Your digital marketing strategy probably has a lot of the essentials in place. From a solid social media presence to a well-written company blog, the basics may be covered – but what is your marketing strategy missing?
Check out these tips to give your digital marketing an edge over the competition.
- Create buyer personas to determine your true target market.
Buyer personas are surprisingly underutilized, but they’re a huge asset when it comes to determining your target market. Who are the core members of your audience? Using both raw data and well-researched, educated guesses, you can bring a buyer persona to life and subsequently improve the way your business relates to its customers.
Don’t just say, for example, that you’re targeting working moms. Give your persona a name and identify where she works. Hone in on the details. Is she a stockbroker? A preschool teacher? How old is she? Where does she live? What are her hobbies? What kind of online content does she consume? What are her values, goals, fears, and challenges?
By diving deep into what makes your buyers tick, you’ll not only identify your audience – you’ll also identify with them, which will help you to better solve their problems. This will also inform the way you target every aspect of your content marketing strategy – not just in emails, but in social media and more.
Which brings us to the next tip…
- Customize UX of your online branding.
One of the best ways to get visitors to convert is to personalize their experience of using your site. You’re taking targeted marketing one step further, providing personalized landing pages in response to all kinds of user data. This is best accomplished with a strategy called account-based marketing, allowing your website’s algorithms to create custom pages and suggestions based on your visitor’s history with your company, ads they’ve clicked on, the device they’re using to access your page, and more.
One phenomenal example of account-based marketing at work is Amazon, a company that automatically shows suggestions based on a customer’s purchase and browsing history. One way the company does this is by periodically displaying products from a wish list associated with the user’s account, accompanied by a text prompt to “buy yourself a little something,” or similar. It will also generate product recommendations based on this data, while also showing the user’s recently viewed items.
This is a particularly excellent strategy if your business has a wide variety of product offerings. Instead of wasting the user’s time with an endless catalog of irrelevant offerings, you can hone in on what the user is really looking for.
This is also true for B2B companies. For example, if a client has already subscribed to your introductory services and is satisfied, you don’t need to keep displaying the same service. Instead, lead your client down a sales funnel. You’ve established a relationship with this business, so you should already know information about their industry, company size, and other such data. Use this knowledge to guide them toward your other services.
- Use the right metrics to measure success.
How do you measure success? Lots of startups tout big numbers – tens of millions of downloads, registered users, tweets, and more. While this kind of raw data can certainly help you track your media’s traction, it’s not going to measure true success. For example, if your mobile app has been downloaded a million times but can boast only a few thousand active users, the number of downloads doesn’t tell you much.
By focusing on real metrics like retention, repeat usage, and active membership, you’ll provide meaning to this data. What matters is context; without context, you’re left with nothing more than vanity metrics.
Final Thoughts
Too many startups go for a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy. As a result, they miss out on forging meaningful connections with their buyers. By identifying your buyer personas, customizing your marketing approach, and measuring true success, you’ll give yourself a real edge on the competition.
