, they think of blogging. Blogging is a big part of content creation but it isn't the whole thing. Content creation must fit with your content strategy or else it will not be as effective as is could be.
Search Engine Optimization
In the early days of the internet, search engine optimization (or SEO) revolved around keywords. Search algorithms were basic and counted the number of times keywords were found on a page.
Search engine optimization is only one of the many digital marketing services available. Many business owners and marketing professionals have seen organic SEO as a quick way to generate business. Today, over 1.7 billion websites compete for the top spot-on search engine results pages (SERP's). Therefore, only the best-planned and best-maintained sites will make that cut.
Convert More Leads
This is where the conversation goes from talking about marketing to sales. After all, nothing happens in business until someone sells something. Getting the sale and getting paid for it is the ultimate culmination in solving your customer's problem. This also allows you to pay bills, maintain your operating costs, pay your employees, and ultimately put food on the table. Closing sales is where the rubber meets the road for your business and your survival.
Customer Relationship Management
To sell your products and services, you need customers. No matter what your business stage, you will always have more prospects than customers.
There are business professionals who remember the "one-call-close," where you close the sale on the initial customer contact. A lot of companies did business this way in the past. Salespeople could sell to a largely uninformed customer and close the sale in one call. That was in the days before the internet.
Now, even for smaller ticket sales, your sales cycle is longer and requires more contacts with prospects. Your customers are more informed than ever before. Customer relationship management (or CRM for short) is how you manage those contacts. In the past, a CRM system could have consisted of index cards organized alphabetically in a card file. Every day, sales professionals would comb through their card files to find out who to call that day.
These days, CRM is managed by software (thank goodness). CRM's can help sales leaders manage pipelines, sales professionals manage customer contacts and marketers capture more leads. Business owners can free up their time by focusing on customer contacts and be more productive.
Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns are one of the most effective ways to nurture leads into sales. The more positive customer contacts you have the more interested you can keep your prospects in buying. If you offer a subscription or recurring purchase, email marketing is how you can keep your customer's attention and keep them engaged.
Conclusion
In today's world, digital marketing services are vital to your business success. To thrive, you need to find new ways to attract, engage, and delight your prospects to convert more prospects into customers. Then you need to nurture those customers into repeat customers. Turning repeat customers into your business evangelists is how you can create a growing successful business over time.