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Digital marketing offers the ability to reach specific audiences, bring people to events and sell directly to anyone, anywhere in the world. Digital marketing is accessible to any business or individual at relatively low cost and is highly accountable.
Because it is quick and easy to get digital marketing campaigns up and running, you can test out different messages and offerings at very low cost and track the response and uptake from your audience, adapt and observe how the changes affect your outcomes – sales, visitors, engagement or feedback levels, for example.
The challenge is that digital marketing itself is evolving and expanding so quickly that it can seem overwhelming. Just keeping up with the new tools and techniques, figuring out where to spend your limited time and money and understanding what is working well – and not so well – can paralyze your efforts.
Keep in mind that more and more people are using on-line tools – search engines, social media sites, review sites and blogs – to do research, gather feedback and make purchase decisions. If you don’t have a compelling digital marketing story it is highly likely that you will find it harder and harder to attract audiences, build communities of interest and grow your projects.
This introduction aims to give you an overview to start to understand the digital marketing landscape and begin to develop a digital marketing plan that speaks to your specific audience, with the most appropriate tools and measure your outcomes. Using these tools, you should have a basic road-map to get you started, help you measure your progress and be persistent.
The Digital Marketing Landscape
Digital marketing covers a wide range of activities, all aimed at gaining the attention of people who are “on-line” – browsing the web, using an app on a mobile phone, reading an email or even crossing over from the physical world back to a web site – and enticing them to take some action, ultimately leading to a transaction.
The distinction between digital and any other form of marketing is fading somewhat as more and more publications move on-line and more physical artefacts (e.g. magazines and television commercials) include elements, such as a QR-code, that bring people back to a web site when scanned with a mobile phone.
Starting back in the mid 1990s, digital marketing began with email and banner ads on web sites. Email remains highly effective for many forms of marketing, while banner ads have largely been supplanted by other kinds of ads.
Today, the main forms of digital marketing are:
- Content marketing – this is particularly well suited for arts organisations where the offering is a form of content, be it visual or performance-based. Content marketing is all about providing valuable content that captures the imagination, excites the audience and encourages them to engage with the content creator. Examples of content marketing channels include your blog (where you place articles, images, videos and documents on your own web site), video platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo, articles, newsletters, eBooks, podcasts… there are a plethora of formats. The key is to show your passion and to give real value. In return, you will be viewed as an expert and someone who people want to deal with.
- Email – probably the oldest form of digital marketing, email remains a powerful way to stay in touch, give updates and remind people of why they liked you and your business in the first place. If you are going to build a successful digital marketing programme, one of the main aims is to get people on your email list, keep them there by being relevant, interesting and useful and provide links for them to return to your web site and buy from you (or do something else you want them to do.
- Search – made popular by Google, search marketing is powerful because people often search for specific topics when they are ready to take action. The more specific the search term, the more likely the user is looking to actually buy something, as opposed to simply doing research. Search is actually divided into two distinct marketing actions – paid and natural search. Paid search (called Search Marketing or Pay Per Click) is the results you see on the right side of Google when you do a search. You pay every time someone clicks on your link (so you need to be sure that the page they land on has a call to action such as “buy now”.). Natural search results are what you see in the body of Google. You can’t pay directly for positioning as Google is trying to return the most relevant results for the user’s query, but you can do a lot to make your site more relevant to search, known as Search Engine Optimization.
- Social – social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have received huge media coverage and changed the way individuals and businesses interact. In general, social media allows businesses to share content and engage in dialogue at a large scale. If it’s done properly, social media marketing can create great brand awareness and affinity and build an audience who are willing to respond to specials and share their actions with their network at no cost to you. Be aware, if you don’t play by the community rules, social media can create major headaches as bad news and reviews spread very fast.
Digital Marketing Objectives
Everything you do in your digital marketing efforts needs to have carefully thought out objectives and you need to measure your progress against those objectives and adjust what you are doing if you are not hitting your numbers.
Some of the high level objectives you can think about are:
- Engagement – getting people to consume your content and respond to it (comments, likes, shares, email sign ups)
- List building – how many buyers and strong prospects are you aiming to get on your email list?
- Actions – getting people to do something you want them to do (buy something, sign up for an event, share your content). Understand the value of these actions and how much you can spend to encourage people to take them.
Your Digital Marketing Plan
Your first digital marketing plan should be simple and easy to follow. Don’t spend so much time planning that you never get to the doing! Your plan needs to address 4 Ws and an H.
- Who: Understand your audience, who are they, where do they hang out, what are they into?
- What: Your story and the way you’ll tell it – text, audio, images, video. What do you care about, what are you here for, what are you passionate about? What messages do you need to get across?
- Where: Which tools work best for you? Where will you put your messages? (Your blog, Facebook? Someone’s newsletter?)
- When: Give yourself the best chance to have your message heard. You need to create a schedule of what you will put out and where.
- How: How will you make it happen? What resources will you need? Who has accountability for it? What will you measure to show if you are on track and what needs to change?
Testing and Measuring
Once you set your objectives and have a plan, you start to roll it out. This is where digital marketing shows it’s greatest power because everything is highly accountable. As long as you have set up measures that are relevant to your objectives, you can tell how everything is going and identify areas for improvement.
Make sure that you regularly track activity, measure your progress and test different options.
Persistence
Digital marketing can give you great leverage and terrific returns. The challenge is that it rarely happens overnight. Just as with any form of promotion, you need to persist. Keep showing up, keep trying new ideas and testing the results against what you were doing before. Over time you will learn, improve and generate the results you are seeking.
