Ideally, lead generation and conversions kick in when your sales and marketing efforts begin. However, your identified tactics will not always follow the ideal scenario in your head. Despite your best efforts at ticking all the boxes, there is always the possibility of generating low quality and low intent leads. If your initiatives are not paying off, the culprit is most likely your digital marketing strategy.
By revamping your strategy and the previous processes you followed to put it in action, you still can turn things around and avoid being in this situation again.
To create an effective digital marketing strategy process, it is crucial to go back to the basics. Do you remember how digital marketing works?
The Buyer’s Journey
As we know, digital marketing is a type of marketing where the messages being conveyed are delivered through digital channels. Digital marketers recognize that in order to succeed in this endeavor, it is necessary to understand the Buyer’s Journey or the purchase process of the customer. This is essentially your prospects’ progression from the discovery phase down to the decision-making phase, ultimately leading to a purchase.
CONSUMER FOCUS
Going digital requires an unwavering focus on modern buyers. Since consumers nowadays are wiser, more digitally driven, more socially connected, and more informed than ever, it is imperative to take a closer look at who they are, what they are looking for, and what triggers them to close a deal or make a purchase. By putting consumer research at the core of your digital marketing strategy, your online marketing activities become more targeted and may have a stronger impact on the market you are trying to tap.
THE CONSUMER MINDSET
To help you further understand your target customers’ mindset, consider revisiting the three crucial stages in the Buyer’s Journey.
The Awareness Stage is the stage where the prospect has become slightly aware of their problem and is on the lookout for information that could potentially help them understand their problem.
The Consideration Stage is when the problem has now been clearly defined. At this point, the prospect has already given a name to their problem or opportunity and will typically look up solutions through Google searches, often using long tail keywords or keywords that are more specific. They could also attempt to explore their options using social media platforms
The Decision Stage is the final stage where the prospect has carefully weighed the pros and cons of the potential solutions they found online and has made a decision to purchase.
CREATING CONTENT FOR EACH STAGE
To say that content is a crucial part of digital marketing is an understatement. Since Content plays a big role in helping your prospects transition from one stage of the Buyer’s Journey to the next, you should know how to leverage Content to Attract, Engage, Convert, and Delight your prospects. Developing and promoting the right content for each stage is indispensable in helping your prospects move through the conversion path. Lack of planning in this regard could keep your leads stuck, undecided, and unwilling to convert.
Attract
The initial use for content is to attract your prospects to your brand through your website, social media pages, or your company’s blog. When creating content for this stage, it is important to be clear on what your company does and what it can offer. This will help ensure that the leads your Content will attract are a good fit for your company. At this stage, neglecting the value of creating the right Content will either pull in low leads or leads that do not meet your criteria.
With that out of the way, the next thing to do is to make sure that the target market you are trying to tap can relate to the problems and issues you are discussing in your content. Trigger attention and increase impact by providing context that adds emphasis to their primary concerns. This could also help turn them into repeat visitors.
Engage
Once you have established a connection with your prospects, you are ready to engage them. Engaging your audience happens when you regularly create content that is consistently relevant and valuable to them. Failing to connect with your audience at this stage will stall the conversion process or cause widespread disinterest among your target market.
To do well in this stage, it is important to inform and educate your audience through your high-value content as this will help you become a reliable source of information for them. By establishing a high level of credibility in this stage, you can also encourage them to subscribe to your email listings.
Convert
The Convert Stage is the most opportune time to turn your prospects into customers. If your qualified leads reach this stage, you will know that they have a genuine interest in the solutions you are offering to them and, alternately, you will also know that they are a good fit for your company. Remember, though, that converting too soon or being too pushy could turn your leads away.
With that knowledge, it is best to roll up your sleeves and get busy creating content that is meant to effectively convince them to close the deal without stepping on their boundaries.
To do that, you need to develop a persuasive sales copy that clearly shows your understanding of the prospect’s problem and presents how you intend to solve these problems through your products or services.
Delight
Closing the deal does not cap off the crucial role of your content in digital marketing. In the Delight Stage, you will use content to build and strengthen relationships with your customers. This will not only encourage brand loyalty; it could also encourage loyal clients to write good reviews about your company. Failing to develop the right content for this stage will result in missed lead generation and conversion opportunities, which would have been effective in reaching more people through your clients’ personal network of friends, colleagues, and family.
By this time, you should have a clear understanding of the digital marketing framework and how content is used to influence prospects to move from one stage of the Buyer’s Journey to the next. Once you have mastered the framework, you can proceed in creating an online marketing strategy process that will suit the needs of your company:
The Basics of the Process
A digital marketing strategy process may differ depending on the needs you have identified and the pain points you want to address. However, a basic process will typically include positioning, situational analysis, distribution, implementation, and evaluation and realignment.
POSITIONING
What does developing your online brand positioning really mean? As digital marketing becomes ever more prevalent in daily life and in the average customer journey, the expression of strategic positioning becomes even more important to brand identity. Since a brand’s strategic positioning throughout the conversion funnel will impact the overall perception of your brand, your goal in this part of the process is to influence how your leads think and feel about your products and services.
SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS
Situational analysis delves into how well you understand your market. This part of the process will require knowing your target market. your competitors, and the general business climate that you are operating in.
To know your target market, you need to create buyer personas or fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. These profiles will help you plan and develop content that is valuable and relevant to your target audience. Buyer personas become more accurate representations if you use market research and insights from your previous clients who belong to the same category.
To know your competitors, start by creating a list and finding more information about them. Take a closer look at how they compete against you and you against them. See how they are using technology to streamline operations and improve services. How are they doing their marketing? What are the keywords they are using? Which of their tactics are effectively bringing in leads and conversions?
As for business climate, keep in mind that the different factors affecting the general business climate cannot be controlled. Regardless, it is best to keep yourself in the loop and factor them in as well in your situational analysis.
DISTRIBUTION
In digital marketing, content is important because of its role in informing and educating your audience is crucial in the success of your marketing initiatives. While there are many types of content to choose from, you need to know which ones will work best to your advantage. Website copy, blogs, eBooks, case studies, white papers, eBooks, and infographics are some of the top performing content types you can choose from. Once you have identified them, list out which distribution channel and stage in the Buyer’s Journey they belong.
IMPLEMENTATION
Equally important in devising the right strategy and structuring an effective process is the implementation phase. When you put your strategy into action, you need to make sure that consistency is achieved. This necessitates regular delivery of marketing activities and thorough quality checks. Marketers who want to speed up the pace of their marketing activities also consider marketing automation which are programs that automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.
EVALUATION AND REALIGNMENT
Digital marketing offers ways and means to gauge the performance of your marketing activities. By setting goals, you can identify which parts of the strategy were effective and which ones need to be adjusted, changed, or eliminated altogether. At the end of the day, having access to your marketing data and understanding how they add up to your marketing efforts will help you refine your strategies and make sure you are getting closer to your lead generation and conversion goals.
Changing how you do your marketing puts a lot at stake: your brand’s online presence and reputation, as well as your sales revenues, are just some of them. But keep in mind that as long as you understand the bigger picture, you can come up with a digital marketing strategy process that is accurately patterned to meet the unique requirements of your business.
At Gohan Concepts, we believe in the value of modern marketing in helping businesses thrive. For more information about our company, click here to visit our website.
You may also book a consultation with our team.
References:
https://www.targetinternet.com/what-is-strategic-positioning-in-digital-marketing/
https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-automation-information
https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/what-is-the-buyers-journey