Digital marketing enables businesses to reach a large number of consumers and target their ideal customers. Businesses and brands aren’t just selling a product or service with digital marketing. They’re becoming part of their customers’ lives.
When businesses first reach out to potential customers, they’re starting a long journey together. So it’s crucial to add value to the customer experience. This can be through products or services, but it can also be through:
- A brand’s voice and personality
- Inspiring and relevant content
- Useful how-to guides
- Promotional offers
- Interactive material and more
Digital marketing isn’t just about creating advertisements. It’s about creating customer-first experiences.
How to benchmark your digital marketing
To fine-tune your digital marketing efforts and make sure that your content strategy and messaging are impactful, you’ll want to identify KPIs and benchmark them against those of your competitors. Finding the right metrics to measure digital marketing success isn’t always easy. But here are a few questions that you may want to ask:
- How many people are opening your emails, viewing your social media content, or visiting your website?
- How many are reacting or sharing things on social media? If the number is lower than anticipated, is the problem with the content or the audience you’re targeting?
- How many people are reacting to or sharing things from your competitors on social media? If the number is high, why? Can you identify how your competitor is driving better engagement?
- How long do people spend looking at your content? What type of content is leading to the most conversions and what type is helping to build better relationships? For instance, a lot of inspirational or curated content may not be sales-driven. However, it may help establish your business as a go-to informational resource for consumers.
- How many customers are responding to your CTAs?
Now compare your metrics to those of your competitors:
- What are they doing better than you are?
- Do they have better content or simply a better strategy?
- What are you doing better than they are?
- Can you capitalise on those aspects even more?
Once you can see where you’re succeeding and where you’re falling short, you can come up with specific goals:
- Double your blog readership
- Triple email read-rates
- Create more viral content
- Increase social media leads by 20%
5 Ways to Improve Your Digital Marketing
1. Shape your marketing with a ‘storyteller’
Telling the story of your brand in a dynamic way is key to digital marketing success. We’re past the point of bland, one-size-fits-all communications and simple sloganeering. Today’s savvy businesses are focusing on social messaging, highly personalised communications, and figuring out how they can solve customers’ pain points.
Many forward-thinking organisations are even hiring a dedicated storyteller – or a ‘creativity architect’ – to shape their narrative and craft compelling digital content that connects with the customer.
2. Leverage the right technologies
Having the right message is crucial, but businesses also need the right technologies to deliver it. The ‘age of the customer’ means that organisations need to provide connected experiences to their consumers and a holistic view of that consumer across different functions.
Digital solutions like Marketing Cloud, Social Studio, and Einstein can help businesses better leverage data, offer more dynamic customer journeys, and automate repetitive tasks to work more efficiently and intelligently.
3. Use curated content to showcase your business and inspire customers
Curating content has a number of benefits for businesses, ranging from helping them become a go-to resource for specific topics to increasing online visibility and the number of regular visitors. Curated content can be highlighted in blogs, on social media channels, and in emails.
4. Look towards Data Sciences for deep-dive analytics
Data Science is becoming increasingly popular for segmenting audiences and developing effective digital marketing strategies. While businesses will still need to get their content and messaging right, data sciences can be invaluable for:
- Helping analyse UGC (User Generated Content)
- Tracking online behaviour
- Providing tailored online experiences
- Analysing social trends and more
5. Create a multi-channel strategy
Every channel has its own unique benefits and audience so neglecting certain channels could be a mistake. Creating a multi-channel strategy where mobile, social media, website, and video are all united to tell a compelling brand story across touchpoints is a great way to win over customers.
Digital marketing helps businesses make a big impact
Marketing used to be dominated by giant billboards, mass email blasts, and million-euro ad spending, but not anymore. Today’s businesses can reach more people, more affordably, and with more of a personal touch. More importantly, they can focus on reaching their target audience and building long-lasting, meaningful relationships.
To see how Salesforce can help businesses optimise their digital marketing, check out Marketing Cloud today.
