Planit’s CEO & Founder, Steve Cox, recently shared his insights on SME digital marketing on Vodafone Business's #businessconnected series. The webinar aims to support small and medium-sized enterprises with their digital marketing efforts. In this blog post, we'll explore some of the key takeaways from the session.
Choosing the Right Digital Marketing Channels for Your Business
Steve emphasized the importance of choosing the right digital marketing channels for your business. Depending on your company's nature, paid search might be the best option if your service provides an immediate need, like fixing a broken boiler. On the other hand, if you're a new brand selling an impulse-driven product like affordable fashion, advertising channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat may be more suitable. Steve also stressed the significance of understanding your audience and their needs to tailor your marketing strategy accordingly.
Reviewing Your Digital Marketing Activity
When reviewing a company's digital marketing activity, Steve found that every business tends to miss something different. It often depends on the founder's interests and expertise, which can lead to certain channels being neglected. However, he noticed that lower-cost channels such as organic, email, and SEO tend to be overlooked. Thus, it's crucial to have a data-driven approach to your marketing efforts and ensure that all aspects of your digital marketing are covered.
Emerging Trends in Digital Marketing
As for emerging trends in digital marketing, Steve highlighted the challenges of measuring, tracking, and reporting in today's complex environment. With so many marketing activities taking place across various platforms, it can be challenging to attribute sales to specific channels accurately. It's essential to have a robust data strategy and ensure that your website's signals are reaching the key platforms like Google and Meta.
Creating Engaging Content
When it comes to creating engaging content, Steve's advice was to make it useful and valuable to your audience. Avoid overly salesy content, and instead, speak to your customers or analyze their comments on social media to gain insights. A regular cadence of content is also crucial, as consistency is key to building an engaged audience.
Tracking Metrics
Regarding tracking metrics, Steve recommended breaking things down into component parts. Such as generating the right type of awareness, getting people to the site, making them stay and look around, making them buy, and encouraging repeat purchases. These metrics will evolve as your business grows and becomes better understood.
Building a Solid Foundation for Digital Marketing
Finally, for anyone starting off with digital marketing for an early-stage business, Steve's advice was to build a solid foundation first. This means setting up your website, tracking, and reporting, and planning ahead for testing various marketing channels over the next 12 months. Installing Facebook's pixel now, for instance, will allow the platform to better understand your customers when you're ready to launch a Facebook campaign.
Wrapping Up
In summary, by understanding your audience, choosing the right channels, and having a data-driven approach, you can build a strong foundation for long-term growth and success. Working with consultants or agencies is a great way to make sure you’re on the right path. If you’d like to speak with the Planit team about your digital marketing strategy feel free to get in touch via enquiries@planit.co.uk.