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Revamp-your-digital-strategy-1

Revamp your digital strategy

Going digital is no longer an option, it’s now a necessity.

So how do you ensure your digital marketing strategy is effective? Our Communications team, responsible for helping our clients do just that, put their heads together to identify four key elements that will help boost your digital performance.

Match your touchpoints across the B2B journey

Your digital marketing activities should be integrated into your existing marketing process. The best way to do this is to map them into your buyer journey. Not only does an integrated approach help you find the right channels for your business and your goals, it’s also a more cost-effective marketing strategy.

Top tip

List all your current and desirable channels and consider the following questions when you’re mapping your touchpoints:

  • What does this touchpoint do for your client? And what does it do for your business?
  • What type of journeys are clients going through?
  • What activities are taking place?
  • What kind of content does this touchpoint include?
  • What value does this channel unlock for the business?

We recommend you create your own journey. But here's a simple template as a guide:

Table

 

Measure your effectiveness

Data is King. That’s why it’s essential that you meticulously track your campaigns and channel performance to understand where the strengths and weaknesses lie in your current strategy.

We know that accurately monitoring campaign performance has never been easy. However, with the advent of digital marketing, we’re now able to collect and analyse all kinds of data from customers, channels and/or campaigns.

It’s made it easier to use our budgets more effectively and build a strategy that packs a punch across multiple channels.

How do you start?

Top tip

Keep it simple and run an audit of your main channels and website. This will highlight the main goals of the website as well as the landing pages.

Once you have a deep understanding of each channel, you need to revisit your KPIs and see if they’re aligned with your overall marketing plan and business strategy.

We suggest that you pick 2 or 3 KPIs per channel. This will help you understand the overall purpose and strategy of your channels and measure your success as you go.

Two free essential tools to track your performance and goals are Google Analytics and Google AdWords.

The graph below shows the different KPIs you can set up and track in your marketing plan:

Digital-marketing-KPIs

 

Rethink your content format

Creating compelling content appropriate for you target market doesn’t go far enough. You need to use the best format available.

So, if you’re thinking about creating educational content, you might want to consider webinars, as 91% of B2B professionals say webinars are their preferred type of educational content.

Podcasts are also popular amongst the B2B audience but we would advise that you start with a clear objective, be sure to rehearse and develop a series of at least 3 episodes before launching to build credibility and engagement with your listeners. 

Top tip

Shake up your format. There are many types of webinars that you can run: Q&A, report reveal, panel, interview, expert and product launch. Try including polls during the event to gain feedback and key insights. And if you’re short on time, you can always pre-record content for people to view on-demand.

Bright Talk research say 10am to 11am PST on Thursdays is the best time to host your webinar.

And Wednesdays is the best day to promote it.

B2B audiences prefer webinars to be 40 mins in length (including Q&A), allowing them to interact with the host(s).  

Here are some useful stats for you to compare with your results:

  • 59% of registrations happen less than a week before the webinar.
  • 17% happen on the day of the webinar.
  • 36% of registrations that happen on the day of the webinar occur between 8-10am.

Don't forget emails

Emails are still one of the strongest digital marketing channels for brands of all shapes and sizes. 81% of B2B marketers say their most popular form of content marketing is email newsletters. And 90% of content marketers say email engagement is the top metric they track to measure content performance.

Email-ROI-by-Industry

Source: HubSpot Email Marketing Strategy in 2020

Top tip:

Try to:

  • make them creative and personalised (e.g. first name in the subject line, geo-location content)
  • structure your emails with the most important points at the top (if there’s an action you need them to complete, make sure it’s clear for them to see and as close to the top as possible)
  • compare different approaches using A/B testing (e.g. goals, subject lines, times and CTAs)
  • allow subscribers to specify email preferences via a robust preference centre
  • set up automated emails (e.g. welcome, onboarding, early activation, reactivation, remarketing, transactional, account, event, thresholds spend, promotional, demo, educational, product launch)
  • ask your sales team about common topics or enquires and create content to support them.

Earlier this year, Campaign Monitor shared some industry average stats which can be benchmarked against your email performance:

Campaign-monitor-industry-averages

 

Start re-shaping your digital marketing strategy today. Contact us to book a 15 minute discovery call.

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