Getting Your Digital Marketing On Target

Whether you’re building a digital marketing playbook from scratch or refining your current process for growth, there are a few foundational components every brand should be aware of when taking on the digital marketplace.

Here’s how advertisers can kickstart their online success by developing full-scale strategies around the right goals, successfully analyzing user data, and creating a holistic marketing approach.

Establishing the Right Goals

Determining which actions you’d like a customer to perform is the simplest starting point from which to build a campaign. Goals may vary greatly as your business builds or expands its full-funnel strategy — email signups, form-fills, in-person appointments and online sales all represent impactful goals at different stages of the buying process. 

Focusing each of your campaigns on a specific metric will simplify your process, and quickly demonstrate which ads are performing well while exposing a few that might be missing the mark. Every campaign should serve a specific purpose and be measured according to how well it performs its designed function.

Using the Data Guide Your Optimizations

Refining your digital strategy requires data — after all, how can you measure improvements in performance without knowing your existing metrics? Allowing current marketing campaigns to fuel your next big decisions is the foundation of optimization. In order to build on what works and leave ineffective ads behind, ask the following questions of your current digital strategy:

• What keywords are performing efficiently?

• What is the user experience on the website? 

• What products are overperforming?

• What measurable action do I want users to take on the website?

• How can we shorten the path to convert?

• Where can we duplicate successes in other campaigns?

Marketers go through a lot of trouble to gather useful data from potential customers across different platforms, so it stands to reason that valuable information should be put to use. Even with the removal of third-party cookies, the overwhelming majority of customers are willing to provide basic personal data for a better brand experience — and even more so if a business is open about how that data is used. As a business, making first-party a priority and focusing on quality data will help create actionable plans to enhance the customer experience, serve your audience more relevant ads, and improve your conversion metrics.

Know Your Audience and How to Reach Them

Knowing your audience goes beyond finding the demographic data behind your average customer. Businesses should be in tune with what motivates users to engage with their digital content, what their needs are, and how their brand can best convey value through relevant ads.

Plenty of tools exist in the digital ad space to help you sift through valuable data. Segmenting your audience by performance will not only show which channels contribute high-quality leads, but also illustrate key differences in users across these channels to help optimize your gameplan. Where audiences skew younger you might apply different creative, platform or even messaging, shifting your storytelling techniques on channels that lend themselves to your ideal customers.

Let Your Digital Channels Work Together

A well-executed omnichannel strategy allows each of your key marketing channels to complement one another. Every ad delivered across each phase of the funnel should lead naturally to the next, creating a holistic brand experience for every customer. When your channels “talk” to each other, you gain sharper insights into individual customers’ needs and preferences and can deliver more relevant information to compel them forward through the funnel. A recent survey estimates that brands stand to lose 38% of their customers due to poor personalization practices — quality personalization is the product of quality data, which is more easily applied when marketing channels work in concert.

Omnichannel advertising allows your business to evolve with shifting trends and consumer expectations, and to meet customers wherever they most prefer to interact with your messaging. The goal of any brand should be to cultivate healthy long-term relationships with its customers through each successful interaction, and the optimal way to spark those kinds of relationships is with an omnichannel approach that feels entirely integrated and seamless for your customers.