Don’t Forget! The 5 Important Things of Digital Marketing Strategy
Accurately collecting, analyzing , utilizing marketing data and making ditital marketing strategy is difficult but important for many marketers and decision makers.
The arrival of the pandemic has also prompted the development of digital marketing. The pandemic has forced many companies to undergo rapid digital transformation. Following this mandate, the top two marketing opportunities for June 2020 and February 2021 are “Building Better Digital Interfaces” and “Transforming Business Models to Market”.
Two back-end infrastructure opportunities have also emerged as the pandemic and digital builds progress. Specifically, 42.8% of marketers reported investing in automation technology to improve customer communication in February 2021, a 25% increase since last June, 42.5% of marketers now report investing in data integration, A 71% increase since June 2020.
Therefore, digital marketing has become the focus of enterprises. I hope to give you an in-depth understanding of the importance of digital marketing by introducing five important steps of digital marketing.
1. Define a problem
First, you have to know what your goal is, or what problem you are trying to solve. The answers to these questions can tell you what digital marketing data you need to track and how to analyze it. Tracking the wrong data or doing the wrong digital marketing data analysis can lead you to make the wrong assumptions. Likewise, making decisions without data can hold you back.
Ask yourself what you want to know, or what problem you want to solve. Generalities are fine at this stage, but these questions should be based on KPIs such as lead generation, brand awareness, sales, conversion rates, or return on investment (ROI).
I want to use the following example to let everyone understand each step in the process of digital marketing data analysis and solve the corresponding problem: You are a marketing manager, after you carefully browse your website, you find that the website is not operating well, Want to bring in more potential users. After discovering your problem, the next step is to take action.
2. Set data-driven goals
Once you’ve identified your problem and goals, actionable goals will help you determine if you’re moving in the right direction. Digital marketing data analysis must be based on goals and benchmarks for the data to be meaningful. Goals should be based on previous digital marketing data analysis, or other criteria collected. In general, the realization of the goal is difficult, but it is possible.
In order to adjust your goals accordingly, you need to determine the level of performance that those goals are intended to achieve, helping you get specific information. Also, identify what needs to be improved and how much improvement is needed to achieve a certain goal.
For example, you’ve found, based on web analytics, that the top-performing landing page brings in 13,000 visitors and 130 leads per month, with a lead conversion rate of 1%. In this case, you can be sure that increasing the conversion rate of potential users is more useful than increasing the traffic.
Previously, you could double the conversion rate of similar pages by optimizing page load speed, but all landing pages had a conversion rate of less than 5%. From this, you can determine how many potential users you need in total to achieve your goals.
3. Collect accurate data
In order to draw the right conclusions and move in the right direction, digital marketing data analysis tools must be very reliable and the data collected must be easy to use.
In order to collect data accurately, you need to use a method to track user behavior. The right code, URL, or plugin can show how your users got to the page, what they clicked on, or whether they saw an ad. These tracking codes may include Google Analytics JavaScript code, URL tracking code, Facebook Pixel or HotJar plugin, etc.
When using these tracking devices, make sure you set up the events correctly so the device knows what to track. For example, you might need to set up Google Analytics code to specifically track conversion rate events.
Once you have your tracking devices installed and events set up, you need to integrate them with a data collection or compilation platform for evaluating your digital marketing data analytics strategy. To do this, you may need to integrate your website with analytics tools through a CRM system such as Hubspot. Or you can use a data compilation platform like Data Box or Google Data Studio.
For example, when evaluating the performance of your landing page, you notice that the conversion rate has dropped over the past two months. To ensure the accuracy of the data, you discuss the Google Analytics tracking code with the web design team and discover that a recently installed chatbot is interfering with the tracking code. The design team fixed the issue, and by testing the code, you ensured that the conversion event tracker was working correctly.
Finally, to get a complete picture of page performance, Google Analytics and CRM system reports need to be added to Data Studio. View the landing pages you’re working on by building custom reports to get an easy-to-read graph of traffic, traffic type, clicks, conversions, leads, marketing eligible leads, sales eligible potential users, etc.
4. Make smart improvements
In order to achieve your goals, you need to decide which parts to improve and how. At this stage, you need to hypothesize improvements based on previous digital marketing data analysis or other estimates. Using A/B testing or user testing, study the test results individually and evaluate the impact of each improvement. It’s a good idea to start with improvements you’ve made before so you have a reference to help you improve successfully and gain experience.
Before that, increasing the loading speed of the landing page doubled the increase in conversion rate. So you make the same improvements first, and study the results, so that the increased conversion rate that comes with increasing the loading speed won’t affect your other improvements down the road.
For example, as you might expect, the conversion rate has doubled after loading speed and is now 2%. Next, you think shortening the web form and adding an annotated video will further increase the conversion rate. So, first, you A/B test your assumptions about the table. It turned out that your assumption was correct; the conversion rate increased to 3%. Then, you run another A/B test on the video, and it turns out that the assumption is still correct; the conversion rate goes from 2% to 3%. In the end, you made both of these improvements, and as you might expect, the conversion rate has risen to 4%!
5. Test and progress
You have achieved your goals for the login page and are very happy with the improved results. However, digital marketing strategies and data analysis are not static. Digital marketing is constantly changing as technology changes, and successful strategies are dynamic. This means you need to apply innovative methods, keep improving, and monitor those improvements at the same time. Sometimes you need to try new trends and see how you can keep improving with modern, creative solutions for years to come.
For example, two years later, you’ve successfully used digital marketing analytics tools to closely monitor your pages, and the conversion rate is still high, but the total number of potential users has dropped. Looking at the data, you can see that the page traffic has decreased, so the 4% conversion rate doesn’t seem that high. Over the past two years, your competitors seem to have noticed you, copied your approach, and stole your traffic. They took your place on the SERPs for two top keywords, resulting in a 10% drop in your traffic.
So ,you’ve decided to try something new. You decide to evaluate your options based on two metrics, KPIs and traffic. You can try paid advertising, additional page upgrades and A/B testing, more SEO or other newer stuff, organic social media advertising, etc.
You notice that your social media manager’s recent video marketing campaign on YouTube resonated with younger consumers, increasing traffic to your blog by 20% without any additional ad spend. Also, you notice the lack of a competitor’s presence on social media. If this approach works, your company may have a big advantage.
In addition to the five things above that are important for digital marketing, for each goal it is also important to identify the time and resources that can be spent on data analysis and evaluation. If you lack the tools, time or experience to apply data analytics to your goals, consider a data analytics agency to help you through the process. This way, you can address exactly the hurdles that stand in the way of your digital marketing strategy, without taking time away from other businesses.
Therefore, an excellent digital marketing strategy should be timely, dynamic, comprehensive, and adjusted at any time according to changes in the environment.
