5 Digital Marketing Objectives: Which One is Right for You?
When clients begin working with Cup O Content, they may be unsure which online objectives make sense for their businesses. In many cases, new clients are not even sure what digital tools can do.
This article will map out five of the most common online objectives, explain what each does, and which marketing tactics are usually used to support them.
Potential Objective: Get More Leads
Who doesn’t want more qualified leads? But, if you want a robust sales funnel, you need to know how to keep feeding it. Where can you find prospects? How can you systematically produce more potential sales? How can you keep the funnel full?
Digital marketing can help. When done correctly, social media, blogging, SEO, search ads, and email not only help find leads but can also persuade them to opt in, identify themselves, or even schedule an appointment to talk with a salesperson.
This is like having prospects raise their hand. Wouldn't it be great if every lead who contacted your firm was pre-qualified? What if your salespeople didn't have to hunt and peck for the next piece of new business? What if potential customers filled in forms on your website? What if they followed you on social media or clicked on your social ads? This would mean that you're getting people to come to you, tell you what they need, and tell you when they need it. Digital marketing can do that.
Sometimes hyper-targeted social media ads are used to reach the kind of people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. By presenting the right information to those people at the right time, it’s possible to get them to “raise their hand.” Other times, it makes sense to send out emails with offers. SEO ensures the website is programmed with the keywords people use to search for your type of services so your brand and website show up in relevant searches. And then the leads come to you.
Objective: Build Brand Awareness
Some companies want more awareness among their target audience. That means they need to be in front of the right people over and over again. After all, repetition is key to awareness. In the old days, that would mean buying a year’s worth of advertising in magazines or newspapers and spending thousands, even millions, to build awareness. Happily, in modern times, technology offers a more efficient path to the consumer via search ads, display ads, and social media ads.
Not only can you send ads to very targeted markets, but you can also resend ads to your most interested audiences via remarketing. This strategy allows advertisers to put ads in front of people after they visit a website or click on an ad. Retargeting requires a user to complete a particular event, such as viewing a website page, and then send (or resend) an advertisement to that user. By limiting exposure to people who have seen a webpage or clicked on an ad, retargeting guarantees frequency.
Marketers can decide how quickly they want to retarget (in a few minutes) or how often (three times? 10 times? 100 times?). It’s also possible to include different information in retargeting messages. For example, do you want to remind consumers that they just looked at a particular pair of shoes on your website? Or do you want to send a dog food ad to a person who just visited your pet supplies page? Retargeting gives you almost limitless options for using frequency tactics to increase awareness.
Email marketing is another way to increase awareness. When people opt into your email list, you can send regular updates, offers, sales, or product information. With emails, you can also choose the frequency. Will you send reminders daily, weekly, or monthly?
Objective: Drive Sales
While some clients want to prime the pump for sales, others want online transactions. Once upon a time, it was hard to get a lot of people to buy things online. But since the pandemic, online purchasing has become truly mainstream. Consumers now purchase everything from paperclips to vacation homes online.
And you no longer need a commerce website. Platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and others offer online stores that make it easier for companies to sidestep building e-commerce websites while still allowing consumers to find and buy the things they want. Cup O Content helps clients sell in various ways, using multiple platforms.
Objective: Rank Higher on Search Pages
When people want to try or research a new product or service, the first thing they do is Google it. In fact, research shows that about half of all people get inspiration for purchases online.
Online rankings drive sales. And if you don’t rank for relevant keywords, you could lose business. That’s because when your customers use a search engine to look for your company online, even to find your address or a phone number, competitors pop up. So if you're not ranking in Google searches against relevant keywords, not only do you lose potential revenue, but you may also risk existing sales. That's why so many successful companies spend so much time (and money) on search engine optimization, also known as SEO.
If you ignore SEO or do it incorrectly or incompletely, your site won't rank high for relevant searches, but your competitor will show up instead. It’s easy to see how search rankings can quickly make or break a company.
Objective: Build an Email List
Email is a highly effective way to reach current and potential customers. It allows you to send videos and images of information formatted n the way you want when you want, which also allows you to schedule emails to send around the time your consumers are likely checking their email. And when you send emails, you don't have to worry about search rankings against competitors or other digital noise. Instead, you have your consumers' attention, if only for a few moments.
But attaining email addresses isn't as simple as it seems. If you buy a list, it's unlikely that you'll see the email addresses or know who is opening your email. In fact, the term
“buy” is a misnomer. You actually rent emails, and the people who rent those emails to you are very protective of the identity of their lists. After all, once they lose the secrecy of the emails, they've lost their revenue stream.
Can you build your own list? Carefully searching for new emails is wildly inefficient. Pulling names from CRM platforms is quicker but often pricey. And emailing without permission violates the policies of platforms such as Constant Contact, Campaigner, and Mailchimp. In addition, if your emails are tagged as spam, you may be blocked from sending emails through these platforms.
But there are ways to get people to voluntarily share email addresses. For example, you can offer high-value information in exchange for an email, such as a white paper or a video. Prospects share emails so you can deliver the information to them.
Sometimes businesses offer free stuff. In this approach, the organization offers a free hat or another small value item in exchange for an email address. To get the emails of doctors, lawyers, CEOs, or other hard-to-find groups, companies may offer high-value giveaways, such as a Yeti cooler or an iPad. Giveaways are often an effective way to build your email list, but you pay with giveaways.
However, your marketing opportunities are almost limitless once you have a good email list. For example, you can support short-term sales with promotions and price-off events. Or you can introduce new products. You can have Black Friday or Cyber Monday offers. You can drive customers to retail locations. You can offer coupons, vouchers, or other promotional tools designed to drive sales.
Can You Have More Than One Digital Marketing Objective?
Can you have more than one digital marketing objective? The short answer is yes. Creating multiple approaches for multiple objectives allows you to compare digital strategies and the resulting success. Comparing allows Cup O Content to make optimizations and grow ROI on a variety of strategies. For example, we can replicate successes. Conversely, if a campaign performs poorly, we can redirect dollars to the most successful strategies, increasing overall ROI.
Every client is different, which is why we customize every marketing campaign. Want to talk more? Contact us at Cup O Content, and let's talk about your business, your objectives, and your goals.
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Which Digital Marketing Objective is Right for You?
