The arrival of the internet and its expansion has meant that various aspects of life and the functioning of society are adapted to this platform. The world of marketing has led this process of change and over the years digital marketing has gained a position in the marketing strategy of companies, some with great success and others with great difficulty.
But what makes a Digital Marketing strategy effective? What factors can affect how it works?
These two unknowns should be the first to which a marketing director seeks an answer when creating a Digital Marketing plan. For this reason, in Web Mentality, we have chosen 4 factors that you should think about when carrying out your strategy so that you can have as your north the main factors that affect the performance of the strategies.
1.- Image / Brand positioning: Before starting to plan a Digital marketing company strategy, we must understand what the present of our brand is. Is it an auspicious present in which we are a market leader or are we going through a bad moment in the corporate image?
For some, this factor may be irrelevant, but in a world like an internet with a few clicks we can find the valuation and opinions about a company or organization, therefore we must be aware that the image that users of our company have and what What they are saying about our services or products is key to achieving good performance.
The success of our digital strategy will depend entirely on the way in which we approach the adverse scenario we are faced with, solve it, and strengthen ourselves with the learning that it leaves us.
2.- Planning and Defining Goals: When creating our strategy we must prepare ourselves in such a way that we understand the environment in which we are entering and in which we are going to develop. For this, it is important to be clear about what we will do, for whom, with what objectives, and under what parameters.
– Know the general context: Although we have years carrying out successful traditional marketing strategies, it is necessary for our team to understand that we are facing a completely different scenario. We cannot think that the internet will work the same way as road, radio, or television advertisements.
One of the first tasks we must do is to investigate what our competition is doing and under what circumstances. In this way, we will understand how our market works in the digital environment and it will help us to get an idea of the steps to follow to connect with users.
What are the trends? Are my products part of these trends? Through what channels are our competition working? What is user behavior in my sector? These are some of the questions that we should try to answer with reliable information that provides us with a good context.
– What is the objective of our campaign: Campaign objectives are important because they define what as an organization we want to achieve through our ads and they determine the tools that we will use.
In the beginning, they may be oriented to increase recognition and customer acquisition, but then we will seek to get users to commit to a purchase. It is necessary to be realistic with the goals that we propose and not embark on a titanic task that should include 3 or 4 specific previous objectives. The results do not happen overnight and a correct definition of the objectives, with rationales that support the goals, is undoubtedly one of the key factors in planning.
– Which channel will best help us meet these objectives: Another factor that we must take into account is the medium/format through which we want to be seen. What means will be suitable to distribute our ads? What is the channel that best defines us? Will we have a trending blog that attracts users with attractive and useful content?
– What platform to use to publicize our services or products: Once we know which channels we are going to use, we will have to choose a format and ad distributor that best suits our strategy.
Google Ads offers us a range of different formats for our ads. Text, Reactive, Image, Ads to promote apps, Video, Shopping Ads, and Call-Only Ads. It is our task to identify which of these formats will be most beneficial for us to advertise through them.
On the other hand, Facebook Ads will allow us to carry out advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, which receive millions of visits from users every day. On average Facebook ads convert 0.90% and generate 3.91% engagement if measured based on all sectors, not unattractive, but if we go to the world of retail the average conversions reach 1.59 %.
The important thing here is to understand the way in which users interact with the internet in order to choose a format that is more friendly and attractive to prospects.
It is important to understand that not all channels and formats work in the same way. While some contribute to publicizing our offer of services or products, others will be closer to conversion. Therefore, understanding what is the mix of media that I need to reach the scope and conversion objectives is essential to not err in the analysis and understand how each medium/format contributes to the strategic objective.
– What type of bid fits our plan: In Google Ads, we can choose between 2 types of bids so that our ads reach a greater number of users for a price that suits our budget.
Manual bidding allows you to choose and assign the maximum value that each click on an ad or visit to your website will have. But this is not simply a whimsical value, you must take into account the recommendations that Google Ads gives you through the bidding history of each keyword and the profit margin that the value granted will give you.
Manual bids allow you to maintain control of your campaigns by making adjustments to the cost per click, you can increase or decrease it to improve the efficiency of the plan you have adopted. You can also bid on each keyword, group, or subgroup of ads separately, obtaining greater freedom to customize these campaigns.
On the other hand, automatic bids allow Google Ads to work on choosing bids based on the segment to which you want to direct your ads. This type of offer will allow us to save a lot of time since we do not need to spend hours choosing the value of the clicks. Also, unlike manual bids, automatic bids will help us with the administration of large accounts in which there is a large number of ads, ad groups, and keywords. We can be faster by working on a larger scale.
3.- Knowing Our Audience: Today users demand personalized experiences and if we do not create experiences based on data, it will be a challenge for each of the strategies we have planned to bear fruit. We must know that the audience we will address is the right one, that the times when they will find us will be the correct ones, and that the information, services, or products that we will recommend meet their needs.
