Category: Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing Strategy Roadmap (Part 2)

Posted on by annaktaylor
Industry and data analytics concept.

 

 

For many organizations today, revenue is generated across multiple channels, thus requiring a wide range of impactful strategies to capture attention, trigger actions, and prompt transactions.

DIGITAL STRATEGIES

Ecommerce relies on a foundation of engagement, interest, and motivation. The digital experience must be seamless, enduring, relevant, and compelling. Any amount of brand ‘clutter’, excess visual distractions, or cumbersome navigation will adversely impact conversions.

Enhance the Buying Experience
  • Seamless User Interface
  • Interactive Features
  • Distinctive Experiences
  • Compelling and Emotive Messaging
  • Simplified Checkout Process
Personalization and Communication
  • Targeted Content
  • Tailored Product Selection
  • Straightforward Loyalty Program
  • Useful Live Chat and Chatbots
Build Trust, Social Proof, and Community
  • Authentic Customer Reviews
  • Polls and Surveys
  • User-Generated Content
  • Media Engagement
  • Community Events
  • Genuine Care and Service
  • Customer Appreciation
  • Transparent and Honest Communication
Digital Marketing Checklist
  • Personalize Emails
  • Engage through Social Media Posts
  • Optimize Content
  • Curate Resources
  • Send Abandoned Cart Reminders
  • Share New Product Notices
  • Encourage Buying with Special Promotions
  • Trigger Interest with Exclusive Offers
  • Prompt Action with Limited Time Deals
  • Create Targeted Ads
  • Produce Compelling Videos and Rich Media
  • Perform Search Engine Optimization
  • Express Appreciation
  • Tender Surprise and Delight

SOCIAL STRATEGIES

Social media is a mammoth reservoir for audience engagement and social commerce. Here are some winning strategies to influence, inspire, and instigate action by potential customers.

Discover and Delve into Your Audience
  • Platforms are Unique – focus on the channels that your audience interacts with the most.
  • Audience Insights – leverage social media analytics to understand demographics, interests, and what content resonates with the audience.
Content Reigns Supreme
  • High Quality, Insightful, and Informative Content
  • Creative Messaging that Stirs Curiosity
  • Captivating Visuals
  • Influential Taglines and Quotes
  • Persuasive Call to Actions
  • Powerful Storytelling
Symbiotic Engagement
  • Respond Promptly
  • Ask Questions
  • Demonstrate Care for Feedback
  • Spark a Positive Dialogue
  • Hold Interactive Contests and Giveaways
Social Commerce Strategies
  • Shoppable Posts
  • Discoverable Products
  • Live Shopping Events
  • Real Time Deals
  • Influencer Marketing
Additional Tips
  • Encourage customers to share their experiences with your brand
  • Utilize targeted social media advertising to reach a wider audience
  • Track performance and adapt your strategy based on what entices your audience

Continue reading “Digital Marketing Strategy Roadmap (Part 2)” →

Digital Marketing Strategy Roadmap (Part 1)

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital blue light

 

For a brand to grow online sales, expand market reach, and increase website traffic, a blended technical/creative/data-driven digital strategy is a powerful means to achieve critical goals. The roadmap requires performance-based initiatives, well-planned campaigns, iterative testing, and an agile methodology.

Important First Stage

  • Define primary success factors
  • Craft a precise and unique value proposition
  • Identify key performance indicators
  • Pinpoint target markets

Establishing the business objective gives you a ‘North Star’ before strategy deployment. For each initiative, be thoughtful and explicit in forming the measurable results that you want the team to reach.

Sidebar – be ambitious with your objectives! Now is not the time to be conventional or cautious. 

A Sample of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

  • Capture more of the market share [how to outperform the competition]
  • Increase organic traffic to the website and social channels [how to better attract the audience]
  • Enhance customer engagement [how to create resonating experiences]
  • Reduce bounce rate [how to demonstrate value and relevancy to compel interest]
  • Improve conversion rate [how to enhance the customer journey to trigger action]
  • Raise incremental sales [how to effectively position products to motivate a purchase]
  • Consistency with monthly revenue rate [how to decrease churn and maintain a steady flow of new visitors]

When creating strategies – aim for impact and efficiency.  Be willing to forego strategies that cannot offer these requisites. 

Digital Marketing Initiatives

  • Content marketing
  • Digital channels
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Paid advertising
  • Social media
  • Influencer marketing
  • Affiliate programs
  • Video marketing
  • Rich media
  • Events and community engagement
  • Email marketing

Continue reading “Digital Marketing Strategy Roadmap (Part 1)” →

The Pathway of Digital Performance

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital growth and performance chart

 

Consumers make decisions based upon their own evaluation path, which is influenced by timing, imperativeness, sentiments, and risk & reward triggers, along with factors of price, quality, and value. Empower your audience to organically assess your offerings with their own trusted sense of significance – this helps to prevent feelings of misgiving, skepticism, or pressure.

A business must demonstrate their intention to get it right through relevant and enriching experiences. Across channels, the brand should engage, share, interact, and applaud. Provide insight, information, and inspiration that compels curiosity and interest.

