Here are my digital marketing tips, meant for those who seek a career in the industry or even small business owners looking to find direction.
My Top Digital Marketing Tips
Everything is marketing these days! Every business in one way or another is pinning all their hopes and dreams on to us guys! We have to be everywhere at once, listening, selling, developing, communicating, researching and thinking.
With the internet world exploding with popularity and businesses mostly dealing online, digital marketing is almost experiencing its own start to the universe. It’s own big bang! Having to reach as far as wide with magical bursts of excellence.
With over four billion internet users globally, and more than 3.6 billion active social media users, it not only shows the weight of expectancy on marketers shoulders, but also the opportunity available to one pursuing a career in it or for a business launching their brand. Even though up until now I have made it sound undesirable, trust me, when you delve into the world, you will be addicted and fall in love with the industry.
However, embarking on a digital marketing journey, particularly as a graduate, start-up or smaller company can be both overwhelming and frustrating at times.
To help put you in the right direction I've cultivated a comprehensive list of my top digital marketing tips from my time as a digital marketer, Head of Brands & Marketing , and working as a Digital Marketing Specialist and from all the qualifications I’ve gained on the way. Keep reading to learn how to skip the learning process and refine your own digital marketing journey.
List of Tips
Know Your Consumers
My first digital marketing tip is perhaps the most important.
Understanding who the people that buy your product or services are and what makes them click is half the battle. If you haven’t heard of segmentation yet, you should read about it! Here is a great article to start with.
There are 3 tips I recommend to help you identify the best consumers for your business.
Personas
My favourite one and maybe the most useful. Building Personas can be a fun task for your team or business.
The aim is to create a lifelike person on paper that reflects your ideal consumers and the user group your business aims to target through their marketing efforts.
Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users' needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. - Interactive Design Foundation
Where They Are
So you have an idea of the type of person that will invest in your product or service. Now you need to find out where they are and where they are spending most of their time.
This is where you should take some time and learn about Google Analytics. You should like to find out:
The main locations your consumers are based
The platform they use to access your website (Desktop or Mobile)
How they find your website (search engine, social network etc)
What is the landing page are the spending the most time on
Identify these points and you are on your way to building a strong marketing strategy.
Problem / Solution
Consumers are people and people are always going to have problems. As a marketer, it’s our job to solve these problems. We do this by clearly communicating how our product or service can solve their issue with ease.
You need to identify the problem. You can do this by actually talking to your consumers. Yep, that’s right! You can actually talk to them. Here are some ways you can do this:
Surveys
Email Automation Questionnaires
Focus Groups
Checking your social media comments or DMs
Using Google Search terms to understand what people are looking up
Once you have all this information, be sure to use it in your marketing campaigns, messaging and communication strategy.
TOP TIP - Remember, people want the answer without any fluff. Give it to them straight and back up your point.
Understand Who You Really Are
So you have done a lot of research on your consumers and what makes them tick! But, amongst all this, have you forgotten who you are? Or did you really know in the first place?
I get it, you are trying to make money! We all are. But it’s important to not forget about what makes you, you.
I have seen many brands fall in this trap. Be who the consumers want you to be. But don’t forget, that’s not what attracted consumers or you to invest in the business to begin with.
Let me break it down for you. If you originally started a business to create the most environment friendly car there is. But consumers are talking about this new ocean draining, forest destroying car that looks super cool. Would you go and copy that car for your next release just to make some sales? I hope you said no to that. What should actually happen is you should identify what consumers like about that car and add elements of design to your next release without losing focus of creating the most environment friendly car there is.
This brings me to my next question.
Why Are You Here?
If you don’t know yet, you should take a step back and work it out.
Start by answering these questions:
If you could be known for something, what would it be?
What’s your mission and vision statement?
What are your core values?
What’s your value proposition?
What makes you different?
Why Would I Want To Listen To You?
Another question you need to ask yourself is why should consumers trust you, your services or your products?
You can answer this by
Showing social proof in the form testimonials from real consumers
Have exceptional customer service standards
Gain industry accreditations and badges
Be transparent in your marketing and when communicating the brand
Follow through on your promise. Solve the problems you said you would.
