The world rapidly thrust businesses like yours to become increasingly digital with the continuing impact of the global pandemic in the past year and a half. Companies across all sectors are looking for ways to transition their marketing investments from traditional to digital marketing solutions. The Wingman Crew has been keeping notes on what small businesses are concerned about. Keep reading to see if you have been asking some of the same digital marketing questions as those below. But, questions without answers wouldn’t be very insightful so we have done our best to answer them all.
[Disclosure upfront: many of the questions below reflect numerous variables in their answer. Add to that that each company leader that reads this blog have unique situations in your business that the Wingman Crew can’t possibly address every scenario in a single blog. We do welcome you to book a Wingman at your convenience and we can isolate answers to your unique situation.]
Digital marketing question #1: “What channel should I use to generate leads?”
This is our favourite digital marketing question because the answer isn’t necessarily digital in its answer. The answer we always provide to this question is ensure your lead generating communication is placed wherever your prospects are – online or offline. You need to ensure you know who your perfect clients – or personas – are. Then, craft your communications directly to them. What are their problems? Answer with your solution. Then, determine what channel(s) they hang out in and invest marketing in these locations.
If your prospects can be educated, informed, entertained, and engaged on social media, then that is a tactic you should use. Do they browse for solutions to their problems solely via search engines, then you need to be found on Google (and Bing). Your company has a wide variety of digital marketing channels to choose from to generate quality leads, including email marketing, social media, social advertising, organic and on-page SEO, paid search and more. This answer likely led to even more digital marketing questions for you (sorry!) such as how do I know where my prospects hang out.
Digital marketing question #2: “What channel should I use to generate leads?” (second pass – we get asked this a lot!)
Generating quality leads – particularly at the exact moment someone needs the solution you provide to their problem – can best be done via search engines (Google and Bing specifically). This answer covers both search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines are the only channel that allow you to get in front of your audience at the right moment that they are searching for a product like yours. This happens with keywords the user types in their search bar, and get matched with the best results according to Google: In contrast, social media and email marketing communicate on your time; not your prospects timeline.
If you are a business just starting with digital marketing and your goal is to get leads in the door immediately. The Wingman crew without blinking will recommend SEM. This channel can get you leads in the matter of days while SEO is more organic and takes time to build traction. You can’t send an email to a non-existent distribution group. Your messages on social media need a following. SEM can be positioned to be in front of a prospective customer within hours.
Digital marketing question #3: “How can I make my campaigns perform better?”
First, we need to ensure the question has precedence and validity by answering this question with a series of other digital marketing questions. Are you tracking your campaign? What are you tracking? Are these the metrics you are assigning success on? How do you track? Do you use controls to compare against? Are you conducting any testing? (There’s even more questions we ask but we’ll stop there for now).
Companies like yours are already investing in various channels, but are not seeing the expected (hoped for) return on investment. Each channel – online or offline – has their own specific nuances but there are four things we consistently start with to answer this question:
- Start at the end. Ensure you set and know your S.M.A.R.T. objectives at the onset so you truly know what success looks like.
- Ensure you can track and allocate channel success. Every channel has their own ways of tracking. Utilize the tracking methods available. When using more than one channel tactic, pre-determine how to measure the success of each apart and combined. If you don’t know where a lead came from, ask. If your phone is ringing, simply ask them what made them call you today. How did they hear about you?
- Test. Test. Test. A set it and forget it model might work for your alarm clock but digital marketing is an ever-evolving equation. You need to ensure you know what works and why. We are not suggesting simply changing a colour or a couple words here and there. Test difference makers such as offer language, communication sequence order, control lists, and more. Testing is absolutely essential for better performance because it allows your audience to “vote” for what draws their attention the most.
- Analyze your results. Track. Review. Test. Repeat.
Digital marketing question #4: “How can I do more for less?”
