4 Key Questions to Ask for an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

Before you put together a digital marketing strategy you need to ask the following 4 key questions below:

Identify Digital Marketing Goal
  1. What is the goal of your Digital Marketing Strategy?
  2. What is your budget for the strategy?
  3. Who is your target market?
  4. Is Re-marketing Required?

To understand what we’re asking of these questions, let’s take these questions 1 at a time.

1. What is the goal of your Digital Marketing Strategy?

Digital marketing can be used for many reasons and if you don’t understand what you want to achieve, then is hard to put together a digital strategy which will meet your goals.

Please find 4 key goals for helping to understand how to implement a digital strategy as follows:

  1. Branding of Company or Product – This type of campaign is about raising awareness for your company or product, where the goal is put your brand/product in front of as many people as possible (impressions) to raise awareness. You may get sales, but it isn’t the key goal for the campaign.
  2. Increase Traffic to Website/Social Media – This type of campaign is more about click through from your advert and trying to get as many people to go to your website/social media as possible (Click Through). You may get sales, but it isn’t the key goal for the campaign.
  3. Direct Sales on-line – This type of campaign is about driving the right type of person to your website to generate sales. This includes campaigns where you target specific types of people or search terms on search engines to then get them to click to your website or social media to then convert them to sales. This can be done through 2 different types of strategies which I will explain later on.
  4. Generating Sales through Physical Retail Outlets – This type of campaign is similar to Direct Sales On-line types of campaigns, but the strategy is slightly different in that it is directing people to their closest stores for your product.

2. What is your Budget for the Digital Strategy?

If you don’t know how much you want to spend, then it makes it hard to put together an effective digital marketing strategy for your goals. So here are a couple of tips which may help you to allocate a budget.

  1. Per Product Budget – The general rule is to allocate a budget is to allocate around 15-20% of the Recommended Retail Price (RRP) towards marketing of your product, i.e. if your product RRP is $100, then allocate $15-20 per service/product. This may be different if you are wholesaling a product and you will need to allocate a similar percentage of your profit per product.
  2. Per Service Budget – Work out what your profit margin is for offering your service, taking into account things like labour costs, materials, etc… and then allocate 15-20% of this profit towards marketing. i.e. if you make $1,000 for each service, allow for $200 per service as your marketing budget.
  3. Final Budget Calculation – Taking into account the above 2 figures at a per service/product calculation, you then need to make a decision on how many product or jobs you would like to obtain from the digital marketing campaign.

Product Calculation

If you want to sell 100 products at an Recommended Retail Price (RRP) of $100 each, then you multiply 100 x $100 x 15-20% = $1,500 -$2,000 for the campaign.

Service Calculation

If you want to do 10 jobs with a profit margin of $1,000 per job, then you multiply 10 x $1,000 x 15-20% = $1,500 -$2,000 for the campaign.

You may wish to allocate more or less budget to your marketing, as different people have different ideas, but this at least gives you a basic formula and guideline to work from.

3. Who is Your Target Market?

This can be worked out from a number of ways depending on which medium you are looking to use. Some of these include the following:

  1. Market research from an expert marketing research company -They can find out almost anything for you, including, but not limited to the following:
  2. Demographics – i.e. the areas/locations where you need to target),
  3. Age Groups – the best ages of people who will look for your store/product/service
  4. Gender – They will identify the best gender to target
  5. Habits, industry, etc… – Based on what you are after and who your target market is, they can identify what types of people you need and what they do.

Search Engine Campaigns

This is useful as you are targeting keywords which people are actively searching for in their day to day lifestyle. This can be very useful, for it is essential to understand the following:

  1. Traffic – This identifies how many people area actively searching for your type of product/service on average every month in the following:
  • Globally – In every country around the world can be useful if you want to generate on-line sales if you aren’t worried about sending your product around the world, but no good if you have a service which is only in Australia.
  • Nationally – In your country, or another country which you are targeting. Just like Global searches, it is fine if you have a product or service which can service the country as a whole, but no good if you a small business.
  • Your Local Region/Area – If you are a local business, it is no use getting traffic on a national, global or even state level as this is misguiding and may not give a true reflection of what people are searching for. So make sure that the traffic for keywords is set for only your suburbs, city or state according what is relevant.