Find Your Reason
I have briefly touched on this point previously. Find your reason!
This means you need to understand why you are in business. Not commercially, but personally. One of the most important marketing techniques there is, is to love what you do. Passion shows through your marketing strategy, campaigns and everything in between.
If you really believe in what you are doing and what you are offering, people will believe you and better yet, trust you.
There are two phrases that sticks in my head and I say when I think about consumer behaviour:
People buy from their friends, so become one.
If you say something with enough confidence, people will believe anything you say.
The second phrase can be mistruded to something negative, but I like to look at the positives. To me, it’s basically saying, people love passion and if you believe in it, so will they.
All About The Digital Marketing Strategy
Here we go, my favourite part about marketing. The marketing strategy. You know those people that see things in a certain way? I see things in a strategy. My brain connects dots and puts it on a map of how things can work or not work.
There are 3 elements of a marketing strategy I recommend you start with.
Mapping out a consumer journey
Building funnels
Utilising free channels
Consumer Journey
This refers to the customer's path and the touch-points they witness on their way to investing in your product or service. This can tie into other marketing theories such as the consumer decision making process.
Usually, customers look at a product or a brand several times before deciding on an action. When creating a consumer's journey map, your job is to put yourself in a consumer's shoes and map out these touch-points.
This can be a fun task and you can create the map as visual or non-visual as you like.
Build A Funnel
Ok, so you have mapped out the consumer journey. Now develop a funnel that will take them through this journey and the marketing strategy that corresponds to each touchpoint.
To make it easier, I often use the AIDAL approach:
Attention or Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
Loyalty
Once you have this mapped out, start implementing!
Free Channels
We all love stuff that’s free. Well, believe it or not, there are free channels you can use as a digital marketer. These are called social media.
Disclaimer - everything is not really completely free. But hey, if you don’t mind handing over some personal data, it can count as a freebie.
I always stress to brands, utilise all the social media channels you can.
They are free.
You never know what will work for you.
Point number 2 being the one that most marketers overlook. I often hear oh Linkedin won’t work if you’re trying to target this audience or you should only post on these channels if you want sales.
Why? Who says?
Yes, your ideal consumer will be hanging around certain social media channels more than others. But it doesn't mean they don’t have it or use it.
Think about it. You probably use, say Instagram and Twitter the most, right? But I bet you have at least one or two other social media apps downloaded on your phone? And every now and then you will have a scroll through them to see what’s up.
Case closed. If you’re not trialling and testing content on all social media channels, start doing so.
Digital Idea Board
Now, you may have the perfect digital marketing strategy, you understand what your consumer wants and you know the problems they are facing and how to communicate with them.
But.. you have no idea what this could look like in the form of content.
Idea Board Of Topics You Want To Talk About
The first thing I recommend digital marketers to do is to create pillar topics. What this means is that you create categories of topics your brand will mostly communicate about.
For example you can use the following topics:
Educate consumers about your brands problem solving mechanic
Promote key features that solves their problems
Build a community that trusts your product or service
Next, you can make this into content for key marketing channels such as social media:
Educational (e.g. how to, ultimate guides)
Promotional (e.g. style guides, product features)
Community (e.g. influencers, testimonials, user generated content)
Find Inspiration Anywhere
If you’re struggling for ideas for your next marketing campaign, you can find inspiration from anywhere.
Here is some of my favourite sources for inspiration:
Search engines (Google, Bing)
Social Media (Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter)
Websites (Alsoasked.com, answerthepublic.com)
Public (cafes, work, supermarkets)
Not only will these help with ideation, but it will also show you what’s trending amongst the community. Especially social media and search engines.
Digital Marketing Tips From A Digital Marketer
There you have it, my top digital marketing tips from working as a digital marketer. I could have made this list 10,000 words long but I decided to only include ones I talk the most about. My theory being, if I’m talking about, they must have value, right?
If you would love to learn more digital marketing tips on how to kick start your digital marketing journey or how to best use digital marketing for your brand. Get in touch with me.
Thanks for reading.
Jack Willoughby
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