The Digital Marketing Formula for Success

If you are experiencing challenges with your digital marketing campaign, there are typically five key areas that can be reviewed to uncover opportunities to improve results.  As a digital marketing agency, we have seen that these five areas support each other. If one of these components is missing or weak then it doesn’t allow the rest of the campaign requirements to be effective.

The 5 “Must Haves” for Digital Marketing Success
We like to call these five “must have” components, pillars, because they are the foundation of successful digital marketing campaigns. They provide the strength that the business needs to become established, grow and scale up. When you think of pillars in their literal sense they are designed from all the right ingredients to be able to hold up a building. One pillar isn’t strong enough to hold up an entire structure and it takes several, so the weight of the building is evenly distributed. If you remove one or more of these then you are creating a weakness in the structure. This is exactly what happens with your marketing campaign. You remove one of these pillars or it doesn’t contain the right ingredients to give it strength, then it weakens the entire campaign.

1. Strategy and Content Development
When starting out, you need to think about your entire digital marketing campaign as a single system that properly integrates your advertising (traffic generation), landing pages and Website (Website conversion), and your email follow-up campaign for new leads. The content in your campaign should link prospects from your ads, to your landing pages, to your follow-up emails, to produce the highest volume of qualified leads and sales possible.

2.Traffic Generation
Traffic generation channels are nothing more than tools you use to drive prospects to your Website. And there are many channels to choose from, including pay per click, banner advertising, print ads, and social media just to name a few. The key to success is to not follow the latest fad, but to manage traffic generation by the numbers. It’s all about understanding which ads are driving the most cost-effective cost per lead, presentation, and sale. By analyzing these three numbers, you’re able to compare all of your advertisements objectively. To scale up your business, simply increase your spends on the ads that are performing well from a numbers perspective, and decrease the spends on the ads that are performing poorly. You can also split test different ads to see if you can improve performance, which we highly recommend.

3. Setup of Website and Landing Pages
Developing a great advertising campaign to drive prospects to your Website is just the beginning. To truly maximize the return on your advertising, you have to use Web pages that are designed correctly to maximize the volume of leads that are generated. And this all depends on the advertising channel that you are using. For channels where you have complete control of your landing page, such as a print ad, you want to use a highly simplified landing page (squeeze page) to maximize lead volume. This squeeze page should contain nothing more than a strong headline, your offer (such as an ebook), and a Web form. That’s it. That’s all. The more simple the squeeze page the higher the conversion. Why? Because you are minimizing the choices that are available to your prospect, which makes there decision a simple one, increasing the number of people that actually opt in for your offer. If you’re running a PPC campaign in Facebook or Google, you want to create a specific squeeze page for these channels as well, which we will get into more in future posts.

4. Automated Email Marketing
Now that you’ve maximized the number of leads from your advertising, it’s now a matter of preparing your leads to attend a sales presentation or buy through a sales letter. This is where an automated email campaign provides tremendous value. Instead of sending cold leads to salespeople, you send out a sequence of emails that establish a relationship with your new prospects, while establishing desire for what you are selling. This way when your prospects speaks to a salesperson, they are well informed and better prepared to make a purchase decision, which increases your lead to sale conversion rate.

5. Reporting
To be able to scale your business, you have to understand how each ad is performing on a cost per lead, presentation, and sale basis. You also have to understand how all of your advertisements are performing collectively. You want to know how many leads, presentations, and sales are required to hit your sales and revenue targets. This is where reporting comes in. It gives you the ability to scale your business by understanding the numbers. It shows you what to focus your attention on to improve results and remove wasted advertising dollars.

Summary:
It takes these five pillars to make up a successful internet marketing campaign, and that there is not one of these pillars that can efficiently stand alone and get the job done. Each pillar has to be built properly to give it the strength it needs.

Perhaps this information has raised some questions for you about your marketing endeavors. Be sure to post them here and we would be happy to answer them for you.