Best Practices

  • Create a cross-channel strategy
  • Curate consistent messaging across touch points
  • Motivate engagement, interaction, and conversion
  • Messaging for 6 I’s: influence, intrigue, insight, inspiration, interest, and information
  • Persuade, don’t sell or pitch
  • Repurpose evergreen content
  • Utilize rich media and visual assets to heighten engagement
  • Make it easy to interact with the brand
  • Automate workflows and trigger campaigns across platforms
  • Be tactical on cadence, timing, and experiences
  • Optimize for relevancy and value
  • Use audience segmentation and customer journey mapping to maximize conversions

Continue reading “The Pathway of Digital Performance” →

Optimize Digital Performance & Monetization

Posted on by annaktaylor
Digital-Performance- Arrow-Graph

 

The motivation to purchase online continues to rapidly rise. Is your business positioned to take advantage of digital commerce? 

Here are some questions to weigh:

 

  • Are the value and distinct benefits of your products or services expressed clearly and concisely?
  • Are you effectively customizing campaigns to tap the unique buying intent of each customer segment?
  • Is brand messaging being consistently shaped to inspire, inform, and persuade the audience?
  • How creative, impactful, and informative is the visual experience of your brand?
  • Do you tell an authentic and compelling story which your audience can relate to?
  • Does the website’s interface and user experience drive conversions?
  • How well have you tested and optimized content, graphics, elements, functions, navigation, information architecture, performance, and mobile design?
  • Can a visitor seamlessly and intuitively search for products or information on your website?
  • Is your monetization strategy being executed across channels with the right cadence to influence customer action?

 

While seemingly simple, there is a complex formula to digital commerce which is an art (creativity, content, and innovation) and science (automation, testing, and technology). Being strategic, agile, and tenacious in both interface and infrastructure are essential to building online sales. 

Continue reading “Optimize Digital Performance & Monetization” →

Digital Axioms to Maximize Sales and Growth

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital growth graphs

 

In the digital space, the drivers for online revenue success are the following:

Axiom #1
– Be flexible. The only constant is change.
– Perpetually pursue market positioning.
– Adapt to shifting customer needs, intent, and sentiments.
– Hone and master your brand story. And creatively tell it.
– Curate highly targeted campaigns, messaging, and experiences.

Axiom #2
These are the resolute Essentials
– Clearly defined, measurable goals.
– Well planned, data-informed strategies.
– Marketing automation for efficiency and effectiveness.

These are the fluid Essentials
– Agile tactics that will evolve and change based on performance.
– A testing regimen that is iterative and quantifiable.
– A penetrative approach to capture attention, persuade, and influence.

Axiom #3
– Utilize data to understand customer behaviors, gain insights, and forecast buying trajectories.
– Be solutions-driven with customers and solve problems in ways that trigger actions.
– Troubleshoot lagging sales performance and explore untapped sales terrain.
– Diligently pilot highly organized project workflows and meticulous tracking.

Final Thoughts
– Be careful to not fall back to familiarity, norms, and comfort.
– Challenge, ask questions, rethink, and be ready to pivot.
– Empower people and architect a culture that has a collective mission, curiosity, care, and customer-centricity.
– Transformation requires innovative thinking, a learning mindset, gut-level motivation, and endless inspiration.
– Digital savvy means to be forward-thinking, misfire-tolerant, and future-ready.

Mastering the Deluge of Data

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital strategy and innovation

 

Attentive, attuned, and analytically inspired digital leaders closely monitor sales and cost metrics, qualitative and quantitative stats, and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). More broadly referred to as ‘data’.

There are known challenges with data collection, preparation, and validation including:

  • Data overload
  • Data stability
  • Assemble and prioritization data
  • Preventing omission of key data points
  • Organization of data to make it usable
  • Taking advantage of data visualization for optimal consumption
  • Gaining insights that can be tested
  • Craft a roadmap for maximum output based on data
  • Pivoting within a plan or shifting an objective due to data outcomes

Prevailing strategies are architected using business intelligence – this is owned data, sourced from customers, sales, performance, operations, marketing, social media, and industry trends.

Types of Data

Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured

Transactional

Hierarchical and Ordered

Text and Meta

Qualitative and Quantitative

The “V” elements of data are variety, volume, value, velocity, veracity, and variability.   When handling data, pay attention to each of these characteristics.

[Step 1]  Utilize a Powerful Digital Dashboard

Creating an impactful plan of action starts with data visualization from charts, pies, tables, and other graphic representations of data.

When selecting a dashboard tool, here is a checklist of key features:

  • User-friendly, high performing interface
  • Intuitive navigation menu and filters
  • Contemporary cards, charts, and forms
  • Wide variety of pre-set templates
  • Multiple layout options
  • Fast-loading import / export feature (multi-file upload is a bonus)
  • Customized views for different types of users
  • Easy widgets to add new tables and elements to a page
  • Tooltips, bookmarks, notifications, and alerts
  • Calendar, email, and to-do list features
  • Data authentication and identification of errors
  • Editing tools
  • Suite of reports with automation capability
  • Color, font, and background controls
  • Interactive with popular platforms and plugins
  • Cross-browser compatible
  • Mobile friendly and fully responsive

Continue reading “Mastering the Deluge of Data” →

Digital Advertising Performance Insights

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital network

 

Digital advertising is a dominant strategy to grow online sales, which is evident by over $65B annual ad spend on just Facebook and Google in the U.S.

