No matter which direction you choose to go, these Digital Marketing do's and don'ts should help guide you down the path to a successful digital marketing approach!solid strategy to compete with other players in your industry in order to get traffic to your website, acquire new prospects and convert them into loyal clients.
Even though digital marketing is the new norm, it doesn’t mean it’s less intimidating than traditional marketing (in fact, it’s a lot more overwhelming than before). This is still a fairly-new way to market, tools are constantly updating and improving and it seems that new tactics are being discovered and tested every week. And all of this makes it even more complex for businesses to figure out what’s best digital marketing approach for their company.
Whether you’re looking to revamp your digital marketing strategy or you’re just starting, have a look at my list of digital marketing dos and don’ts.
The Dos
Know Your Brand and Competition
Before you spend first digital marketing budget it’s important to build a strong branding strategy and identify what sets your business apart from your competitors. Make sure you stay ahead of the competition; make your business stand out by learning what your competitors highlight in their marketing message offer and find out how their products or services are better/worse than yours. By doing competitor research, you will be able to use their weaknesses and strengths to improve your digital marketing efforts.
Write Original Content
Once you know your brand strategy and studied the techniques of your competitors you may now begin with your digital marketing strategy. In order to have successful digital marketing strategy you will need high-quality, original content that your targeted audiences will remember. This means that all digital content; everything from your website and blog to your social media posts and advertising, must be tailored to your fit the needs of your target audience. The relevancy of your content is what’s going to get your website to rank higher on Google and will help you to engage with your audience.
Pro Marketing tip: Make sure that all of your content either solves a problem of your audience, answers a question, or provides them with more insight. Let your audience see the value you provide in order to build up a trustworthy relationship.
Give your audience a personalized User Experience (UX)
Digital marketing is a super strong medium and you can fully customize it if you want. But you have to know what you are doing. A great example of personalized marketing is email funnels with dynamic content. The way that people interact with your emails can give different audience personas a unique email stream that tailors to their needs. If you are a fashion store you want to know if someone is interested in men's or woman's or even children clothes. You can extract that information by measuring the way they interact with your general emails and your website.
A personalized experience can also be added to a website. As soon as someone logs in to your platform you can use the unique user date to tailor the content to their needs.
Using a chat bot to interact with your audience is also a great way to give website or social media visitors a unique experience. By asking a few simple questions you can direct them to the info or product on the website they are looking for. Or you can give them info in a way they really love. Imagine having a chat, finding the info you need and throughout your experience you had the feeling that you were talking to a friends that understands you.
Yes, chat bots take quite some time to setup perfectly, but believe me, they will do wonders in the short and long term.
Try to be active on a few digital marketing channels
Ok, make sure to use the channels your audience is actually as well, so no need to jump on all channels. But try to spread your message and social media pressure across a few different channels and on different times of the day.
The Don’ts
Please, don't be perceived as pushy and spammy
Digital marketing is only successful when you are not annoying your audience. Even though email marketing can enhance your digital impact, it can also destroy it if your approach is wrong. Make sure to be mindful of your audience and don’t fill their inboxes on a daily basis, give them the space they need. You can ask them even about how many updates they want to receive, or what kind of updates would interest them the most.
The exact same principal applies to your social media; when your start appearing in the newsfeed of followers too frequently, you’ll quickly lose your followers.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t actively invest in your digital marketing channels on a daily basis. promotions are acceptable to ramp up your digital marketing efforts, but be sure to slow the pace once the event or sale is over.
For online advertising you can split the pressure across different audiences. If you can segment different buyer personas you can for instance target one or two of those personas every week. In that way you are not too spammy for all personas at once and you give them some more room the next week.
Don't give the impression you are selling something
No one likes pushy salespeople. Building trust is hard and unfortunately it is easily lost. take your time to build towards pitching your products and services. Gain their trust by actually showing why they need to buy your product or service.
Create a positive level of engagement by approaching your hard sell more as a solution you can offer them to a problem they have.
Digital Marketing can be your best friend, best sales rep, best client support... Depending on what your audience needs in their part of the customer journey.
Bonus pro tip: Experiment! And experiment some more! You will need to test different approaches and find out what works best for you and your audience. Create A/B test with different imagery and copy to see what kind of message a certain buyer persona likes. (even C/D/E/F tests if you want)
No matter which direction you choose to go, these Digital Marketing do's and don'ts should help guide you down the path to a successful digital marketing approach! Good luck and do not hesitate to contact me if you need any help throughout your Digital Marketing journey.