Prepare for 2022 success with my top 5 ways to optimise your digital marketing strategy.
Digital Marketing has represented a critical aspect of every Marketing Plan, at least since I’ve been in the field… so a couple of decades and a few years on top! I’m quite surprised these days when I hear companies need to focus their marketing efforts on the digital side – seriously what isn’t digital? Even our good old-fashioned customer conferences in 5-star hotels (when they take off properly again!) have an enormous digital component, from email and web campaigns, to event apps that enable people to network, book sessions, view live streaming, etc.
The pandemic (oh no, not that again…) has also contributed hugely to the growing importance of digital in all aspects of our lives. Reading about marketing trends and business perspectives, you might be forgiven to think there was no digital before Covid!
I’m afraid I’ve now fallen into that trap of separating Digital from the rest of Marketing… Here are my reasons. Even though it’s embedded into every minute activity in the marketing mix, it seems to me that the discipline that has always applied to marketing economics doesn’t always follow through to the digital side. Therefore I thought I should list my top 5 ways to optimise your digital marketing strategy, as you’re no doubt preparing or finalising your 2022 plans.
1. Plan the SMART way
I’ve talked about this before in the context of a CX strategy (blog here for reference). And we all know SMART objectives [should] apply to any business plan. Here’s a reminder:
S(pecific) – and no, “Digital First” won’t do… This is about setting specific objectives that cover all aspects of your digital activities, and every activity should indeed track back to one of these objectives. Otherwise you’re going to end up with teams that try to find ways to look busy and probably achieve a great deal, but then their activities inevitably end up on the “so what…” list.
M(easurable) – now this is tricky, not because it’s hard to measure digital marketing activities, but because it’s too easy! Whatever you do digitally has an almost unlimited amount of metrics associated with it. You do an email campaign, and you can measure open rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click through rates, shall I go on? They’re all interesting, and if you have a dedicated analytics person, there’s much to learn from almost all these rates. But when we talk about setting measurable objectives, we need to focus on those that most tightly link back to business objectives. More on that later.
A(chievable) – we’ve all faced those dreaded “70% increase in the next 3 months” objectives that some leaders seem to pluck out of thin air. Far from motivational, they only serve to destroy morale (unless of course there’s a reason to hope for those 70%, and you’d better be “specific” about that upfront). So make sure you set achievable objectives, or in an ideal world, collaborate with your teams to come up with an ambitious yet realistic set of objectives.
R(elevant)– this one’s important in digital marketing. Back to the thousand ways you can measure anything digital, the only trick not to be buried in interesting but ultimately inconsequential numbers is to pick the relevant ones. Hint – they’re the ones that track back to your overall business objectives. So for example, number of web visitors is an interesting figure, but conversion to web sales is definitely more relevant. By keeping the focus on what really matters you can analyse the metrics that influence this number (e.g. number of visitors, conversion rate by campaign type, bounce rate) and use the right levers to get to your key objective of increasing web sales, without being distracted by trying to fix everything.
T(imely) – this one’s quite easy to understand, but in the digital marketing world, you need to make sure your objectives take into account the right periods. Not only to be in line with your financial reporting system, but to track against key web trends. If you’re basing next year’s goals on your results over a particular period of time (inflated because of Christmas sales if you’re in B2C, or underrated because of Covid affecting Q4 2020), you’re in for a surprise, which is never good news in business, whichever way it goes. So think carefully about customer behaviours and key market trends…
2. Get out of your bubble
Once you set your SMART objectives, across all your key activities, it can be easy to rest on your digital laurels and just deploy your plans. Much harder is to keep track of where you are against the plan. Surprising how often teams set objectives at the start of the year, and the next day, it’s business as usual.
Even more surprising is how rarely we get out of our marketing bubble. It can be challenging to look over the fence but this is absolutely critical. After all, you might reach 100% of your target and still fail… if your competition has overtaken you. Digital success is down to a few key factors, including:
ability to innovate,
right skills to deploy the volume and quality of digital campaigns, and to analyse results,
agile processes and plans to adapt to evolving trends
seamless and consistent flow across channels, activities, teams
Just like you, your competitors are striving for digital excellence constantly (unless you’re exceptionally lucky in your marketspace). So it’s easy to focus on your own bubble and measure only against your own objectives. But don’t forget to look outwards and compare yourself against your direct competition. There are great tools and solutions out there that will help you do that, but you might need a bit of manual comparison as well. Time well spent I assure you.
In addition to this competitive benchmarking, another way to look outwards is to check what the leaders in digital marketing are doing. It can be so inspiring to look at market leaders in other industries, and find a way to replicate their approach whilst staying authentic to your brand. If you’re in B2B, you’ll note leading B2C companies using really innovative techniques to reach out to their customers, and if it’s the other way around, you might apply ABM techniques from B2B to your VIP customers.
