Digital marketing offers advertisers a powerful and effective way to reach potential buyers and stay in touch with customers. All businesses can benefit from starting or adding digital direct marketing tactics to their advertising strategies. No matter your business – whether you are B2B or B2C or are in the health insurance, auto repair, or financial services industry – implementing a digital strategy will measurably benefit your bottom line. It is also essential to staying competitive in today’s market.
It is often (and sometimes mistakenly) thought that digital marketing is universally quick, easy, and cheap. While that can be the case, it takes strategic thought, careful planning, and the right media mix at the right time to generate hard-core business results. You must first pinpoint the right blend of the primary digital marketing components of Paid Search, Social, SEO, and Email. To do this, consider the following three questions: What are my goals? How much can I spend? How much time do I have?
These are the three keys to unlocking your perfect digital marketing media mix.
1. Goals – What do you want to achieve?
Before you begin your digital marketing efforts, identify specifically what you want to achieve. Setting realistic and measurable goals is the only way to succeed with any digital direct marketing strategy. A strategy to drive measurable leads will be very different from for an awareness-based goal. The same goes for setting your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – if you don’t have measurable goals, you won’t be able to accurately determine your campaign’s success.
For example, what if you are just starting out and want to generate a specific number of leads? You may wish to begin with a paid search campaign. This way when people search for solutions to a problem your product solves, they’ll see your ad, land on your page, and ideally enter your sales stream.
But what if consumers have already expressed an interest and you want to entice them to become more engaged? In this case, you may want to leverage an email campaign. This will allow you to provide them with added information on a topic they’ve already demonstrated their interest in.
2. Budget – How much $$$ are you willing to invest?
Having a clear understanding of your budget will help you select the right digital strategies for your media mix. Marketing noobs may try to tell you that “Digital strategies are cheap; after all, you are only paying a few dollars (maybe even cents) per click. Practically every dime spent is returned tenfold, right?” WRONG! Starting with the wrong digital strategy can blow through hundreds and even thousands of dollars with little to no return.
If you’re strapped for cash (and who has money to burn?) and you’ve set your goals, start with these grassroots digital techniques:
- To drive leads — build a highly targeted paid search strategy with a fully optimized landing page. This approach can help achieve your goal without needing a lot of spend. (BONUS TIP: If you have a highly visual product, test Facebook lead ads.)
- To get people to visit your Web page — look at Google Display and Facebook campaigns. Both are great ways to show off your brand and generate a lot of clicks for relatively low spend.
- To reconnect with existing customers — start an email marketing campaign. This is a great way to make the most of your marketing spend. You already have your customers’ information – reengaging them is a great way to make one-time customers turn into brand advocates.
When you have more to spend, you have more options. However, throwing money into a poorly budgeted digital campaign can still result in a waste of spend and low results. Start with a carefully budgeted campaign using the tactics above. Once you settle on a strategy that fits your goals, you can increase your budget.
3. Time – How long are you willing to wait for success?
Beginning a digital direct response campaign can be overwhelming. There is a lot of pressure to get results quickly since you are able to see the data change in real-time. However, timing is important to ensure the success of your digital campaigns. Making decisions on only a few days of data can not only cause confusion, but also hurt your profitability.
How long you have to drive results is also important to consider when deciding on a digital strategy.
- If you need fast results or are planning for an event in the near future, a paid search campaign may be best-suited for your needs.
- However, if you are looking to grow and strengthen your brand over a period of months or even years, long-term tactics like SEO might be for you.
When combined with strong goals and a clear budget, knowing your timeframe can help you achieve success in your digital efforts.
Bonus Tip: Measure EVERYTHING!
Ignorance is not always bliss. Measuring your digital efforts is essential to keep you tracking toward your goals, budget, and timeframe. One of the biggest benefits of a digital direct campaign is that you can get real-time data. By measuring everything from impressions and clicks to conversions, you can make fast optimizations to improve the strength of your campaigns and gain valuable insights on aspects of your marketing strategy that you can use to grow tactics outside of digital.
DMW Direct has considerable experience in helping clients establish the right strategy for their digital direct marketing initiatives and uncovering actionable learnings to surpass client goals. Let us know how we can help start your next campaign!