When it comes to digital marketing, it’s pretty obvious by this point that one size most definitely does NOT fit all. Different platforms have different applications for different products and services, but many agencies will try to sell you what they have to offer regardless of how much you do or don’t need it. For this reason, we thought it would be a good idea to help educate you on how to know which platforms you might need and why so that you can tell when you’re being sold to vs when you’re being offered practical solutions with regards to digital marketing.
So for starters, let’s talk about your audience.
Where your audience is
It’s obvious that different types of customers would frequent different platforms. For example those seeking ongoing product or service lines that require an ongoing relationship with your business are much more likely to interact with you via social media than search engines. However that requires that they know who you are in the first place and when it comes to product and service discovery, search engines reign supreme. The important thing to point out here is that in this case, both platforms would be the best place to target these customers depending on where they are in their journey. First time customers doing research are much more likely to come across your business via search channels than social media, while continuing customers need to be interacted with via social media.
How to speak to them
This then poses the question, how do we approach these customers? Well the answer unfortunately isn’t simple. What you really should be asking yourself is “how do we approach these customers at each point during their discovery and buying cycle”? It’s quite easy to identify where customers are most likely to buy if you’ve gathered a good enough amount of data to examine, but it takes time to get a really good feel for where they’re at when they’re at different points in the buying cycle. Don’t be impatient. Run a few campaigns for a while, whether they’re Google Ads, Social Media advertising or some other form of digital marketing and the truth will reveal itself once you sit down and have a really good look at the numbers these campaigns produce.
How to tie it all together
Once you have those numbers, you should have a very accurate, yet unique view of the landscape that your business is operating in when it comes to your products and services. This should allow you to figure out how to advertise yourself both in the ways that are unique to the platforms that are successful and in ways that will translate across those advertising platforms. For example, the imagery you’re using is probably best to stay consistent across Google Ads and Social Media, despite the fact that your targeting may change quite a bit depending on what each of those platforms has to offer as well as the opportunities that are unique to each of those platforms. But you definitely can’t target “keywords” on social media in the way that you can on search engines, where you’re able to catch people with a very high intent to buy at exactly the right moment, as opposed to throwing ads out to users who have interests along the lines of the kinds of people you’re looking for (via social media).
How to reward loyalty
Your customers deserve rewards for being loyal to you and online marketing offers you the opportunity to look after them in ways previously unimaginable. Whether it’s exclusive voucher codes that they can only get from you via social media, exclusive content, exclusive access to content and services or a variety of other highly customizable rewards that can be very specifically assigned to them based on their actions, opinions, activity and a whole range of other very personable data that they will recognise as a reward for said activities.
How to decide on a platform
At the end of the day, most platforms suit most businesses. However it’s important to understand that this isn’t always the case and that occasionally there can be vast differences between what’s possible for a business between search engines and social media platforms for example. Again, this is something that should become amply apparent based on data. So run a whole raft of test campaigns. Don’t view it as a waste of money, view it as an investment in business intelligence. Find out exactly how well your business can perform in each of these areas with a very high degree of certainty, which is never a waste of time or money. Once you know the correct avenues to explore, your business can only thrive.
Which concludes this weeks blog from us. As always if you’d like to know more or explore your options with regards to Brisbane Digital Marketing then please feel free to get in touch! You can also leave us a comment below of you think we’ve missed anything.
