Holistic Digital Marketing

Dale Keipert — December 14, 2018 Follow @360Interactive

— December 14, 2018

StartupStockPhotos / Pixabay

It’s nearly impossible to keep up. Search, Content, Social, Email, Display, Mobile, the list goes on and on. The challenge with digital marketing is that there are more ways to try to connect with your customers than you have time, people, or money for. So, what happens most of the time is that you focus in on certain things within all of these marketing channels that you’re either comfortable with, or that you have some resources for and pretty much ignore all the rest.

The problem with focusing on just one or two digital marketing components is that you’re probably not getting your marketing message in front of your customer with enough, or possibly any, frequency.

Here’s the real world example

Let’s say that your sweet-spot customer is female, mid-’40s, lives within a 30-mile radius of your store, had is middle-income. You know that the benefit of digital marketing is the ability to target your campaigns specifically for this sweet-spot customer. What marketing channel will you use? SEO? Social? Display?

Exactly! You’ll use the channels that will deliver your marketing message to this customer at the right time, with the right consistency, in the right place, so that you get the results that you want.

Holistic digital marketing is looking at every tool at your disposal and using the right tools to accomplish the goal of growing your business. In this example, you will uses tools to:

• Drive the right people to your website from multiple channels (remember your customers are everywhere)
  • The search channel which includes PPC, SEO, LocalSEO, and the Knowledge Panel.
  • The social channel which predominantly includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and don’t forget YouTube.
  • Content marketing which is everything from your blog to thought leadership articles to what you post on the social media platforms.
• Get the people that do visit your site to convert and remember that calling you for a quote or scheduling a room measure is not the only conversion there is. Other conversions are:
  • Time spent on a page. If people aren’t reading the content on your site (which is shown by time on page) then they’re probably not going to become a customer.
  • Downloading some content from your site like product brochures, how-to guides, or signing up for coupons or newsletters.
• Getting visitors to come back. One of the biggest misunderstandings is that when someone lands on a website they will, during this first visit, perform the ultimate conversion of purchasing something, requesting a quote, or scheduling an appointment. That very rarely happens. It will take multiple visits before they are ready for that level of commitment. What can you do to get them to return to your site?
  • Retargeting ads are displayed to people that have visited your website. These ads are run on websites that are part of a network (like Google’s ad network) and when your past website visitor visits a website on the network, they see an ad for your company.
  • Retarget past website visitors on Facebook. A little-known feature in Facebook is the website custom audiences feature which allows you to target people that have visited your website.
  • Marketing automation is the perfect tool is the visitor that you want to draw back to your website has filled out a form that required them to give you their email address.
• Know exactly what is working and what isn’t when it comes to your digital marketing by setting up your analytics reports to inform you on the following metrics
  • Returning visitor count
  • Traffic source
  • Time on page
  • Most popular content
  • Goals
• Your website has to be the center of your digital marketing universe. I’ve heard of people trying to use their Facebook page or other social media page as their website but that is never going to work to grow your business. To make sure that your website is fully prepared to handle all of its responsibilities here are some things that you’ll want to make sure are in place with your site:
  • Mobile-friendly is the standard for the web, today. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, make this your #1 goal. Yes, it is that important. There are a number of ways to make your site mobile-friendly. For a comprehensive explanation of them, here’s a link to an article we put together explaining it.
  • Content has to be current and provide the information that your customers are coming to get. One of the best ways to make sure that you have the right content on your site is to brainstorm all of the typical questions that you get from customers that come into your store. Then, go to your site to see if you can get the answers to each question, on your site.
  • Eliminate all marketing and industry jargon from your website. Your customers are not going to understand or appreciate it and they’ll most likely just leave.
  • Speed up the load time of your website pages. Without even looking at your site, I’ll bet that they are too slow. Page speed will drive customers away from your site faster than they got there. And, it will hurt you with your SEO rankings.

Holistic

As you can see, it takes more than SEO or tactics to put together a winning strategy for growing your business with digital marketing. All of the components must move in unison and support each other.

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