If you talk with most modern-day entrepreneurs, they know that they need to use digital marketing channels to their advantage. Many of these entrepreneurs will, at most, create a website and hope for the best. However, to remain competitive in the digital world, they need to invest in a digital marketing strategy that will allow them to grow their inbound traffic, leads, and sales so their business can grow.
In this article, the digital marketing team from Digital Next shares tactics and the impacts that can be expected; all of which will also trigger business growth.
Niche targeting
The first thing that every business needs to identify is the niche that they are targeting. When putting a business online, it is easy to tell if the business idea is too general, since there won’t be much traffic going to the website.
It’s important that the niche and the USP of the business are strong enough to break through the noise in the market. There are a few ways businesses can achieve this in the online space.
1. Specialize the business in a local market
The business can focus on a town, city, state or country. To get the best response, the business should focus on a target area where they service customers in that specific area. For example, instead of focusing on being a “Physiotherapist in London”, you would be better to focus on “Physiotherapist in Chelsea” and focusing your marketing efforts to the local Chelsea area.
The benefit of this approach is that the business will be able to focus on a core market and will be able to attract potential customers that have a ‘high-intent’ to convert.
2. Specialize in the lifestyle interests of your target audience
Businesses can identify the specific interests of your target market and offer them a tailored product or service. For example, if the business offers coffee, the business could offer a special coffee for people that like a certain television franchise, such as Star Wars, Game of Thrones, or Marvel movies.
This would also give the business the opportunity for an alternative PR angle.
3. Specialize in targeting specific customer demographics
The business may choose to only specialise in working with one type of customer. For example, if the business is a gym, the target demographic could target women that are under 30 years old and that live in certain postcodes.
Note – In online marketing, it’s important to identify the micro niches so that a business can penetrate competitive markets and carve out their niche for future expansion. Many businesses make the mistake of going after a general niche that is far too competitive. This usually leads to an expensive and unsuccessful campaign. Identify the micro-niches and build a web portfolio that will position your business to compete in the more competitive niches in the future.
There is an ability to build an automated conversion funnel.
The great thing with digital marketing is that it can be developed to work for the business 24h a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The conversion funnel will attract prospective customers, turn these prospects into qualified leads, will turn them into buyers and can trigger referral sales, if the conversion funnel is setup correctly for the business. Once this is in place, the business will only need to focus on scaling through volume to build the business.
In order for the business to get into this position, the following needs to be implemented:
1. Commercial conversion process
This is where products or services that are being offered through the site have a consistent conversion rate for commercial sales. For example, if the business converts 2% of all website visitors at an average basket value of $100, the business then needs to focus on increasing qualified traffic to the website to scale the business’ growth.
2. Retargeting strategy
Is there a process on the site where customers can be retargeted through advertising or can they opt-into a database where they can be remarketed to? It’s important that this is in place, as it means the business can increase its awareness and trigger sales from traffic that would have been lost.
How can this be done?
Businesses can set up retargeting campaigns using Google Ads, Facebook Ads (across Facebook and Instagram), LinkedIn and other remarketing providers.
Insights from digital marketing can be used as intelligence to grow the business
Digital marketing can provide businesses with data direct from the customer or users. These insights can be used to help develop the business further. The business will need to have a process in place where it can track people’s behaviour, receive feedback, and implement the feedback quickly to improve the product, service, or experience that is being offered.
How can this be done?
Insights from Google Analytics
Google Analytics should be installed on the business’ site to receive insights on how people find the content that’s on the site, as well as how they navigate on the website. So, the insights may show the type of content that people prefer to engage with, or even the type of content that triggers conversions.
Insights from Google Ads search intent
If the business is running a Google Ads campaign, you will be able to pull a search query report that will show you the exact searches that people are using to find the business online. It’s possible to dive even deeper into these reports to find the location that they are searching from down to their town and even zip code.
You can even assess the search intent by demographics such as gender and age. These insights can be used for other marketing activities in your business such as sales letters, radio advertising, video advertising, display ads and more.
Traffic generation opportunities
Once the business’ website converts, the digital marketing activities need to focus on sourcing and generating new traffic to the website. The good thing is there are several traffic sources available on the web. The business will need to test different traffic sources to see which ones are commercially viable for the business to invest in over the long-term. Below, we have shared a few of the traffic sources that tend to generate a good ROI.
Paid search marketing
There are a few platforms where this activity can be implemented, however, Google has the largest global market share. Launching into the market is instant, although the cost to stay in the market can be expensive depending on the niche that you are in.
It does offer the opportunity to test and refine paid marketing activities quickly, which is an advantage. Plus, insights from the activity can be funneled into other digital marketing activities.
As long as the ROI is greater than the cost per customer acquisition, the business can scale growth simply by increasing its budget.
Content marketing and organic search (SEO)
This is the most lucrative channel for businesses since the cost to acquire the customer is free, compared to other marketing channels. However, there are several factors that affect a website’s ability to rank on search engines such as Google. These ranking factors can take time and affect the business’ projected performance since a timeline can’t be determined. A process can be implemented to project the SEO performance. However, everything is subject to the search engine displaying web content for keywords that will generate sufficient web traffic.
If the business implements a content marketing strategy, the website can gain visibility for keywords and generate free web traffic. The content published in the form of blog posts or articles can then lift the entire site to rank at the top of Google for lead or customer generating keywords.
Email marketing
The business can foster a relationship with its current customers by having them added to a user database (with their permission). They can then be contacted with offers from your business, which will trigger sales and referrals for your business.
What can businesses expect from digital marketing?
If the business can validate that their products or services will convert on the web, they will be able to grow the business by increasing the amount of qualified traffic to the business through different digital marketing channels and referrals.
Conclusion
Businesses have a great opportunity to grow on the web. It is niche dependent, however there are several proven and emerging digital marketing channels that can be tested and validated by the business to see if it will provide a return on investment.
