How to ensure digital marketing success when nothing else seems to work?

Every business wants to hop on to the digital bandwagon. It is inexpensive, and there is no reason why shouldn’t a business try it and reach out to a broad base of customers who now shop online! However, more often than not, many digital initiatives lose steam mid-way and fail to cut through the noise.  The problem is not with the ambitions of growth hacking with digital marketing but with the business falling into usual traps. Often their digital marketing strategies are reduced to chasing the trends or because of myopic vision; it falls short of reaching its potential. It’s been a research executed by Pulkit Gogna among various digital marketing courses to ensure the success formula for advance digital marketing strategies.

If your business is sailing in the same boat, and you feel it is sinking fast, read on to know how you can create a robust digital marketing presence. 

Your brand is the message.

It doesn’t matter how many likes you get on Facebook or the engagement you receive on Twitter. At the end of the day, it is about your brand, the leads you are getting or how much traffic you successfully push to the website or the product. Besides, there is always the onus of how your customers see you on social media. While happy customers are a myth, the idea is to respond to them, be culturally appropriate and use the platform as an opportunity to be friends first. You can turn them into customers, later. 

Social media is for engagement first, and not promotions. If you use your brand’s presence on social media to be with your customers, and not only as a means to push it, you will stay ahead of the curve. 

Know your audience. 

You can keep creating strategies, and make plans, but unless you know your audience, you aren’t going anywhere. The content, its tone, language and conduct and the platforms that you are going to push your product on- it all depends on the type of audience you are catering to. You can’t speak to a millennial in a boomer’s lingo. If you are marketing products’ for senior citizens, Instagram can’t be your primary means to push your products. However, it is not to say that you rule out using a social media platform.  A digital marketing strategy should be omnichannel, but it is up to a business to prioritise where it wants to go head-on. 

Be consistent. 

You want your employees to show up at work every day, right? You value consistency at work, but not on social media. It doesn’t sit right, folks. You need to ensure that your posts are on your customers’ feed every day- because out of sight, out of mind. The attention span of users is reducing, and the thumb is always scrolling. If they don’t see you up there, you will fade away soon. And the posts shouldn’t have to be about your products. Social media opens up several avenues for a business to be creative, juicy and sensational without being culturally inappropriate. You can talk about how Monday sucks, or how the long weekend can be a pretty good thing for people. You can inspire them, be sarcastic, make fun, take a shot at self-deprecating but just pretty much be there!

Create wow-worthy content.

You can be a talk of the town, in a good way, if you play your cards right. That’s a big ‘IF’. And there is no such thing as creating ‘viral’ content (I shouldn’t be talking about viral; it is such a lousy omen these days). The focus should be to satisfy user intent. A wow-worthy content in the world of digital marketing is the content that brings traffic and users to a website and creates quality leads. Besides, fulfilling the query of a user, it needs to be simple (and there you go, it is the most challenging task for a content creator),easy to understand and fun to read or watch.  So, if you could create content like this, you folks, have a winner! Quite contrary to popular belief, content isn’t only text-based. Content is images, GIFs, videos, emails – and almost covers each intellectual property attributed to your business. The idea is to make use of it, run regular A/B testing and figure out what clicks with your customers more and how you can milk it for more traction! Also, don’t forget to re-purpose your content. You know the time, efforts and money invested in creating something of value, so, keep plugging! Experts recommend to keep updating the content with timely updates and to make it more relevant. 

Know what works.  What doesn’t?

Knowing your customers and ‘what do they like’ is the stepping stone of a business’ survival. If you want to win this race, you need to put forth several content strategies, try different patterns and styles to figure out what stays with them. If email marketing is an integral aspect of your digital marketing strategy, you should perform an A/B testing for frequency, animation, videos, subject line, and so on. Run tests for a blog’s headlines, web content, CTAs and images. 

Cultivating your brand’s presence through a solid digital marketing strategy doesn’t have to be expensive or tricky. However, you need to follow the right plan for the right users and at the right time.