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Digital Marketing Strategy
Engaging customers
Understanding which channels to use to reach your customers effectively is key to creating an effective digital marketing strategy.
Today, customers and prospects can interact with you through an ever-expanding variety of digital media and devices, from web and email to mobile or SMS/TXT.
Effective engagement with customers and prospects relies on getting the mix of media and message right.
Looking at how your customers want to engage with you
As prospective customers move from awareness of your products and services through active consideration to purchase, they need to understand what you offer and if it suits their needs.
Customers will engage with your sales team during the purchase cycle, with your customer services team post purchase, and ideally will re-engage again as they purchase further products or services from you once they're a customer.
At all points in the customer life cycle, opportunities abound for you to use digital channels to improve your engagement with your prospects and customers; maximising your opportunity to convert prospects to customers, and realising increased revenue through smart, targeted upselling and cross-selling or marketing campaigns.
Digital communication can also help you to deliver the levels of customer service that will keep your customers coming back again and again and recommending your services to others.
The customer life cycle
In developing your digital marketing strategy, it often helps to examine the typical life cycle of your customers as they move from being a prospect to a customer to a loyal repeat customer.
At all points in the customer life cycle there are opportunities to use digital marketing to improve customer engagement and improve the returns on your marketing expenditure.
Digital marketing can also help you to tie your multi-channel marketing activity together. For instance, it could enable customers and prospects to respond to a billboard, TV, radio or print campaign with an SMS/TXT message, or by registering through a web form - which can then trigger a variety of automated marketing activity.
Identifying digital marketing opportunities
Examples of digital marketing activity at each point in the customer life cycle include:
Prospect and Qualify
- E-brochures, coupons, trial offers for product promotions/launches.
- Web, SMS/TXT or email-based competitions.
- Web lead capture and lead tracking.
- Database building.
- Email marketing.
- Event or webinar registration.
- Press release distribution.
- Research/surveys.
- Telemarketing process support.
- Education - SMS or web-triggered information services, webinars.
Consider and Propose
- Conversion tracking, lead capture and lead tracking.
- Marketing process automation.
- Email marketing.
- Event or webinar marketing and registration.
- Email newsletters.
- Product selection wizards.
- Samples/free trials.
- Whitepaper fulfilment.
Convert and Deliver
- Managing customer profiles and enriching customer data.
- Customer loyalty programmes.
- Viral and friend-get-friend campaigns.
- Email newsletters or targeted one-to-one email marketing and communications.
- Customer satisfaction surveys.
- Upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
Grow, Retain, Refer
- Business process delivery/marketing automation (eg, contract renewals).
- Managing customer profiles and enriching customer data.
- Email newsletters or targeted one-to-one email marketing and communications.
- Education or customer loyalty programmes.
- Event or webinar marketing and registration.
- New product development - using customers to help you refine your products or develop new products and services.
- Referrals - friend-get-friend, social share, or other viral marketing campaigns.
- Market/customer satisfaction research using customer panels or targeted surveys.
- Upsell/cross-sell campaigns.
- Customer orientation/welcome/on-boarding programmes.
Where to next?
With so many opportunities to utilise digital marketing to achieve your objectives, it can sometimes be hard to know where to start.
Check out how some of our clients have used digital marketing as part of their marketing mix.
Or contact us to talk about what you need to achieve and we'll help you to create and deliver activity that will generate real, measurable results.
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