It’s that time of the year. You need to make your digital marketing priorities for 2021 and start executing them. No matter if you are a founder, marketer, salesperson, or you have an agency to take care of all your marketing needs, either way, you need to start setting priorities and deciding which marketing channels, campaigns, and activities to focus on.
I would like to share a few simple strategies that I improved in the past year. I’m sure that with more focus on them you will have more effective and efficient campaigns.
Know the business, product, service.
Before you start setting your digital marketing strategy learn everything you can about the company you work for and the product you’re selling. Find the answers to these questions first: How much growth would you need to see every month? Where every dollar spent has a real impact on the success of the business? How expensive is the product? How many sales do you need to make to hit your goals? What kind of budget does the company have for marketing? Which marketing strategies have worked really well for this business in the past, and which haven’t? Why? The more knowledge you can gather, the better equipped you’ll be to make decisions.
Know the audience
It’s really important to learn as much as you can about the customers you’re trying to reach. For example, if you are selling a dairy product and the audience is made up of digitally unfluent baby bloomers what will be your main channel of communication? Or if you are a development company and your audience is made up of digitally fluent millennials, maybe you’ll focus on an Instagram or YouTube strategy. If they’re in upper management at consulting firms, maybe you’ll try to reach them on LinkedIn. These are the questions to find the answers to; What are the demographics of your audience? What other products do our customers use and purchase? Where do they “hang out” online? How does the audience describe themselves? If you can’t answer these kinds of questions, you might need to do your own research. Maybe you can start by sending out surveys or interviewing actual customers. A lot of digital marketing strategies fail because of addressing the wrong audience.
Know your focus.
As marketers, we are kind of generalists. But besides that, you’ll need to start narrowing down the strategies you’ll rely on most in your toolkit. First off, think about which part of the marketing funnel you’ll focus on. Or focus on the part of the customer journey you specialize in. Start with acquisition which means growing an audience base using social media, blogging, SEO, etc. After that is conversion. This is the phase that is turning that audience into customers with lead generation, sales campaigns, email marketing, etc. Retention is the phase of keeping customers and building community through social media, email, website, etc. You can approach this in two ways: either focus on just one stage or pick just one or two strategies in each stage. Speaking of focusing, when you set priorities, try to do less rather than more. For example, narrow in on two social media platform at a time, or focus on refining one sales campaign and email sequence before moving on to others.
Hope you’ll find this article useful and you’ll create a successful marketing strategy for 2021. Follow our blog for next Monday’s Learning article! Or if you have any questions about anything related to reaching your marketing goals – feel free to contact us.