Global Management Consulting carried out a study in which it revealed that those companies that base their marketing strategies on data are able to save their costs by up to 30%, while their income has increased by up to 20%, the negative data is that only 2% of marketers are making the most of this opportunity.
– Identify the Target Audience of the Campaigns: When organizations understand their audiences, the probability of capturing their attention is much higher. To achieve this we must face the challenge of organizing the data that the tools give us in order to recognize, understand, and attract our prospects.
Using the same strategy for all the users we reach is not recommended, we must be able to generate personalized strategies for each of the user profiles that allow us to generate a greater commitment.
So that we can create appropriate strategies, we must be able to segment our users under some type of criteria and differentiate them from each other. However, segmenting users who are increasingly diverse and behave in such different ways can be a complex and tedious task.
The most common parameters to perform segmentation is through the following aspects:
– Demographic: takes into account data such as age, gender, marital status, profession, among others, and helps to focus on the trends and needs of each of the groups that are generated.
– Behavior: thanks to the data we collect from users, we can segment them depending on specific search, purchase, and browsing habits.
– Acquisition: in a very simple way, it is to segment users depending on the means by which they reach our digital platforms. – Purchase interests: usually delivered by platforms through clustering with machine learning.
– Remarketing Clusterizations: that can be done on your digital assets.
Although these parameters are the most used, they are still basic on their own. For segmentation to be really effective we must be able to combine the data that each aspect gives us.
For example, we could create specific campaigns to call back to our site those people who searched for a specific product in a search engine, entered our site, saw a product, and yet did not buy it or did not fill out a contact form.
The effectiveness of segmentation will largely depend on the format, time, and space decisions we choose for each group when planning our digital marketing strategy.
4.- Site Optimization: Once we have evaluated our position in the market, we set our objectives and we get to know our audiences, we can only use all this prior planning to deliver remarkable experiences to customers. There are multiple factors that we must think about when setting up our site and the points of contact with users, that is why we have chosen some that seem relevant to us.
– Mobile First: This work philosophy basically understands that the best way to start the design of a site is through the mobile version that is then scaled to the desktop. This will allow us to make a friendly and fast site.
And is that despite the fact that many think it is not relevant, Google in its study ” Getting Things Done on Mobile ” has revealed that “Almost 50% of those surveyed say they would not consider buying products from a company that has a mobile site with a poor design ”. On the other hand, Statista in its Percentage of all Global Web Pages Served to Mobile phones from 2009 to 2018 indicated that more than 52% of all world traffic corresponds to mobile devices.
Site speed: And since we have talked about Mobile First, this method does not make sense if the site we designed does not develop with speed. Currently, 53% of users leave a site when it takes more than 3 seconds to load. What’s more, for every second it takes a site to load, conversions decrease by 7% and visits by 11%.
One of the resources we can turn to when our site is taking longer than adequate is image optimization. The first thing we must ask ourselves is if we really need the image that is inside the site or if we can replace it with another resource. If it is not possible to replace them with another resource, we must use efficient formats that allow greater compression without loss of quality.
Another technique is the lazy loading of images, that is, they are loaded once it enters our field of vision.
Either way, consider speed one of the critical factors today. Not only are users intolerable to mobile friction and long waiting times, but also Google declared years ago that the most important factor for positioning and for the quality score of campaigns would be speed. Therefore, if your site is slow, you should focus on improving the response time of your page. If you want to measure the speed of your website, you can check them in Page Speed Insights.
– User Experience: It is necessary that our site be designed based on what users are looking for and need. We must ensure that each action that users complete is carried out in less than 5 steps, use shapes and colors that attract and make users feel comfortable, make a sketch of each part of the site. Finally, we must continually test that the design we have defined works, in this way we can define modifications to the original design that improve the user experience.
The ideal way to arrive at the best design for our site is to perform A / B tests that allow us to identify which version of our site is more attractive and comfortable for users, so we will be sure that the final design is the best we can create.
– Landing Page: Another important aspect when thinking about site optimization are landing pages since it largely depends on whether our conversions and leads increase or not.
Some fundamental characteristics of landing pages are that they must be easy to navigate. The use of attractive headlines and headlines that are at the same time quick to read, help the reader to quickly find interesting information that may be useful for their search. This is always accompanied by an image of the product or service we are talking about and an attractive call to action for the user.
Finally, the sense of urgency and opportunity is another key to the digital world. Give your users unique promotions that can only be contracted through the web and your users will generate a better volume of conversions.
As we have seen, the effectiveness of our digital marketing strategy does not depend only on one or two aspects, but on multiple and diverse factors. Planning, preparation, and staging will work to the extent that as strategists we are able to improve where we are weak and we promote good practices. Good results do not come overnight, they are the consequence of a long and structured process of planning and analyzing our image on the internet.
