Eight Digital Marketing Elements In Your Business – pt2

In this post, we will cover the second part of the eight digital marketing elements you should use in your business.

In my last post: The eight elements of digital marketing – part one.

We covered the first four foundation elements of successful digital marketing for businesses today:

• Planning and strategy
• Keyword research
• Search engine optimisation
• Mobile responsive websites

Part two continues with the final four items of the eight digital marketing elements that have proven to generate more traffic. The areas listed below are designed to engage with the right customers and create more opportunities for sales.

So without further delay, let’s get into the final 4 areas.

5. Creative Content – Providing Value And Solutions

So number 5 in the eight digital marketing elements is the incredible variety of different types of content. And it’s not exclusive to blog posts and articles, in fact, it’s one of the largest jobs a marketer has to do.

P.S. So to be clear at the beginning; social media, content marketing, website marketing, and email marketing are all driven by “stories and content”.

Without the consistent creation of content, your other activities cannot be activated to provide value, leadership, and engage with potential clients.

Most people by now will have heard of a “blogger”, which is someone who consistently writes about specific topics with some expertise. The problem for most of us mere mortals today is that this strategy is a bit like “putting all your eggs in one basket”. The percentage of bloggers who make a decent living from it alone is very low.

The money for most businesses is in their product or service, and blogging is a way of utilising digital marketing to drive traffic to their website.

The following is a list of the most popular types of content that you can create to generate traffic to your website and social accounts:

• Blogs and articles
• Video
• Webinars
• Slide Shows
• White papers and ebooks
• Case studies
• Podcasts

This list is not exhaustive of all the types you can produce, but it pretty much covers them for the purpose of this post.

Now you may be thinking at this point this is an uphill struggle I’m not prepared to invest in?

Well here is the bit that should interest you – content repurposing.

This is where you write content once and reuse it across several platforms. Not everyone likes to read, some like video, some like audio, some like to download a book.

For instance, when you write a blog post and upload it to your website. You obviously share it across your social media platforms. And may even send an email with a link to your list, but that’s not repurposing.

Now if you record a voiceover of the blog post it becomes a mini-podcast/audio file which can be shared on other broadcast sites online.

What if you wrote three or four posts about a specific subject, take the data and convert it into an e-book. You can now share it on your website and social media as a download.

How about taking the e-book and creating a video with it, or a live video discussing the content.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Repurposing content can reach a larger audience across more channels when done properly” quote=” Repurposing content can reach a larger audience across more channels when done properly”]

So you can see write once and repurposing will give you several avenues for the same content. It can be seen and heard by different users who want to absorb it in different ways.

P.S. Without stories and content how can you share information of value linked to your business on social media?

6. Social Media – Engagement And Conversations

Social media “the one big thing” (well that’s what they would like you to believe)!

Like everything else in this post, social media is a tool to reach out. It’s about attracting an audience, engaging with them, and caring about them and their success.

Richard Branson once quoted: “There are no quick wins in business – it takes years to become an overnight success.”

That statement could not be truer than when talking about social media. The fact is social media takes time, you can’t grow a raving audience of evangelists overnight (no matter what the headlines say).

I have always thought of social media as the desk in your office, or the table in your dining room, only the online version.

When you sit at a desk in your business and talk to staff and customers, they have arrived there for a reason. Either to ask you a question, discuss an issue, or report a success (there are other reasons as well).

When you sit at the dinner table with friends, guests, and family, you also inevitably talk about the weather (well we do in the UK anyway). You talk to the other people around it, ask questions and listen to what’s happening in their lives.

You may even give advice!

So if you approach social media in your business with this mindset of starting a conversation, asking questions and giving sound advice (example: the creative content above). If you generally care about the welfare and success of others, then you will inevitably be placed in a position of trust.

Once you have achieved that trust it allows you to ask “can you do me a favour” (different words can be used such as “please share this” etc).

Gary Vaynerchuk once quoted: “I attract a crowd, not because I’m an extrovert or I’m over the top or I’m oozing with charisma. It’s because I care.”

If you don’t care about the customer sitting in front of you, it becomes blatantly obvious to them. If you don’t care about that hot prospect sitting across the desk and are only interested in the sale, they pick up the vibe.

