Attempting to do digital marketing can be daunting for the first time.
Given the wide number of digital marketing platforms, of which do you choose and to invest in can be critical to your success. While it is unnecessary to fret excessively
over the setup and integrating digital marketing into your traditional marketing mix, neither is it a wise move to assume that your digital marketing campaigns will run effectively by automating it without monitoring.
In Essence, a good digital marketing integration requires a sound plan, a committed team to navigate the digital marketing routes and some basic understanding of digital data analytics for optimization.
Herein lays a simple framework which you can utilise when creating a digital marketing campaign.
Integrating Digital Marketing – You need a Plan!
Step One: Build a Good Website
Digital marketing is about marketing online. Henceforth the first thing you would need is a good website. Instead of a plain static boring website, you would need to consider how to design a website that is engaging and more search engine & social media friendly. This would make it easier for people to find you and more importantly, to facilitate interactions and sharing about your website’s content to social media platforms.
If you are keen for sales to be transacted online, your website should also be user friendly and flawless when it comes to e-transactions. You have to craft apt call-to-action buttons and place them in highly visible locations of your website. This would allow potential customers to surf and purchase your products or service effortlessly.
Step Two: Choose a few suitable platforms
Cast your net wide my friend! (But not too wide as it would dilute your effort in optimizing your digital marketing efforts)
These are some of the worthwhile considerations:
Facebook – useful for building communities and to share media information (picture, videos etc) with your fans.
Twitter – good for updating real time information to your community. Similarly, you can follow businesses or niche influencers who post information relevant to your business and get their updates real-time.
Step Three: No Man is An Island
You will need a team. A solid digital marketing campaign requires consistency. From managing an editorial schedule, tinkering and generating high quality content to publishing it regularly, you would require a dedicated team to commit to these responsibilities.
As such, you may have to reorganise your main marketing team to allocate resources to the digital marketing campaigns, or even to consider new hire of digital marketing specialists.
If this may not be a core function of the company, it is also possible to outsource the entire digital marketing campaign to an external agency who is experienced in this area.
Step Four: Integration is Key
Integrate the Management, Marketing and Sales Team with your Digital Marketing Team.
Once you have setup your digital marketing platforms, your customers now become participants of your social network and your business, giving their positive or negative feedback.
Previously, in traditional marketing, a distance lingers between the customers and the company. Now with the digital marketing platform, customers are able to share their feedback more vocally and freely.
Taken in the right corporate attitude, it would delight the customer if the company executives from management, marketing or sales team engage and converse with them via digital media platforms.
This creates a higher potential of converting customers to fans, turning them into (unpaid) ambassadors of your company, promoting their positive earnest experience with your products or services via word-of-mouth to their friends or communities.
Therefore, it is critical to involve your management, marketing and sales team on your digital marketing platform all together.
Measuring & Evaluating your Digital Marketing Campaign
In the beginning stages of setting up your digital marketing platforms and campaign, it is imperative you do not measure the success purely base on Return of Investments (ROI).
Digital campaigns reap rewards of various kinds and it is indeed wiser to measure more of them.
Digital marketing goals can include:
- The number of social shares for your blog post.
- The number of “Likes” Facebook post sharing receives.
- The size of your fan base on your social networking sites.
- The number of conversations of about your company/products/services on the web.
- Inbound web visitors to your website.
- Online conversion rate of web visitors to social website group fan or customer.
Henceforth, it is essential that you create these goals before launching your marketing campaigns. Along the way as these digital marketing campaigns take effect, try to analyse and evaluate if you are participating on the right digital properties or targeting at the correct market segments.
After about 3 to 6 months, this would give you a good set of data to recalibrate your digital and traditional marketing strategies, fine tuning to a more effective campaign leading to a more successful conversion rate.
And Voilà! You have indeed successfully integrated your digital marketing campaigns together with your overall marketing strategy!
Best of success to your digital marketing integration!