The advertising landscape can be perplexing in its scope, channels, models, and tactics.

Along with value-based offers, compelling copy, resonating visuals, and relevancy for the audience, the most critical factors for creating ROI-driven campaigns include the following:

(1) Crafting strategies based upon extensive competitive analysis, keyword research, and use of business intelligence (BI).

(2) Machine learning for understanding trends and forecasting.

(3) Sufficient budget to gain key insights on consumer interactions with your ads.

(4) An iterative approach to each campaign to test ad effectiveness and to measure performance.

Programmatic advertising should be a primary component of your overall marketing automation strategy.  There are significant tools that support these efforts – some of the most popular are Salesforce, Marketo, Adobe’s Customer Experience platform, along with a host of other solutions on the market today.

Why a DMP?

A DMP (data management platform) aggregates data to develop customer profiles which are then utilized for targeted advertising.

Insights garnered from audience data are drivers for enhanced engagement and more personalized and relevant cross-channel experiences.

Continue reading “Digital Advertising Performance Insights” →

Impact – Shape Your Brand Narrative & Influence Customer Actions

Posted on by annaktaylor
drop-of-water-ripple

In the digital commerce space, impact is critical and relentlessly pursued. Attracting your target audience and converting visitors to consumers require far more than a hook and a pitch.

Impact is achieved through exceptional efforts that blend strategy, creativity, agility, and innovation. Whether problem-based, exploration-based, need-based, or interest-based, capturing ‘intent’ and motivating people are forms of marketing dexterity – weaving touch points and experiences that trigger actions and engagement.

Impact comes from tapping emotional, mental, spiritual, intellectual, societal, physical, and environmental factors.

Always start with specific objectives and a well-defined project plan.  Any endeavor worth doing begins with concept, scope, definitions, timelines, tasks, and measurable goals.

Leverage your organization’s expertise and acumen. Intellect drives trust and confidence, and should serve as the foundation of impact.

Share a wide spectrum of content, and assess where it most resonates with your audience.  Be mindful of the tone, voice, and style – each of these should have unique brand characteristics and a consistency across platforms.

Tell stories. Not about the brand, nor your products and services. Instead, create organic media about people – their journey, experiences, challenges, passion, pursuits, and insights.  Be purposeful in demonstrating a correlation between the story and the brand.

Tailor campaigns to narrowed segments of your customer-base to ensure the experiences offer value and provide benefit beyond a purchase.  When you penetrate the mind and motivators, impact is lingering… and lasting.

Continually fine-tune your approach until impact is evident. This will build your competitive edge.

Establish a pipeline of progress, continually fostering new ideas, driving the quality and ‘wow’ factor, and digging for hidden opportunities.

Be open and receptive to instances of  poor performance. Embrace when outcomes do not align with objectives- these are essential moments to learn and improve. Test, iterate, and be excited when incremental advancements are realized!

Impact isn’t always obvious, nor readily validated.  And yet, it is incredibly powerful. When achieved, compelling brand experiences are highly persuasive and will help you dominate in brand positioning and profitability.

Today’s Digital Marketing – Pointers and Priorities

Posted on by annaktaylor
digital marketing strategies

 

OKR. Objectives and Key Results must be a marketers ‘North Star’ at every stage, including research & planning, production, measuring and testing, and iterative experiments.

Have clearly defined targets (audience segments, metrics, messaging, experiences) and a singular focus (specific offer, incentive, product line promotion, etc.)

Create well-defined projects and apply agile methodology and fluid execution practices.

Relevancy and Value. Without it, you’re just noise.

There is a psychology to marketing. Pay attention to intent, context, triggers, and intrinsic motivation – from your audience, untapped markets, stakeholders, team members, executive leaders… even your competitors.

Continue reading “Today’s Digital Marketing – Pointers and Priorities” →

Performance Metrics in Digital Terms

Posted on by annaktaylor
performance-metrics-data

 

Often the data points capturing the most attention are sales, margins, opportunity win ratio, and inventory.

A deeper dive into a few other digital stats will help a business in its online position and performance.

CAC vs. CLV

Customer Acquisition Cost is a must, especially in comparison to the Customer Lifetime Value. Set those side by side on your reporting dashboard to closely monitor your investment in obtaining a new customer along with the long-term ROI. 

Visits and CR

Website traffic is appealing, yet only meaningful if you experience a steady rise in the Conversion Rate. The effectiveness of your brand’s online experience is reflected in conversions, which is directly impacted by messaging, usability, visual appeal, and triggers, all which must be compelling and actionable.

Continue reading “Performance Metrics in Digital Terms” →