Digital Marketing Management FAQ
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If you have questions about digital marketing management, below you will find answers to key questions to support you on your journey, including:
- What is digital marketing and what are its key components?
- What are the goals of digital marketing and how do you measure success?
- What strategies are used in digital marketing?
- What are the challenges and opportunities of digital marketing?
- What are the best practices for managing digital marketing campaigns?
- What are the most effective digital marketing channels?
- How do you create and implement a digital marketing plan?
- What are the challenges and opportunities of managing digital marketing budgets?
- How do you measure the ROI of digital marketing campaigns?
1. What is digital marketing and what are its key components?
Digital marketing is internet marketing that encompasses various online approaches to generate Website traffic, leads, and sales, while increasing brand awareness.
There are two key areas of digital marketing. The first is traffic generation and the second is conversion. The purpose of traffic generation is to drive Website visitors to your Website. The purpose of conversion is to convert the Website visitors into leads and sales.
The key traffic generation channels are SEO, PPC, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and offline advertising.
The primary way to convert Website visitors into leads is by using landing pages or a Website. The most effective way to convert leads into sales is through automated email marketing, supported by properly timed calls from sales people.
2. What are the goals of digital marketing and how do you measure success?
The goals of digital marketing are to increase sales by generating leads and converting the leads into sales. When establishing your goals, ensure they’re achievable and specific. Start by defining your goals based on what your main objectives are as a company. For example, if your business growth strategy is to generate leads and convert them into sales, establish targets for Website visitors, leads, and sales. You also want to establish target conversion rates for Website visitors into leads, as well as leads into sales.
On a more granular level, consider your key performance indicators (KPIs) for each digital marketing channel. These KPIs will provide clarity on how you will measure success for SEO, PPC, social media, etc. Below, you will find the key metrics to track for SEO, PPC, and social media.
SEO Digital Marketing Metrics
- Overall Website Traffic – refers the number of visitors coming to your website.
- Traffic Per Web Page – the number of visitors per page indicates which pages are generating the most visitors.
- Ranking of Keywords – shows you how your primary and secondary keywords are ranking.
- Change in Ranking – indicates how your ranking is changing over time by keyword.
- Number of Backlinks – shows you if you are gaining new links from other websites.
- Number of Referring Domains – shows you how many unique domains you’re acquiring backlinks from.
- Domain Authority – shows you if Google views your web pages as authoritative or not.
- On-page Optimization Score – shows you if your pages are properly optimized.
- Text Readability Score – lets you know how easily readable your content is.
- Page Speed – shows how fast your pages load to provide a good user experience.
- Pages Per Visit – shows the number of pages that a visitor views, which is a good indicator for quality of content.
- Bounce Rate – is the percentage of people who visit one page per visit, which indicates the quality and relevance of your content.
PPC Metrics
- Impressions – show the number of times your ad is seen by people.
- Clicks – indicate how many people are clicking on your ads.
- Click-through Rate – shows the percentage of people that click through on your ad.
- Conversions – show you the volume of leads that you’re generating.
- Conversion Rate – indicates the percentage of people that opt in for your offer.
- Cost Per Click – shows you how much you’re paying per click.
- Cost Per Acquisition – indicates your cost per lead.
- Impression Share – shows you the percentage of time your ad is showing.
Social Media Marketing Metrics
- Reach – shows you the number of people that you’re reaching.
- Impressions – shows you the number of times your content is viewed.
- Audience Growth Rate – shows you how fast your audience is growing.
- Engagement Rate – is the percentage of time your audience is engaging with your content.
- Amplification Rate – shows how much your content is shared.
- Virality Rate – indicates how often your content goes viral.
- Video Views – shows how often your videos are viewed.
- Video Completion Rate – is the percentage of people completely watching your videos.
- Net Promoter Score – shows customer loyalty and how likely a customer would recommend you to others.
- Click-through Rate – is the percentage of people that click through on your content to view it.
- Conversion Rate – shows the number of people that opt in for your offer.
By measuring KPIs for each of your channels, you’ll be able to pinpoint which areas need the most improvement to drive your business forward.
3. What strategies are used in digital marketing?
The most effective strategy in digital marketing is to develop an integrated digital marketing campaign that integrates your advertising channels with your landing pages and an automated email marketing sequence.
Outline Your Digital Marketing Goals
To get started, outline your digital marketing goals in terms of Website visitors, leads, and sales.
Define Your Digital Marketing Channels
Next, outline the channels that you are going to use to promote your business, such as SEO, PPC, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and any offline advertising.
Define Your Target Audience and Avatars
Next, outline who your target audience is. If you have multiple audiences that you market to, create avatars for each, so you have a clear picture and understanding of the different customer groups that you are marketing to.