2. Identifying Correct Keywords – When identifying keywords for your campaign, you need to have a good understanding of what your clients will be searching for in relation to your product. Some of the following will help you to do this:

  • Eliminate Generic Keywords – Generic keywords can be used for a number of reasons, i.e. research, buying, etc… So unless you have a lot of money to spend on this, some of the traffic may have nothing to do with what you are trying to gain traffic for.
  • Identify strings of words which match your purpose – In this case if you are looking for sale, then look for keywords which are close to what people would be using for searching for your products, i.e. 10 kw solar systems, chest exercise devices, competitor names….
  • Set Conversion Points – A true digital strategy is useless unless you know whether it is working. To do this you need to know that a click through from a search engine, is converting to a sale, download of a document, inquiry, etc… Otherwise you will have no idea if your campaign is doing the following:
  • Giving you a return on investment – A conversion point will allow you to identify what it costs to convert someone from a click to a sale, inquiry, etc…
  • Understand if your Landing Page is Working – If you are getting 100 or 1,000 click through and you have no or a very small number of inquiries, sales, etc… then obviously your landing page isn’t working and this will give you the knowledge that you need to change this for a better conversion rate, otherwise you are just generating traffic with no return on investment.
  • Work out a Cost per Sale/Inquiry – This give you the ability to make your campaign scalable (increase/decrease based on your needs). This will allow you to know that if you spend more money you can gain more sales/inquiries, or decrease the spend, giving you the ability to literally increase how many sales or inquiries that you want simply based on the spend.

3. Social Media Campaigns (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc…) – This is useful as you can create a proactive campaign to get your brand and product/service in front of 1,000 or millions to improve branding, sales, inquiries, etc…. but you need to understand are what your goal is to understand identify the correct method of doing this as follows:

a) Lookalike Audiences – This identifies who your audience is based on information put into Facebook, some of these include the following:

  • Based on your database – If you have a reasonable size database you can plug in the information of your current clients into Facebook, Facebook will search out the profiles on Facebook and put together a specific lookalike audience which will match this. The large the database the more accurate the audience is.
  • Based on Characteristics – If you don’t have a database to work off, then you can put together profiles of people based on everything from gender, age, what pages they like, etc… again the more information the more accurate this is and the better the chance of converting the right people from clicks to a sale/inquiry.
  • Choose the right Locations – If you are a local business, it is no use getting traffic on a national, global or even state level as it will cost you more and only give you people who you can’t sell or service. Be specific with your targeting to make sure you have the right people to match your business.
  • Set Conversion Points – A true digital strategy is useless unless you know whether it is working. To do this you need to know that a click through from a search engine, is converting to a sale, download of a document, inquiry, etc….

Otherwise you will have no idea if your campaign is doing the following:

  • Giving you a return on investment – A conversion point will allow you to identify what it costs to convert someone from a click to a sale, inquiry, etc…
  • Understand if your Landing Page is Working – If you are getting 100 or 1,000 click through and you have no or a very small number of inquiries, sales, etc… then obviously your landing page isn’t working and this will give you the knowledge that you need to change this for a better conversion rate, otherwise you are just generating traffic with no return on investment.
  • Work out a Cost per Sale/Inquiry – This give you the ability to make your campaign scalable (increase/decrease based on your needs). This will allow you to know that if you spend more money you can gain more sales/inquiries, or decrease the spend, giving you the ability to literally increase how many sales or inquiries that you want simply based on the spend.

4. Is Re-marketing Required?

The answer for this is Yes for most of the time and the reason being that only up to 30% of people buy/inquire on the first visit to your website (purely based on the landing page, it may be as low as 0%), while 70%+ of sales/enquirers occur on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th visits. But depending on your budget and goal of the campaign, you can capture them quicker.

If you are only after enquiries to convert to sales, social media has an option for Forms (i.e. Facebook Forms), this allows you to go from a click to a form which captures their details and if they choose to submit their details, then you capture them in this process and can follow a sales process from here. This all depends on you advert, target market, etc… to be right, otherwise this can be very expensive without a good conversion rate.

Summary

One key point to remember in relation to understanding whether to go with search engines over Facebook Marketing campaigns is to ask the simple question “Is your service/product well know and searched for in the market?”.

This will become identified through the Keyword searches, but if you are trying to launch a new product without any competition in the market or have a product where people don’t understand the need, then you may need to use Social Media to push the product and understanding into the market space, the only other way is to identify the pains/needs of what your product helps/heals/fixes.

By answering these questions, these will help you to identify the right type of digital strategy for your company which has the potential to save a small fortune while also helping to generate more sales/inquiries at a better return on investment.