With the digital population growing, companies can no longer afford to overlook eMarketing. We need to build an online presence, create brand awareness, drive leads and engage with existing and potential consumers. Here are two critical strategic objectives which lend themselves to eMarketing and the ways they can be implemented to create holistic and successful online and offline marketing campaigns.
Create a Digital Footprint
The first step to eMarketing success is establishing an online presence. Website development provides the central hub upon which all future activities are built. It has to be thought through carefully in order to ensure that it is aligned with your offline brand, not only in the iconography, but also in the messaging and user experience. If you sell rustic food, an upmarket corporate style of writing will not contribute to your web presence, even if your look at feel are the same as they are in the real world.
Once your website is place, you need to look at social media, web PR, online advertising, industry blogs and viral marketing to extend your digital footprint beyond your website to drive potential and existing customers back to your site. This should be a dedicated activity.
With a digital presence comes more potential customers and an additional revenue channel. You need to ensure that people can find you by using search engine optimisation (SEO), which will ensure you are better represented on the SERPs (search engine results pages) – increasing your exposure to potential leads and driving traffic to your website.
Using the many avenues for driving online presence presents unique advantages over traditional brand awareness drivers. For example, the upfront costs of a website are considerably lower than those of TV and, with reduced cost and time lag, it’s possible to mould your presence to opportunities and risks in a near real-time fashion as they arise. Furthermore, the economies of scale apply, it costs the same to open a market of 100 000 potential consumers as it would 10 million.
Conversion optimisation makes the most of each unique visitor coming to your website – subtly directing them to meet your marketing objectives. By implementing conversion optimisation, more traffic is turned into viable business leads. This improves the profitability of your web presence and your overall business.
Engaging your audience
There are various channels to drive engagement and build relationships with your consumers. By exploiting one of the two key advantages of online marketing – one-to-one engagement and economies of scale – it becomes possible to meet consumers’ particular needs.
Social media provides a useful channel to spread your marketing. By creating a platform for engagement, you are opening the door to further engagement and this allows for a relationship to be developed. However, all engagements should empower and enrich the relationship rather than directly sell products. A simple measure to establish whether you are on track is to make sure that no more than 10% of the content is focused on sales. This encourages the development of a relationship built on transparent and honest communication.
Provided engagements have clear payoffs to the users’ time investment (financial, social or emotional), users will continue to engage. It’s important to remember that your consumers are as time-starved as you and need to provide value in exchange for their time.
This is fundamentally changing the way we communicate with our consumers. The new focus is on empowering them to communicate on your behalf, therefore increasing the impact of their trust – the perfect opportunity for social media marketing.
eMarketing doesn’t stop at the creation of a digital footprint, driving of leads or the creation of a platform for engagement. One should also consider the possibility of internal business process improvement through integration of certain processes with your web presence. CRM can be perfectly integrated to improve consumer satisfaction through targeted and timely engagements. This reduces the fixed cost overhead of staff and replaces it with the low variable cost of a “per engagement” model which can grow and be shaped as your needs develop.
From these engagements deeper customer insight can be gained which can be used to improve the effectiveness of your current and future marketing strategies.
As the online population continues to skyrocket, eMarketing provides the competitive edge necessary to excel in today’s highly competitive environment.
Kate Elphick Digital Bridges
