Tag Archives: digital marketing

 

Social Media Impression vs Clicks

Don’t just buy impressions – make an impression!

Last week, a business owner who has been finding it hard to grow their business, told me that digital marketing does not work for them. When I hear people make such strong claims, I feel disappointed for two reasons – one, some digital agency did not do their job properly and two, this old established business is possibly giving business away on a silver platter to new competitors because of the lack of new opportunities.

Let’s dig on this a little deeper. In the marketing world, ‘Impressions’ basically means that your advert appeared in front of someone. Impressions have been one of the widely exploited statistics from time immemorial – be it newspapers, television or online. Just because your advert has had 20,000 impressions, doesn’t mean you actually made any impression on any of them. It doesn’t say anything about the type of audience, the effect of that impression or if it prompted anyone to take any action. It simply gives you an opportunity to put forward your message in front of someone. How to make it effective, is a much more important question.

Many people claim to know digital marketing but only a few really understand the art of making it work effectively. My advise to you is simple; focus on making an impression rather than just counting them. If you run a campaign with an objective of getting leads and you are getting the impressions but not the clicks, then you shouldn’t just assume that the medium doesn’t work for you. Take another look at your audience, your ad, your message, your landing page and your call-to-action. If your objective was to get clicks and it didn’t work as expected, there could be more than one reasons for it not working.

There has been many cases where I have taken over a campaign and it has almost doubled the conversion simply by taking a fresh look at various things. Few days ago, a client for whom we had setup an initial online campaign, which worked really well for them contacted me. After that campaign, they tried another digital agency (belonging to their friend) for 3 months, but their click-through-rate, conversion and many other statistics declined significantly as a result. They have asked me to re-look at their online marketing so that we can get them back to where they were before. I am not saying I have all the answers but we focus on continuous learning and work very hard to get results for our clients.

Getting impression may look like a simple task, but making an impression to your audience is an art. Don’t let your business suffer from growth deficiency. If you need help, feel free to claim your free discovery session with me.

 

Online Marketing for Offline Businesses

Online marketing for offline businesses

Marketing in today’s world is confusing. There are traditional offline marketing mediums like print, TV, radio, outdoor advertisements and there are online options such as search engines, blogs and social media. Ideally, your marketing mix should have both offline and online mediums. In this article, let’s focus on the online bit and break it down into smaller chunks. Before we get down to the details, you still need to answer following questions:

Why?
Why do you want to do this digital marketing exercise? Branding? Is for any or all of the following: lead generation; sales conversion; repeat customers; new service offering or clearing stock? What are you really trying to achieve? Is that goal long term or short term? What’s the big picture look like? Be clear in about your reasoning. Some say, ‘to make more money’, well, that’s the overall result, not a clear purpose.

Who?
Who is your ideal customer? It’s a simple yet difficult question get right. Learn as much about your ideal customers as possible. Be clear about who you want to do business with.

What?
If you have answered the first two questions clearly, this will be an easy one. There are many marketing options available in the digital world. What you choose really comes down to where your ideal audience hangout for the objective you want to achieve. For example, if they are trying to find you via search engines, then you want to focus on Google SEO and SEM, if they are B2B customers, you should focus on LinkedIn or other B2B channels. You can choose a combination of channels to push your message to the right audience.

How?
Once you have decided on the channels, come-up with a series of campaigns reach your goals and allocate how much you want to spend on each one of these campaigns, how long will they go for and how will they communicate your message. You can use a combination of campaigns to complement each other. For example, if you are running a Facebook ad to promote a new product, you can use Google AdWords and online PR campaign for maximum impact. Each campaign should be designed to achieve certain objectives. More importantly, KPI’s for each campaign should be clearly defined.

Once you start a campaign, make sure you track it regularly so that you can make any necessary changes if it’s not working. Sometimes you will have to give it some time to really know the effectiveness of it. Other times, you may be able to spot the difference between various campaigns and allocate more budget to the one that’s performing better.

Just like the offline marketing, you need to try different things to see what works best for your business. Keep trying, keep experimenting, keep fine-tuning. Marketing (any kind) is one of the core functions of any growth focused organization. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Just focus on the ROI.