This was the last in the Savannah Chamber of Commerce digital marketing seminar series – I learned so much over the past few months! Make sure you check out the links at the bottom to read the notes from the other sessions.

The most important considerations in digital marketing strategy

The key is to not think of it as separate from your overall marketing strategy. It’s not something you do also. It should be one part of an overall marketing plan.

Keep your eye on the prize – think about the big picture. Is this working, is it worth it. Measure everything. All the time.

Strategy is a road map to get you somewhere. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Where am I going?
• Who am I?
• What do I want to do?

Think about this – if it doesn’t give your business money, you shouldn’t do it.

Set a goal, know what the goal is. Be nimble, adjust the goal as needed.

Your digital marketing strategy should be all-emcompassing.

Determine your budget.

Don’t go into anything blind. Be mindful of your goal, and how the budget supports that.

Important components to your digital marketing strategy

• Consider who you are
• Budget
• What’s involved to get you to your goal
• Analytics – Google analytics and Facebook insights

A digital footprint can be huge and vast. Stay educated on what’s new. Stay on top of new social media outlets, and what’s changing.

Ask yourself:

How do you use social to support your business?

How do you use your website to support your business?

Think of your website as a storefront. It’s merchandising. Think seriously about:

• SEO
• SEM
• Social Media – keep in mind all digital channels might not be for you, but you should know what’s going on out there.

Be consistent.

Be blogging.

Understand what’s happening – check your analytics. Take the time to figure out how to set up goals in Google Analytics. Remember to track conversions.

Some offline POS systems can upload info to Google Analytics. Adwords also has a new capability to do things like track people coming into a store.

Set goals, monitor them.

Questions to ask when creating your digital marketing strategy

• Who am I talking to?
• What am I saying to them?
• Best time to reach them?
• What sites am I reaching them on?
• Why am I saying this message to them?

Look into adding a “pixel” to your website. It’s like a video camera that you can put on your site, you can confirm if you’ve targeted a site visitor before, you can tell other sites to show your ads, and when a conversion happens, you can set directions to not show the customer your ad again until 3 months later when you want them to buy something else. (Look into Google tag manager)

How do you prioritize your digital marketing strategy?

• Info about your business needs to be accurate and consistent across the web.
• Google Maps – make sure your business is correct. Inconsistent info can hurt you with Google
• Test things – try stuff and see if it works. What are different things you can try, and see if they work. Not A/B testing – more like consistent testing.Email marketing is one of the best ways to get customers to your site.If your shopping cart software can, send emails when a cart’s been abandoned reminding them you’re there
• Track everything

Set priorities – focus on what’s working.

There’s no time anymore – what brings in the most money the easiest for your business? You should be doing the stuff that takes the least amount of time to make the most amount of money.

If email marketing is great, but something else brings in more money for your business, do that.

Know where you’re going, test to see if it’s working, ditch what isn’t.

Find people that can help you with some stuff if possible. (We would LOVE to help you. Just sayin.)

Be nimble.

Don’t worry about changing direction.

Example given – marketing firm was doing videos with a CTA to book a hotel room, and there were no conversions. They tried banner ads, and were able to recoup the losses from the campaign that wasn’t working.

There is no one size fits all for small business.

There is no perfect recipe. It all comes back to goals, being nimble, and focusing on what brings in the money.

How do you know if your digital marketing strategy is working?

Google analytics / Facebook insights

On Facebook, use the “power editor” instead of boosting posts. You’ll pay more per action if you’re promoting posts instead of creating an ad.

Use the right tools for your activity. Know what you want – do you want to drive likes to your Facebook page, do you want to send people to your site?

You need to know what your end result is, and then work backwards.

Shoot your budget towards what’s working.

New on Facebook

You can upload a list of your past customers, and show an ad just to them.

Your current customers are your best customers.

Customer surveys are a great way to see how something’s been received. Reviews are great, too, and they hang out online for a long time.

How does your website play into your digital marketing strategy?

It could be a key piece in your overall strategy. Your website is your home base.

But – sometimes you can leverage things that bring your end goal without them going to your site.

Website stats

97% of people search onine for goods/services

51% of small businesses have a website

Understand your goal – if the goal is to get them to your site, your site needs to be GREAT.

Remember your site increases your reach outside the local community – it’s international.