Now take that same scenario and put a screen in front of you, it becomes even more apparent.

P.S. Don’t get confused between the warm and cuddly caring social media and business. You can still have a great product/service, care about your customers, and sell.

7. Paid Adverts – Sometimes A Quick Fix

For the seventh area of eight digital marketing elements, we are going to cover “paid advertising” (sometimes incorrectly referred to as PPC or “pay per click”).

Paid advertising covers:

• Pay per click (PPC) – when you pay an advertiser every time someone clicks on your advert (see Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn)
• Search engine Marketing (SEM) – when you pay to appear in Google (and other search engines) search listings
• Banner retargeting – when you pay an advertiser to show your advert on a related website (those pesky adverts that follow you around the internet)

Now I don’t want to confuse you at this stage, but each of the above can be broken down further to a specific type of advertising within each area (sigh of relief). For now, we will talk generally about how it works and why it pays to be careful.

Here is an example of a badly produced paid advertising campaign

When Facebook opened up advertising on its platform, marketing agencies rushed to sell their “new” services to businesses. The problem was that businesses historically measured their marketing by the number of people who liked, interacted and shared the item – wrong!

So the agencies would say something like “let’s have a competition to give away a free iPad”, and there was the start of the problem. So the business was let’s say a fashion retailer, they gave the agency their money. The agency spent the money trying to reach as many people as possible, and get as much reaction as possible.

The end result:

• The client pays £5000 to manage the campaign
• The client pays £5000 on paid advertising
• The client also pays £700 for an iPad to give away
• The agency reports that the campaign reaches a million people
• The agency reports that 600,000 people entered the competition

And everyone was patting themselves on the back for a great job done. Unfortunately, the business now had 600,000 people like their Facebook page who were not interested in their fashion retail business. What they were interested in was a free iPad.

You can guess how much business and sales the retailer did from the campaign! (Psst, the answer is very little).

[clickToTweet tweet=”When using paid advertising in your content marketing make sure it reaches the correct audience” quote=” When using paid advertising in your content marketing make sure it reaches the correct audience”]

So what can you do to succeed at paid advertising

Here is the list:

• Know who your target market is
• create an advert that relates to your product/service
• split test the advert to try several different types
• spend a small test amount and measure its success
• Calculate your ROI (return on investment)
• Put your larger budget behind the most successful advert

This way you know how your campaign is performing, you know the best message that generates sales, and you know that increasing your budget should increase your sales in line with your measured ROI (i.e £1 in £2 return = £100 in £200 return and so on).

8. Email Marketing – Keeping The Engagement Ongoing

Email marketing is a subject close to my heart because it feeds the investigative part of my brain. As with any of the other seven elements from the eight digital marketing elements. It requires “thinking like your ideal customer”, getting into their head (not in a creepy way).

An email has a purpose, and each area of the email has its own micro-purpose such as:

• The headline – it’s sole purpose is to get the email opened
• The content – it’s sole purpose is to get the reader to the CTA (call to action)
• The CTA – it’s sole purpose is to get the reader to take the ultimate action you sent the email for in the first place

P.S. A well-crafted email to an audience who know, like and trust your business can generate massive revenue.

I have covered why it is bad to purchase a list of emails in a previous post:

Marketing by email and getting closer to your customers

So there are other ways you can grow a list of emails through permission-based data capture:

• Free downloads (see repurpose content e-book)
• A list of customers on your database
• special offers
• Offering to inform readers when your next post will be published
• Competitions

There is a raft of creative and permission-based ways of creating a list of “subscribers” that will welcome your emails. Remember as with many marketing rules it comes under the 80:20 rule. Give value and care about your readers 80% of the time which gives you permission to sell 20% of the time.

Research has shown that businesses who email their customers consistently with value always have higher sales than those that don’t.

Summary:

Over the two posts, we have covered the eight digital marketing elements that I use in my business to drive traffic to this website. And the same elements I use for my clients to generate value and sales for their businesses.

In future posts, I will break down each element in more detail to show you how to implement them in your business.

If you would like me to email you when I publish each lesson, just join my list below. And lastly “can you do me a favour” and share this on your social platforms using the buttons below.