Finally, and this one’s close to my heart, don’t forget to check what your customers are telling you. Make sure you put feedback mechanisms at key touchpoints in the digital marketing journey to see what works well, and what needs fixing. An example I’ve seen was a web team trying to fix decreasing conversion rates on their site, through UX and other techniques. With a simple feedback form triggered when customers left without purchasing the items in their trolley, the team actually realised that there was a bug in the Payment screen, and when fixed, their conversion rate shot up to normal levels again.
3. (Re)Build your Customer Personas
I’m going to assume you know what customer personas are – possibly the topic of another article! Here’s a link to a great Forbes article in case you’re not sure.
You might have done the work already of segmenting your customers into key categories, and assigning personas to these categories. A worthwhile effort I’m sure you’ll agree.
What I’ve seen too many times though is customer personas gone stale… Not a pretty sight! When done properly, it takes a while to build your personas and the ecosystem around it (e.g. Product X fact sheet with relevant messaging for Persona A). So what happens is the digital marketing team using the same personas for years and years… But everything else has evolved: your business, your processes, your touchpoints… and yes, your customers too!
In all probability, you can still use 3 out of 4 key personas, and just edit them to reflect changing behaviours. But you can’t just assume things stay the same, or your personas will be useless.
The good news is that digital campaigns represent an ideal way to check your personas on an ongoing basis. Look at the job titles of the people who engage with your brand across the different campaigns, and if you’ve got your campaigns properly mapped against your buyer journey, then you’ve got a great chance of validating that your personas are still relevant.
A word of caution though… only addressing specific job titles for certain campaigns will NOT validate anything, as the filter is already in place. Remember to widen the scope (even occasionally) to ensure your audience’s needs haven’t changed.
4. Connect to your business KPIs
Hopefully this is covered by the SMART objectives I mentioned in Point 1, especially the M and R sections. But planning excellence does not automatically lead to effective measuring and reporting. Digital Marketing can be in my experience the first area of misalignment between the marketing department and the rest of the business (especially sales and the executive team). Clearly this has something to do with the fact that Digital is omnipresent in all marketing activities. But more critically it’s the abundance of metrics that tends to be at the source of many heated discussions, at all levels of the organisation.
What can often happen is that if the trend of a specific metric doesn’t look great this month/quarter, some marketers pivot to another metric which for some reason (hopefully you know why!) looks much better. Web visitors are down this month? Never mind, it’s all about bounce rate, don’t you know! And back to web visitors next quarter when you’ve fixed the problem. Unsubscribe rates are regularly the subject of much debate – definitely important if you’ve managed to get them under control, and “just one of these things” when the rates go up again.
So what do digital marketers need to do? Go back to the Measurable and Relevant objectives they’ve set up in the SMART plan, and focus on these only (all other metrics are interesting only if ultimately roll back to these key rates). And as we’ve already mentioned, the metrics that matter are those that link to the overall business KPIs: web sales, customer engagement, even operational metrics like number of customer calls, if you’ve managed to get a great Self Help feature or How To video on your website. If you can directly link your digital marketing strategy to these KPIs, the heated conversations I talked about will be much quieter and critically, much more productive.
5. Keep evolving…
Like in most walks of life, consistency and ambition get the worm! That’s the saying, right? Digital marketing, more than any other aspect of marketing, requires constant dedication to keeping up with all the latest technology and trends. Whether we’re talking about SEO rules and algorithms, PPC options, types of social media promotions, best practices for email campaigns, digital feedback solutions, it can seem like a never-ending learning journey. But getting left behind is simply not an option if you want to stay ahead of the competition, and have the upper hand during those heated internal debates!
Focus on digital evolution has also become a key customer expectation, and we all know what happens when those expectations aren’t met. I recently visited a website looking for a certain B2B solution, and their Resources page didn’t have a Search function. First impression: if they can’t even get that right, how can I expect them to implement a fairly complex solution successfully? You might say their services teams aren’t connected to their digital marketing department, but hey, don’t get me going on the importance of a holistic customer experience and focusing on your brand promise, in a consistent manner!
So watch out that you get the right balance between keeping up with digital innovation whilst still delivering on customer expectations. Nothing more frustrating than launching a brand new website but your customers can’t find the key features they’re used to. Equally, nothing more amazing than seeing new user-friendly features that make the customer’s life easier.
In summary, to deliver a successful digital marketing strategy in 2022, it’s important to go back to basics and plan SMART (and keep the planning process going throughout the year). Don’t forget to (re-)evaluate your customer personas as part of this plan. And do keep checking your metrics against your plan, and against the larger business KPIs to build credibility across the organisation.
Finally, remember that the journey never stops. No end in sight for the digital marketer, but that’s a great thing! And it also means you need to keep investing in your (and if you have one, your team’s) professional development. Digital best practices and tools move so quickly – I’m already behind just for the time it took me to write this article.Welcome to your blog post. Use this space to connect with your readers and potential customers in a way that’s current and interesting. Think of it as an ongoing conversation where you can share updates about business, trends, news, and more.
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