If you are like most business leaders, you want to ensure your investments have maximum returns. This includes your digital marketing efforts. So, our answer to this question is that digital marketing, unchecked, can consume a lot of budget. It needs to have your end goals and objectives at the heart of all activity. While there is no silver bullet answer to this question (despite what tactic-first agencies might tell you), if you start with quality of your campaign and align it directly to your objective, you will have the best opportunity for success in your campaigns. If your keywords and messages directly respond to the problems and solutions needed of your prospects, your cost per [fill in the blank – click, conversion, connection, phone call, etc.] will likely be massively decreased than spray and pray tactics. Ensure you are aligned with segment, copy, offer, and creative. We say this all the time:
Does your campaign resonate with the right audience offering the right solution
to the right person in the right medium at the right time?
Digital marketing question #5: “Is content really King?”
Content Marketing is perhaps your best long-term strategy for providing value to your audience. Delivering great pieces of content is an excellent way to get your audience to talk about your brand, and share your content around the Internet voluntarily. For free! (to be fair, good content takes time. If you can’t spare the time, it can be outsourced. But, the actual distribution of content, via eBooks, infographics, blogs, white papers, social media, email, press releases, etc. is free. Digital marketing questions to the Wingman crew surrounding social media and blogs specifically are addressed below in #6 and #7.
Digital marketing question #6: “Should my business be on social media?”
Yes. The short-answer to this question is “yes.” There is almost no segment of the economy that shouldn’t have at least some form of representation on select social networks. The big four – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn – are fantastic vehicles for creating awareness and for reaching your target audience. With 4 billion social media users worldwide, your business has a very real opportunity to find and engage with your target audience on one or more social channels. But, similar to our answer in digital marketing question #1, you want to be where YOUR audience is. LinkedIn, for example is spectacular for educating and communicating B2B. Instagram and Twitter are excellent channels for quick-hit messages for communicating in the moment.
Digital marketing question #7: “Should my business have a blog?”
Similar to the previous question, the answer here is an emphatic “yes.” We truly believe that every company needs to have a blog in their industry. Blogs allow you to position your brand in a passive non-intrusive way. It provides value and allows you to showcase your company as a subject matter expert. Blogs offer the opportunity for your business to present the amazing work you have done and to add value to those in the decision-making process moving them from knowing you to trusting you and eventually buying from you. In addition, having a blog with content optimized for search engines is an extremely powerful way for getting qualified traffic now and well into the future.
Prospects coming from search engines are actively looking for content that is related to their problems needing to be solved. Your blogs offer juicy content painting a picture that your business has the perfect solution for them. This is also evergreen content so it exists long after it was originally written. It also keeps prospects on your website longer learning more about your business and building more of the trust mentioned above. Getting your content in front of an audience of potential customers is a very efficient strategy that may bring great results in the long run. Even if your reader doesn’t purchase from you right after reading your blog post, you are adding one more impact that may bring them back again later, this time with an intention to purchase.
Digital marketing question #8: “How can I convert leads into customers?”
At the end of the day, you don’t care about clicks, follows, engagements, shares, leads, etc. You care about sales. No list of digital marketing questions to the Wingman crew would be complete without this question. Leads without conversion are the same as fellow passengers on the bus. Unless they are sitting next to you and actually making a purchase, they are nice to acquaint with but simply going on the same track as you but to a different destination. For this reason, the end goal of lead generation is almost always to convert leads into customers at some point of their journey. Here are three things that you can do to achieve this goal:
- Generate quality leads. Instead of focusing on the quantity of leads, invest your efforts in finding the right channels to allocate the quality of your target audience that could actually buy from you. Revisit the answer to digital marketing question #2. Optimized and/or paid search campaigns with the right keywords is a great place to start.
- Leverage your customer feedback. Ask your existing client base to share their experience with your product or service. Paying attention to both positive and negative feedback is absolutely essential for acquiring more customers.
- Make use of your data. Pay close attention to your metrics to determine and allocate the exact channels and campaigns that are bringing you the most leads. Do more of those with the higher quality leads. Reduce or remove the channels producing low quality or no leads at all.
Conclusion
Eight is enough. We get asked so many more than just these eight questions (seven actually, since we answered #1 twice). The Wingman crew thanks you for taking the time to read our article on the most common digital marketing questions for businesses. The above eight answers have only scratched the surface of how to improve your business’ digital marketing endeavours. Want to know more? Need a hand? Wingman Direct Marketing knows how to get your objectives from conception to strategy to execution to analysis to profit. Interested? Book a Wingman today. You don’t have to fly solo.