Define the Emotional Drivers
Next, outline the emotional drivers of each audience, including their desires, fears, obstacles, etc. This will help you understand what matters to them.
Outline Your Benefits and Differentiation
Next, outline the key benefits of your product and your key differentiators.
Create Your Value Proposition
Once you understand what matters to your audience, your benefits, and differentiation, outline your value proposition.
This framework will allow you to write a marketing campaign that connects with your audience and clearly explains the value that you provide.
Map Out Your Digital Marketing Campaign
Next, map out your digital marketing campaign to show what ads connect to specific landing pages and email sequences.
Develop Your Ads and Landing Pages
Next, develop your ads and landing pages to make sure that the front end of your digital marketing campaign is performing well. At this point, you simply want to focus on generating leads cost-effectively.
Create Your Email Follow-up Sequence
Once you are generating leads, develop your email follow up sequences to follow up with your leads. The bottom line is that a large percentage of leads simply are not sales ready – they are just information gathering. Instead of calling them prematurely and burning out your database, take a little time to nurture them. The purpose of the email campaign is to educate your prospects and differentiate your product, so they are better prepared to speak to a sales person.
Split Test Your Digital Marketing Campaign
Once your entire marketing campaign is performing well, split test your ads, landing pages, and emails to improve performance.
4. What are the challenges and opportunities of digital marketing?
Challenges
Selecting the Right Advertising Channels
Since generating Website visitors is the beginning of your marketing funnel, it is vital to select the right channels. We typically recommend starting with PPC advertising and affiliate marketing to get started.
The reason we recommend starting with PPC advertising is because you will generate immediate Website visitors, which will help you drive business growth in the shortest period of time.
It is important to test multiple channels, such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram to see what is producing the most cost-effective leads and sales.
Affiliate marketing is another great channel to test early on because there is no risk. You simply pay 50% of revenue to the affiliate to market your product to their list.
Social media marketing is a popular channel, but it does take time to build. SEO is also a very effective channel, but takes several months to see results.
Getting Enough Engagement
If you are pursuing social media marketing, focus on strong engagement and publishing short videos. Keep in mind that it’s not enough to just publish content, you want to ensure that your content is getting viewed and shared.
Optimizing Landing Page Performance
Once you are generating Website visitors, take the time to optimize your landing pages. If you can double your landing page conversion rate from Website visitors into leads, you can double your lead volume without increasing your advertising spend.
Improving Email Performance
Once you are generating leads cost-effectively, analyze how your emails are performing. Review your open and click through rates to see if your subject lines and emails can be improved. This is a simple way to improve the conversion of leads into sales without having to spend more money on advertising.
Establishing Easy to Understand Reporting
With the vast amount of data available, we often see that businesses get lost in the data. We recommend creating a simple report that shows you the most important data, such as lead, presentation, and sales volume, as well as the cost per lead, presentation, and sale. By simplifying your reporting, you can get a clear understanding of what step in your marketing funnel will have the greatest impact on results.
Connecting with Your Audience
One area that is often overlooked is how well your content connects with your audience emotionally. People go through a very linear process when making a purchase decision by asking the following questions:
- Why is this important to me?
- How does it work?
- What will this do for me?
- Why should I believe you?
- What should I do next?
To answer these questions, it’s vital to outline the emotional drivers of your target audience, including their desires, fears, frustration, and obstacles. Then, outline the benefits your product provides and how it’s different than your competitors. By understand this, you will better understand how to answer your audiences questions through your marketing.
Opportunities
There are six key opportunities to focus on to improve your digital marketing results, including increasing website visitors, landing page conversions, email conversions, reporting, messaging and branding. Let’s take a look at each.
Increasing Website Visitors
Increasing website visitors through SEO, PPC, social media, affiliates, email marketing, and offline advertising is the first step you can take to improve your digital marketing performance. The more traffic you can drive to your Website, the faster your business will grow.
Landing Page Improvement
Your landing pages are just as important as your ads to improve results. There are three key areas to focus on to improve your landing page results, including your headline, hero image at the top of your website, and your Web form. Take the time to test these three elements to get the best possible results.
Email Improvement
Instead of driving new leads directly to a sales person to call on, segment your leads. For example, for leads that show that they are sales ready because they have opted in for a free consultation, send them directly to a sales person. For leads that have simply downloaded an ebook, they have not indicated that they are ready to speak to a sales person. Instead, put them into a nurture email sequence that will educate them on your product and why you are the obvious choice.
Since email marketing can have such a significant impact on your ability to convert leads into sales, take the time to analyze your emails and split test changes to improve results.
