digital marketing strategy – Indian Academy of Digital Marketing

Essential Things to a Powerful Digital Marketing

iadm — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 10:26:35 +0000

As 2017 comes to a close, many companies are already planning their digital marketing strategy for 2018. With the expectations of instant communication and evolving world of artificial intelligence, companies are planning their marketing strategy to stay updated with the market trends. There is always a lot to learn from the previous year strategy as to what worked out and what didn’t. Industry innovation is an essential practice to stay aloof from the competition and to future proof digital marketing performance. With the limited resources and scarcity of time in a small business budget, it is difficult to build a marketing plan as per the changing scenario. There are many digital marketing companies that render services in such situation and helps in getting an effective plan.

Thus it is always better to choose few digital marketing best practices rather than doing it all. Few of the marketing trends that stay on the top of the list in 2018 Marketing Strategy are as below:

1. Marketing Automation:

This is an innovative solution to save time and resources by doing automation of repetitive tasks. But there needs to be an expertise available to utilize it otherwise, it can be an expensive venture. Under this concept, the website, social media and email campaigns are integrated with other lead generation initiative. There is always requirement in the company to generate leads for sales to increase revenue. Marketing automation helps in this by using number of marketing channels and automates the tasks.

2. Mobile Marketing:

Google has already stated mobile as an important ranking factor. Thus the mobile friendly website and applications have gain significance in recent years. Every year, Google search has been made extensively and half of it is done using mobile. With the help of expanded text ads, Adwords are gaining importance and is about to become first advertising platform on mobile.

Everything done on a website, from content creation to display ads, it is necessary to incorporate mobile standards. You can always consider working with a digital marketing agency if you are low in resources as the digital marketing company can really help in boosting the sales of your products and services with the help of latest digital marketing campaigns.

3. Website Security

Earlier this month, Yahoo suffered a security breach that affected more than one billion of its user accounts. A security breach of this size should serve as a reminder of just how critical it is to ensure that your website is secure in 2018. We provide our clients with server-level monitoring for maximum security.

As scammers become more adept at stealing sensitive information, phishing scams are also on the rise The Anthem medical data breach of 2015 was one of the largest data breaches in American history, and it caused by a phishing scam that targeted Anthem employees. Today’s scammers will go to great lengths to separate you from your money or access your customer data. In our blog post, Lessons Learned From Scamming a Scammer, you can see just how far scammers are willing to go to get what they want.

In 2015, Google announced that it uses HTTPS encryption and SSL certificates as a ranking factor. This means that websites with HTTPS or SSL certificate will be given priority in Google search engine rankings over websites that don’t. Many online shoppers won’t even buy from websites that don’t have SSL certificates, because they’re afraid of having their credit card information stolen. If you haven’t already done so, your company should definitely make the switch to HTTPS in 2017.

We offer SSL certificates, website security audits, employee training about the dangers of phishing scams and other common threats to your website security.

4. Quality Content:

Anything posted on social media has to be a part of a thoughtful marketing plan. There will be a larger appetite for quality content in 2017 as social media also only favors relevant content. The customers are always looking for a unique, fresh approach to their problem and thus a customized experience is to be created to speak to the audience.

The realistic goals can be established and documented through an effective digital marketing plan. Internet now consumes more content and less advertising.

5. Paid Search Advertising

As the effectiveness of paid search advertising continues to grow, more companies are realizing that it’s something they need to do to stay competitive. Popular paid search advertising networks like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads offer advanced audience targeting features that allow companies to target their customers like never before. This prevents your ad dollars from being wasted on irrelevant audiences and helps to ensure that your ads are in front of the right prospect at the right moment.

We can set up your paid search ad campaigns to only target users who meet your specific demographic and geographic customer data, or campaigns that only remarket/retarget your ads to people who have visited or made a purchase from your website. Using paid search advertising to target in-market segments of prospective customers who are actively researching and comparing your products or services to your competitors is an efficient and cost-effective digital marketing strategy.

However, with advanced targeting capabilities comes increased complexity. Many companies do what they can to limit their ad spend and reach their customers, but paid search ad campaign are the most effective when they’re being managed and optimized by ad experts. Paid search ad specialists know how to research your competitors and;are able to tell you whether or not your competitors are doing paid search advertising and how much they are spending. They can even tell you which keywords your competitors are advertising for and which ads they are running so you can maximize the effectiveness of your paid search ad campaigns and increase your return on investment.

As a Google Partner that is also AdWords certified, we can optimize your paid search campaigns in accordance with Google best practices and setup or manage Bing, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn ad campaigns to achieve your marketing objectives and increase your ROI.

Top tips for developing a digital marketing strategy

iadm — Wed, 28 Dec 2016 04:25:53 +0000

Top tips for developing a digital marketing strategy

Here are my top 5 tips for starting off on the right foot with your digital marketing strategy.

Know your audience

Did you know that online shoppers aged 50+ convert 20 times higher than any other age group? No, well that’s because I made it up. The point is that we can all make assumptions, or go by what other people have written, but it’s vital to understand your audience first.