Keep in mind that your site is international before you have your cousin build it. If you wouldn’t trust them to pick out a location for your brick and mortar store, don’t trust them to build your site. (Let us build a website for you. We’ve won awards for it.)

Google wants you to tie your site with Google Plus – you need to be there. Make sure you’re optimizing your Google Plus page.

No matter what device someone is on, your site needs to perform. It has to be mobile responsive.

Has to. (If your site isn’t mobile responsive, we can help.)

If they have a bad experience with you online, their perception of you changes. Your digital experience needs to work everywhere.

Every page of your site has to have a purpose, with conversion in mind.

Give the site visitor something valuable and lead them to it.

Shorter copy – think about the quickest way to get the visitor what they need and convert them.

We’re in an impatient society. We want the info, we want it now, we don’t want to argue.

Your site needs to be a pleasurable experience, not a battle.

Evaluate your competition frequently.

Tweak your site to compete. You want your site to steal market share from your competition.

Should the focus be getting people to come to your website?

If your site would crash with a bajillion visitors, figure out another way that can handle that much traffic.

Think Woobox for contest entries

Facebook ads can really ramp up your site traffic

Power ad on Facebook – high cost per click, good budget, specific targeting can really bump up the views

Don’t forget about offline advertising – think about direct mail postcards

They can direct people to your site, too. Don’t be afraid to hit people different ways.

Think about what you want them to do, try different things to accomplish that.

• Email
• Direct mail
• Text messages

Should strategy focus on building traffic?

Remember your goal, be nimble. Adapt and adjust as needed.

What should you NOT do when working with digital marketing?

Doing nothing is the worst. Don’t be paralyzed.

Don’t set it and forget it. Play with it, your digital marketing needs constant monitoring to be successful.

Don’t waste your money – track what you’re doing, if it’s not working don’t do it.

Think of your website as a digital encyclopedia, and social media as part of the conversation with your customers

Ask the customers a question with three answers – which one do they want you to do?

Openly engage with customers and ask questions.

Don’t be a robot – no automation

Remain in conversation

If you have an ROI, there shouldn’t be a budget.

Meaning, if it’s working find a way to do more of that.

If your customer is blind, it doesn’t make sense to focus on screens – go with radio or something like that. If it doesn’t work, there’s a reason why. Understand why it’s not working, and adapt.

Don’t implement big ideas without filling in the gaps.

What’s the action our customer is most likely to make before the conversion?

Understand the details, fill in the gaps.

The goal of an ad on YouTube is get their attention. Example – a loading sequence for 5 seconds

How do you get the customer every step of the way?

Your digital marketing strategy should change as the business changes.

Remain alive and nimble.

What are nontraditional business conversions?

• Get people to your business partners
• Follow you on social media
• Point to the conversion – example given: event listings, at the end of them put offers for rooms and hotels to get them to book a room

Offer white papers or infographics, where site visitors need to give you their info before they download

Your goal can be anything – whether it’s sending people to a page or sending them to a partner.

Non-traditional goal: time on a site

The bounce rate on a site – high bounce rate is bad but not always, if the bounces lead to a conversion. You can manipulate bounce rate and time on a site. Create ways to capture what people are doing – it increases your data and what’s happening.

What about business without a physical address? Can you appease the directories?

No. Get a mailing address (Hearts and Laserbeams uses a mailbox at a local UPS Store. The address reads like a normal office address, which is what Google has on file.)

You can also use virtual office space services like DaVinci for your physical address.

What’s next in digital to explore?

Consider how you can make Snapchat work in your overall marketing plan.

Infographics are huge – people are info addicts, getting people to download one is easy. Online universities are using infographics as textbooks sometimes.

The physical world is starting to be captured by the digital world

Where you’re spending your digital money will start to see returns form the real world. There’s ways to track customers walking into a store.

Geofencing – when someone goes somewhere and they get an alert on their phone

A store made an app where they found out you were going to buy a shoe somewhere else, and they’d send you an alert saying get to our store in the next X minutes and you’ll get a big fat discount

iBeacon – stick it to something, and when something happens like someone picks up a shoe in your store, something else happens like a video can play on a screen.

Watch the Naked Brand documentary

Reviews – reputation management is super important. It’s how people see you and what they’re saying about you. There’s services out there that will search all sites and tell you what people are saying about you

What’s your number one tip for digital marketing strategy?

Share it in the comments, I’d love to read it!