Reporting Simplification and Improvement
When developing your main digital marketing report, we recommend creating a single dashboard that tells you how all of your lead channels are driving leads, sales presentations, and sales. By simplifying your reporting, you can understand what to focus on to improve results, while understanding the health of your digital marketing at all times.
Messaging Clarity
If your messaging is not clear and you are not connecting with your audience, so they feel that you understand what matters most to them, your marketing will fall flat. It is for this reason that you want to take the time to outline your audiences emotional drivers, your key differentiators, and value proposition.
You can then take this document and develop a marketing campaign that truly connects with your audiences desires, overcomes their obstacles, differentiates your product, communicates your key benefits, and clearly positions you as the obvious choice to satisfy their needs.
Branding for Consistency and Clarity of Message
Branding is often overlooked, but as you grow it is branding that will unify your marketing, so it stands for something specific. Start by outlining your vision, mission, core values, and establish your brand guidelines. This will ensure that your business comes across professionally, while allowing you to achieve a clear position in the market.
5. What are the best practices for managing digital marketing campaigns?
The first step is to establish clear and concise goals, including goals for each advertising channel. Once your goals are established, track the performance of your digital marketing campaigns at least twice per week for all channels, so you can optimize your campaign and minimize wasted advertising dollars. Next, make weekly spend adjustments to get the most out of your advertising spend.
As you scale your digital marketing, you want to ensure that team members are assigned to different roles to make sure that you can convert as many leads to sales as possible and for your marketing processes to run smoothly. As part of this, it’s vital to integrate marketing and sales, so your leads are contacted at the right time.
For constant improvement, split test ads, landing pages, and emails to maximize the return on your marketing investment.
6. What are the most effective digital marketing channels?
There are seven key digital marketing channels that can be used to drive your business forward, including PPC, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, and affiliate marketing. Let’s take a look at each.
PPC
We typically recommend starting your digital marketing campaign with PPC advertising in Google, Facebook and Instagram. Starting with PPC is effective because it generates immediate Website visitors and sales.
Google leads typically convert well into sales because people are actively searching in Google. Facebook and Instagram usually generate a higher volume of leads at a lower cost per lead, but may not convert at the same rate into sales. It is for this reason that we recommend testing all three channels to see what channel is producing the most efficient cost per sale.
SEO
SEO is more of a mid-term campaign as it does not produce immediate traffic and leads. Take the time to properly optimize your Website for different keywords and add pages to your Website and blog over time. This will allow you to rank for a longer list of keywords over time and increase your Website traffic.
Eventually, you can get to the point where multiple pages are ranking for different keywords and you are getting strong organic traffic on a monthly basis. Although SEO is labor intensive, it’s worth the time and effort.
Content Marketing
When publishing content, push it out through multiple channels to position yourself as a true thought leader. Content marketing channels include your blog, YouTube, SlideShare, social media, and more. Develop your content in different mediums, such as videos, guides, blogs, infographics, etc.
To ensure that your content is aligned to your SEO and branding, develop a content marketing plan, so all of your content serves a specific purpose with a consistent message. Download our Complete Content Marketing Ebook to learn the full 23-step content marketing formula.
Email Marketing
Email marketing can be a very effective medium to promote new products, promotions, and to nurture your leads. It is for this reason that you want to maximize the amount of leads that you generate and to build the largest possible email database.
Social Media Marketing
With various social media marketing platforms to choose from, it’s important to focus on the ones that generate the most traffic and engagement. Key social media channels to focus on include Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The different social networks appeal to different audiences, so it’s important to select the right channels for your target audience. Following trends will help significantly with how well your content performs in social media.
Video Marketing
Video marketing continues to grow in popularity. The fastest growing form of video is short videos. Important channels to publish your videos include YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can be a very powerful, low risk channel. You pay affiliates 50% of revenue to promote your product to their list and provide them with emails that they can send out to their database.
For the fastest growth, we recommend using as many channels as possible. Take the time to test different channels and let the data tell you where to invest more of your marketing dollars based on your cost per sale.
7. How do you create and implement a digital marketing plan?
Your digital marketing plan is a document that outlines how you’ll be going to market. Additionally, it also encompasses what your campaign looks like, your goals, what you’re investing in and your timing for implementation. Here are the steps to follow to develop and implement your digital marketing plan:
Step 1 – Outline Your Digital Marketing Goals
Outline your short, medium, and long-term digital marketing goals and your budget. Goals can include website visitors, leads, sales presentations, and sales. You can also establish goals for each marketing channel, such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, affiliates and email marketing.