A rather obvious one, but we are still taking briefs that focus purely on what the client thinks is best, as opposed to what will actually work for engaging with their audience.

In a perfect world we’d start with audience research before even thinking about a digital marketing strategy; this would give us all the insight needed to nail our online engagement strategies every single time. Unfortunately we don’t always have this luxury.

However, there are still some quick, accessible tools available that will help answer some unknowns. For example, Google Trends offer insights into what people are searching for; AdWords allows you to see how many people are searching for the keywords you’re trying to target; and sites like Social Mention give you an indication of what people are talking about across social media.

The great thing about the tools I’ve mentioned here is that they’re free to use and will help you to understand more about how you target audience behaves online. This is invaluable for creating onsite and offsite content, developing site structure, creating paid search campaigns, optimising web pages… the list is endless.

Choose your KPIs wisely

I’ve skipped the more obvious step of ‘setting objectives’ as where I see most clients falling down is when they’re choosing the KPIs to measure them.

Play to the strength of the channel. For example, SEO is great for driving organic traffic so the metrics you’ll be most interested in should be visibility, rankings and organic sessions. With a channel like paid search it’s better to monitor factors like paid sessions and conversion rates.

My recommendation would be to work with your agency to select the right KPIs and try not to be led by what your executive team want to see. Where we’ve been asked to support during this process we’ve been able to demonstrate higher success levels and open up clients to new opportunities.

Keep your wallet open

Easier said than done but if you can be fluid with your budgets you’ll be able to unlock more potential from your digital marketing strategy.

A common misconception is that channels like organic and paid search are fairly low touch; you optimise all the techy bits, set your PPC budget limits and off you go. In reality these channels are incredibly competitive and you need to leave room to be reactive.

Over the Christmas period we worked with a number of our retail clients to combat an unexpected surge in competitor activity. The clients that were able to find the additional budget were able to maintain their share of voice and overachieve on their targets.

Don’t stick to the plan

The beauty of digital is that it allows for movement and you can update aspects of your strategy as you go. If something isn’t working then change it!

Analytics is an obvious choice for monitoring how well the plan is going but I’d recommend testing and experimenting as you go so you can gain further insights and optimise as you go.

This has worked really well for a lot of our clients. As a rule we like to revisit strategies with our clients every two to three months with a view to using our findings to improve. An example of this approach working well can be seen with one of our financial services clients.

At the start of the year we focussed largely on increasing visibility and rankings. After reviewing performance, and using the insights gathered along the way, we found that we could offer higher value and achieve more by focusing more on conversion rate optimisation.

The result is that we’ve been able to unlock more revenue from the same number of visits.

Don’t forget, digital is just one channel

In a slightly unusual move from someone that works in a specialist digital agency, I’d like to point out that ‘digital marketing’ is a bit of a misnomer. Marketing is the art of changing an audience’s behaviour so they complete an action that is favourable to you. Marketing is an all-encompassing term that covers a range of channels and I’d advise not to discriminate.

Offline and online channels work together; we’ve seen that TV advertising has a direct influence on search and online media can impact upon offline attitudes and opinions.

In 2016 it’s estimated that most companies will allocate at least 30% in online marketing spend. It’s safe to assume that in most cases no new budget will be available so other channels will be dialed down.

Work with your digital agency to ensure that reducing activity in one area won’t affect you in others. We’re fortunate enough to work alongside a wide range of offline and online agencies and will always promote an integrated digital marketing strategy that plays on the strengths of different marketing disciplines.

5 Steps to a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy

iadm — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 04:26:01 +0000

5 Steps to a Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy

According to a ‘Managing Digital Marketing’ study by Smart Insights, 46% of brands don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy, while 16% do have a strategy but haven’t yet integrated it into their marketing activity. But here’s the thing: if you don’t have a plan in place how can you expect to grow and innovate, to measure meaningful results and to learn from past mistakes?

It’s time to stop panicking about next year or next month and start crafting a plan that can pack a powerful punch. We’ve selected the 5 most important steps that you, the decision maker should take to ensure that your digital marketing efforts create a real impact on your bottom line.

1. Know What You Want (& Set the Objective)

Nail Your Mission:

Define your business’ overall mission/objective first – your digital marketing mission must fit into your grand plan.
Answer this question: what is the overriding objective you want your digital marketing efforts to achieve (for example do you want to position your company as the go-to online provider for computer parts in Europe)? This is your mission.

Set & Measure Your KPIs:

Get specific with your KPIs by identifying the figures you will be held accountable for achieving.
Get realistic with your KPIs by analysing your previous digital marketing efforts first – this will ensure you aim for a positive increase on your current results, while helping you to avoid setting your expectations too high.
Identify a method to help you measure each of your KPIs – for example, will you use Google Analytics to measure your conversions, your individual social media analytics to track engagement or a tool like BuzzSumo to assess the success of your content marketing?
Here’s a handy KPI template for you to steal: (Insert goal, e.g. ‘Increase traffic’) by (insert figure)% in (insert number of months).
Before you begin planning your KPIs find out which metrics matter most to your CEO.

