While a nonexistent or inconsistent digital presence can drive away your potential customers, a new digital marketing strategy could be the approach you need to raise brand awareness and convert your audience into buyers. With the right digital marketing strategy, you can shift the tides and turn your brick-and-mortar business into a successful online business. We have a few handy tips to help you do just that.

Start with Step 1

Digital presence can grow your business 5 times faster and is a necessary tool for success in today’s world.  
So, set your digital presence, starting with your Social Media profiles and Website (if you haven’t already).

Important tips for your social media channels:

• Make sure that your social media channels are interconnected. They need to show the same feel of the brand and have links that can help the audience navigate from one channel to the other. 

• Curate specific content for specific channels. It’s easy to just copy and paste the same post in each channel, but you have to be aware that even though they all are social channels, they’re not the same. 

• You need to not only adapt the length of the text, image sizes, and designs, but also the tone you use and the type of content you post. While for LinkedIn it’s appropriate to use a more formal and standard tone, in channels such as Instagram you may opt for more lighthearted posts. 

• Make use of the channels your audience uses. This is one of the reasons why it’s important to know your audience (…but we’ll get to that later). It’s no use being on Snapchat if all your audience is on Twitter. So make use of the channels where your preferred audience can be reached.

Now all that remains is to bring those customers in. Right? Well here is where things can get a little tricky. Attracting followers, increasing sales, or simply making your brand known requires more than just a boosted post.  There is no one component that makes a successful digital marketing strategy. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of a few things that will help you out. Read on.

Let’s dive into the digital marketing strategy.

A digital marketing strategy doesn’t only include an ad, a  campaign, or a piece of content. It’s a combination of these and many more other elements. That’s why to get, engage, and convert visitors, a good digital strategy is just what you need.

First things first, who is your audience?

Attracting your audience gets easier if you know who you’re talking to. You can start by creating your ideal customer persona. It sure is tempting to go for the “shotgun approach”, throw content out there and see who catches on. If you want to grow your business though, get started by having your audience in mind. It’s vital to know beforehand who your ideal customers are and who you want to attract and tailor the content and campaigns accordingly.

Scout the competition!

Learn from your strongest competitors. See what they are offering, and how they are engaging with customers. You don’t have to copy what they do, but you can learn from their successes as well as their mistakes. Besides plain old-fashioned research, you can also use tools such as the Facebook Ads Library, to learn what your competition is doing and what campaigns they are running.

Like in every relationship, you need to find the right time.

Timing is the WOW factor. It can make or break your campaigns. To put it in perspective, think of launching a Summer Sun Spray product in October. 

You can also make great use of pop culture references and buzz topics for more impactful content. A great example is that of the Aviation Gin commercial, with the actress from the much-discussed ‘Peleton Viral Add’.  You can also join the bandwagon with an important current cause or issue that you can have a positive impact on.

Look at what others have done.

When looking for inspiration you can always check successful campaigns out there.  Even though you may opt for something totally new and different, it’s still nice to know what has worked in the past. 

Zen Media has compiled a list of some fun and inspiring digital campaigns for inspiration.

If you want to make it work, think long term!

One campaign and you’re done! That sounds too good to be true, right? Well, that’s because it’s. You can’t boost your sales, funnel your audience, increase page likes, and webpage traffic in one campaign. 

Different campaigns have different goals. If you want to educate your audience you need to be constant with the content you post and you need to think long term. A campaign to funnel your audience or for brand awareness can last weeks, months, or even years. But don’t forget, just like in any other aspect of life, hard work & consistency pays off.

Have you set up your Facebook Pixel?

Tracking your social media and web page visitors is essential for tailored campaigns and targeting. Hooking up your page with Facebook Pixel enables you to track interactions with your webpage and the success of campaigns launched on social media. 

You can also retarget page visitors with specific campaigns launched solely for page visitors, or target the individuals who have viewed a specific product with promotional offers for said product.

Be SMART about it!

Just like any other goal that you want to accomplish, your strategy and campaign goals also need to be SMART. That’s Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timebound. While wanting to target millions of people to bombastically increase sales sounds amazing, let’s face it, it’s not realistic.

So what does it exactly mean to run a SMART campaign:  

• Have Specific campaign goals (decide what the main goal is: brand awareness, reach, conversion, etc.), and have a specific audience (your niche audience with specified demographics, interests, and other characteristics). 
• Decide on how you’ll measure success (will it be conversions, views, likes, reach, etc.), 
• Opt for Attainable results (for example: reach 120’000 potential clients and convert 1’000). 
• The campaign goals need to be Realistic (you can’t expect to invest 50$ and triple website views in one campaign).
• And Timebound (decide for how long you will run a campaign and have an estimate of when do you expect results).  

Value over quantity, always.

About the content? Think: Creative, Catchy, and Consistent. If you want your audience to engage, interact, and share your content, it also needs to bring some sort of value to your audience. It could be providing a discount, season’s offer, interesting information, or anything else that could be of value. 

Captivating content goes a long way! So you may opt to make your content as visual as possible, and throw more videos in there. Video Content was and remains the best performing digital content type with 8 billion videos on average watched daily. 

Making your videos entertaining also results in a 97% increase in purchase intent from users. So by opting for a short interesting video that sends your message through, you can’t go wrong.

Put everything on paper and start implementing your digital marketing strategy.

If it’s the first time you are implementing a digital marketing strategy, you can always find helpful resources online to get started. Pages such as Hootsuite and Hubspot offer you a wide range of materials to help you do so, including downloadable templates to make planning easier. Once you have your plan ready, start working on the content, implement your digital marketing strategy, and launch those campaigns.

What if you are still unsure that you want to do it all by yourself?

If it’s still early on for you, you might feel more comfortable opting to engage someone else’s services for the job. We got you covered there too. At UCX, our Creative Team consists of detail-oriented professionals that can create the content you need, plan your campaigns, and make sure that your business is a digital success. 

To see what we offer, check out our services!

With the secret spice of consistency, commitment and creativity, your business will be booming in no time. All you need now is to get started. 

Good luck young grasshopper!