Step 2 – Establish Your Key Digital Marketing Messaging
Outline your target audience, their emotional drivers, and establish your value proposition. It’s vital to have clarity on who you are marketing to and what drives them emotionally before writing the content for your digital marketing campaign.
Take the time to outline who your target audience is. If you have more than one audience, create an avatar for each audience, so you can visualize who you are speaking to. Then, outline their emotional drivers, such as their desires, fears, frustrations, and obstacles.
Next, outline what benefits your product provides and your differentiation. Once you have this information, you can create a value proposition that will help you concisely communicate to your audience.
Step 3 – Define Your Digital Marketing Strategies
Outline the strategies that you will use to achieve your digital marketing goals. Specifically, outline how you will drive visitors to your website and landing pages, as well as how you will convert the visitors into leads and sales.
Step 4 – Map Out Your Digital Marketing Campaign
To help visualize your digital marketing campaign, map out the channels, landing pages, and email sequences, so your team and outside vendors can better understand your plan.
Step 5 – Outline Your Digital Marketing Implementation Plan
To ensure that you can get to market quickly, establish a project plan with deadlines, so everyone involved understands the priorities and when tasks need to be completed.
Step 6 – Outline your Vision, Mission, and Core Values
One of the areas that is quite often misunderstood and overlooked is branding. In order for you to have a consistent message both internally and externally, it’s vital to outline your vision, mission, and core values.
Step 7 – Establish Your Digital Marketing Brand Guidelines
Take the time to establish your brand guidelines to ensure that all of your marketing is consistent. This will help your brand establish a consistent voice, look and feel, while providing clear guidelines for outside vendors to follow when developing your digital marketing campaigns. It will also help your team understand what your company represents, so they can help support your positioning on a daily basis.
8. What are the challenges and opportunities of managing digital marketing budgets?
Challenges
Minimizing Wasted Digital Marketing Spend
The first challenge is to ensure you aren’t wasting advertising dollars on inefficient digital marketing campaigns.
Tracking the Most Important Digital Marketing Metrics
The second challenge is to ensure that you are tracking the right metrics to have clarity on what areas of your digital marketing campaign needs improvement.
Proper Tracking of Your Digital Marketing Funnel
The fourth challenge is to ensure that you are tracking each step in your digital marketing funnel to understand if your leads are converting into sales at the maximum rate. Track how well you are generating leads, sales presentations, and sales.
The reason that it is important to track each step in your digital marketing funnel is to determine where there are areas to improve. The more leads you generate, the more important this is to scale your business. For example, if you are generating a high volume of leads and your prospects are opting in for a free consultation, it is vital to contact them immediately. If the prospect is contacted two days later, the probability converting them into a sale is much lower.
Spending on the Right Digital Marketing Channels
The third challenge is to allocate the right amount of marketing dollars to each channel. If you have a small budget, it may make more sense to focus on one channel versus multiple. If you have a large budget, it may be best to use multiple channels and increase the spend in the first couple months to learn quickly what is working and what needs optimization.
Using the Right Digital Marketing Ads
The fifth challenge is to create the right type of ads. For example, in Instagram, you can advertise using images, images with text, a carousel of ads, and even video. It’s important to test different ad types to see what performs best. Then, you can increase the advertising budget for the ads that perform best and remove budget from ads that are not performing as well.
Opportunities
Digital Marketing Spend Adjustments
The greatest opportunity when it comes to managing digital marketing budgets is to analyze your advertising results and make your spend adjustments based on performance. To get started, ensure that you are testing an adequate number of marketing channels with different ad formats as we discussed above.
Review Leading and Lagging Indicators
Next, review both leading and lagging indicators of results. The leading indicators of success are the cost per click and cost per lead. Ensure that these costs are as low as possible. You also want to make sure that you have a good landing page conversion rate because that can drive down your cost per lead.
It’s not enough to just analyze your leading indicators of success because if the lead quality is low, they may not convert into sales. It is for this reason that you want to review the volume of leads that convert into sales presentations and sales, as well as the cost per presentation and cost per sale.
Adjust Your Digital Marketing Spend
Once you have a clear understanding of what advertising channels are producing the lowest cost per sale, increase your spend in these channels and reduce the spends on the channels that have a less efficient cost per sale.
9. How do you measure the ROI of digital marketing campaigns?
Measuring your ROI includes using the equation – net profit divided by total cost, multiplied by 100 ( ROI = (net profit / total cost) x 100 ). The ROI will let you know what’s working so you can make adjustments to your campaigns and they’re easy to track within any channel. You will first need to determine what your ROI goal is (generally speaking, a 5:1 ratio is good).
We are Here to Help
If you have any questions at all, call 905.844.1685 or email us at info@blueprintim.com.