Before you start a blog, open a Pinterest account, or start gathering email addresses, you need to choose the business goals for your digital marketing campaign. When you know what you want to accomplish, you'll be able to direct your energy into the right marketing campaigns and employ marketing tactics that move the needle on the right business metrics.
Here are six common goals that your digital marketing strategy can affect:
- Increasing problem and solution awareness: Your online marketing can help prospective customers become aware of something they need, an effect called problem awareness. Your marketing can also make prospective customers aware that your company provides a solution to a problem — called solution awareness. Your objective is to help people realize that you can take them from the “Before” state, in which they have a problem, to the desired “After” state, in which they have obtained a positive solution.
- Acquiring new leads and customers: Gaining more leads and customers is a primary objective of most businesses. Without generating new leads and customers, your business will never grow beyond what it is now. You need to bring in new blood in order to scale your business.
- Activating leads and customers: If you've been in business for more than a few months, you likely have leads and customers who have yet to buy or haven't bought in a while. You can use your digital marketing campaigns to encourage people to buy from you for the first time, as well as to remind past customers who haven't purchased from you lately of the value you bring and why they should buy from you again. Your digital marketing campaigns can activate these dormant leads and customers and help keep your business in mind.
- Monetizing existing leads and customers: Acquiring new leads and customers is expensive and time consuming. Don't forget to create digital campaigns intended to sell more products and services to those new leads and customers. Monetization campaigns make upsell, cross-sell, and other types of offers to sell more to your best leads and customers
- Onboarding new leads and customers: New leads and customers deserve special treatment simply because they are new. They need to be taught who you are and how to be successful with what they've purchased. To achieve this goal, create content such as welcome emails or welcome packets that tell people how to use your product or service, what they can expect, and where they can go if they need help with their purchase.
- Building community and advocacy: To move prospects, leads, and customers beyond a shallow, transactional relationship, you need to build campaigns that create communities of advocates and brand promoters. One of the most effective ways to achieve this advocacy is through social media, such as through a Facebook group or a Twitter page. Here, people can reach out if they have praise for or questions about your product or service. By creating an outlet, you help to cultivate a sense of community for your customer base, which leads to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