2. Analyse Your Past (& Learn From Your Mistakes)

You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) go into the planning period in the dark. Analysing your digital marketing strategy’s past success and failures can help focus you on setting the best KPIs for your business. You, therefore, might want to complete step one and two together.

Choose a time period you’d like to analyse (it’s best to set this time period as the same length of time you plan for your new strategy) – for example decide on whether you’re going to analyse the previous year, quarter or month.

How to Analyse:

Determine the time period you would like to analyse and set your Google Analytics calendar to match this timeframe.

Try out Google’s Benchmarking Reports in your Analytics account to compare your progress to your competitors.
Don’t forget to analyse your competitors’ strategy too – create an analysis spreadsheet of their online activities (you can use SEMrush to identify the SEO strategy of a competitor, i.e. what keywords are driving the largest volume of organic traffic to their website. It can also be used to compare the organic and paid traffic of different websites so again quite useful to see how aggressive they’re being with their paid spend.)
Ask yourself this question at regular intervals: is there anything else I need to analyse that I haven’t thought of before – e.g. should I be testing the times I post my content or the types of images I use?

3. Remember Who You’re Talking to (& Speak Their Language)

Don’t let the planning take away from the people you’re trying to reach. You already know who your audience are (at least we hope you do) but sometimes they’re the first thing a digital marketer can forget amidst the KPI setting, budget fretting and channel selection.

You’re not going to make this mistake – not this time. Instead you’re going to put your audience at the heart of your strategy, cater to their emotional needs and satisfy their deepest desires. How? Through the creation of well fleshed out and well thought out personas, of course.

Develop Useful Personas:

Start with the basics and note down all the demographic information you know about your target consumer – like age, gender and location.
Then dig a little deeper and Identify the problems you can help your target persona solve.
Delve into their emotional desires, goals, aspirations and fears and document all of the factors that could make them tick (think about their conscious and unconscious desires).
You can dive deep into the ‘Audience Reports of your Google Analytics account to identify key characteristics of your target persona like age, sex, career, etc.
When creating your personas this is the perfect time to identify the people who will be of influence to them – these will be the influencers your strategy should target.

4. Identify Your Means (& Stick to Your Budget)

Three things are important for identifying your means: these are your budget, your digital channels and your team (or people). It is important to take stock of all of your resources before deciding on what else you might need for the next period.

For example, now is the perfect time for creating an audit of your existing digital channels and to decide whether you’re going to outsource specific sections of your digital marketing and whether you need to set budget aside for a new hire or two.

How to Identify Your Means:

Your Budget:

Define your overall digital marketing budget.
Look at the historical data of what has worked before (for example, have any specific channels brought you quality leads at a low cost?)
Decide whether you will use paid promotion (for, example Adwords or paid ads on social media).
Allocate a specific portion of the budget for each digital channel you want to use for paid promotion (delve into your Analytics to help you assess the most cost effective digital channels with the largest reach and conversions and the lowest Cost Per Click).
If a certain element of your paid promotion digital marketing strategy isn’t bringing you the results you desire, revisit it and invest the allocated budget figure into the channel that’s bringing you the best results.

Your People:

Look at your current team and assess what you are capable of achieving (be realistic here and ensure that no-one will be over stretched or over worked).
Identify whether you need to hire more people and whether you have the means to do so.
Decide whether all of your digital marketing activity will take place in house or if you’ll need to outsource some elements to a third party agency.
Get each of your team members to review their digital marketing activity and brainstorm a few ideas for their future strategy (the more autonomy your employee has in their role the more they’ll be on board with your new plan).

Your Channels:

Review your current digital marketing channels and decide which channels to keep and whether you’d like to invest in any new ones (this depends on where your customers are and the time you have available).
Clearly articulate what each digital channel is trying to achieve.
Make sure you have at least one KPI attached to each of your digital channels.

5. Make the Plan (& Don’t Stick to It)

‘Create a plan and don’t stick to it? But, but, what do you mean?’ Before the panic sets into the most organised of digital marketers let me explain…your plan is never going to be perfect from the outset. Not every assumption you make is going to be correct.

And although you’ve taken every care to craft a carefully constructed plan based on a set of insightful assumptions and analysis you still can’t predict exactly how your customers will behave. It is, therefore, essential to continuously measure and monitor your strategy’s performance and to change elements where needed.

Create Your Digital Marketing Calendar:

Try creating your timeline using Google Calendars – that way you can share it with your team members and allow them to edit it where necessary.
Highlight the key campaigns you’ll create and promote throughout the year and allocate a timeframe for each.
Document the digital channels needed to ensure the success for each campaign.

Review Your Digital Marketing Strategy & Identify Changes Needed:

Create a measurement and monitoring plan (this should fit in with your KPIs).
Check the success of the individual elements of your strategy at continuous intervals.
If something is not working (i.e. you’re not achieving the KPIs you’ve set out) isolate the different elements and try to identify what is not working (e.g. is it the time you’re posting content or the taglines you’re using for your ads?).
Revisit your previous analysis, personas and budget allocation and try something new.
Create a clearly defined KPI for your new venture.