Marketing is the decisive factor in the success of a small business. It kicks in the entire process of sales funneling, starting from attracting prospects to converting them into customers. So, if you do it right, marketing becomes the key to your survival and growth.

Many would confuse it with creating awareness about a brand. Though partially true, it's not the ultimate aim of marketing. It's also not about beating your own trumpet in an already noisy world. Marketers have now started viewing marketing from a different perspective altogether. They prefer to see it as a tool to connect a business to its consumers.

Businesses are doing everything possible to engage their audiences. It necessitates a business marketing plan that should entail the entire modus operandi of how you'd reach your ideal customers.

There are several methods to market your small business or startup, but you should focus on the most effective strategies that can change the game for you.

Marketing Ideas for Small Business

Marketing is a process of targeting your ideal customer and nurturing leads by sharing the right messages at the right time. It all revolves around adding value and making their lives better.

However, you can't do it if you don't do a proper marketing audit to identify your target audience and make your marketing message appealing.

Here is a list of 121 small business marketing ideas to fulfill your dream of running a successful entrepreneurial venture.

1. Make a marketing plan keeping in mind your target audience.

2. Do market research to understand its dynamics and find essential information about your ideal customers.

3. Make your buyer persona and further refine it to reach the right audience.Figure out the value you can add and identify a powerful unique selling proposition (USP).

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5. List your product features and service specifications.

6. Relate product features to benefits and use them for your marketing message.

7. Add your mission statement and key marketing message to your business cards.

8. Create and publish white papers, industry research, trends, and brochures to spread your word out.

9. Create a website and offer an excellent user experience. Even a single landing page will do, but it should provide enough information to help users make a purchase decision.

Gifts, Giveaways, and Outreach

The first step of any outreach campaign is to entice your prospects through irresistible offers, gifts, and giveaways. It is probably why many eCommerce companies offer a discount for people when they visit their website for the first time.

Here are a few outreach ideas you can try.

10. Use the power of giveaways and seize the opportunity trade shows and networking events offer.

11. You can offer several gift items people hang on to, such as pens, notebooks, keyrings, stress balls, etc.

12. Keep an elevator pitch ready and use it for quick prospecting. Use the following tips to craft the elevator pitch:

• Use an irresistible offer or hook people can’t ignore.
• It should reflect your enthusiasm.
• Keep the facts and stats ready to support your claims.

Networking and Partnerships

Networking and partnerships help small business owners in a huge way. Participating in local events enables people and local businesses to learn about you. It gives you the required visibility and advantage of working with like-minded people and experts.

You'll also get institutional and technical assistance and support from business groups and government institutions.

13. Participate in industry events, seminars, meets, and conferences.

14. Leverage the power of networking, use business networking and connect with local networking groups.

15. Attend business workshops, especially the ones taking place in your neighborhood.

16. Join your small business technical assistance center, local small business development center, the local chamber of commerce, or use tools like commercetools CMS to enhance your business capabilities.

Direct Mail

Direct mail sounds like an old practice, but it's still very much in fashion. It has become even more relevant because it has a very high level of reach and penetration. It can be a bit expensive, but it's five times more effective than email in terms of sales. A targeted list is the prerequisite, though.

Here are a few direct mail ideas you can try.

17. Start a well-planned direct mail campaign.

18. Apply multiple tactics and do A/B testing to determine which approach works the best.

19. Use a compelling call to action in your direct mails.

20. Experiment with different direct mail formats such as tear cards, enticing envelopes, and inserts to attract your prospects.

21. Approach customers who have bought from you in the past with free samples and rewards to regain their business.

Advertising

Advertising is the sub-domain of marketing, so don't confuse it with marketing. Marketing is a broader concept, whereas advertising is an aspect of business marketing that deals with sending the right message to your audience. Everything counts in advertising, including its timing, message, tone, and platform you use, and it's planned according to your audience's mindset, psychology, needs, culture, and emotions.

Here are some of the best ways to advertise your business:

22. Tap the advertising channels to help you reach your target audience. For example, you can buy a spot on the radio.

23. Identify magazines, journals, and other publications your ideal customers love to read. For example, Cosmopolitan, the women's magazine for fashion, is widely read by women across the globe. Car and Driver is the most popular magazine for auto lovers.

24. Go traditional and rent a billboard having a lot of visibility. People still look at them while waiting at the traffic signals.

25. Besides handouts and pamphlets, use stickers and magnets for advertising on the rear window of your car.

26. Buy advertising space in your local newspaper.

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27. Buy ad space on a website related to your niche, but you also need to ensure that this website is popular among your audience.

28. Another forgotten traditional technique is to use a sidewalk sign to promote your products and services. It surely attracts the eyeballs of the locals. So, if you have a local business, it can be an effective medium for promotion.

Social Media Marketing

Very few businesses are able to actually survive if they aren't a part of our social media ecosystem. Almost everybody is on social media, and if you aren't active on it, you are missing out on many opportunities. Just like being a part of a group of like-minded people on social media, customers want to follow their favorite brand's progress, view updates, and make connections with their community.

Social media can help you achieve your marketing objectives by promoting products, creating awareness, generating and nurturing leads, defining your brand image, and building lasting relationships.

Here are a few killer social media marketing ideas for small businesses.

29. Use various social media platforms, including some lesser-known platforms like Foursquare, Pinterest, Reddit, and Tumblr.

30. Don't underestimate the potential of growing platforms like Twitch, Discord, TikTok, Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, Caffeine, and Instagram Reels.

31. Don't forget to create your personal and business profile on LinkedIn. It increases your online visibility and opens many vistas of opportunities for you.

32. Regular blogging brings numerous benefits, such as increasing follower growth and engagement. So, invest in blogging and do it consistently; create different versions for different platforms.

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33. Creating short videos on TikTok can be magical if you wish to tap a younger audience.

34. Leverage the power of Instagram. Pay attention to the visual quality and maintain an attractive aesthetic. Create short videos for Instagram Reels.

35. Research your audience and popular keywords in your niche, and then create an editorial calendar for your blog and social content. Cover the topics that might add value to the lives of your target audience and address their pain points.

36. Create an informative website and optimize it using the best SEO practices.

37. Leverage the enormous power and reach of paid search using Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Choose the platform as per your audience type.

38. Social media influencers enjoy a dedicated fan following. Hire them for promotional posts and tap newer audiences.

39. Vlogging is the latest craze. Create video blog posts and attach a familiar face to your brand.

40. Leverage YouTube marketing and create YT videos to boost your online visibility.

41. Online directory listings offer numerous benefits for a local business. Save time and get your business listed in desirable directories at an affordable cost using white-label directory listing services.

42. Leverage the power of Facebook advertising. It offers laser-sharp targeting based on your customer characteristics and personality types.

43. Leverage the world's most extensive professional network. LinkedIn brings you many opportunities by allowing you to connect to people according to their niche, job profile, and location.

44. Try a Facebook Live video demo. To tap into the power of live streaming, you should have a Facebook page. It's an utterly personal way to engage your fans.

45. Analytics offers many marketing benefits, including Google Analytics or social media analytics. It helps you improve your campaigns. To learn more, refer to this actionable guide on Google Analytics.

46. Always be on the lookout for what's trending. It can be a new practice prominent brands are tapping into, new platforms and tools, etc.

47. Update yourself with the latest trends in local search marketing and use them to your advantage. Local search marketing is highly effective in terms of conversions and ROI

48. Track your online reputation regularly. To learn more, refer to the definitive guide to online reputation management.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is considered even more "intimate" than following a brand's social media account. People give their email addresses only to the brands they are interested in, making it a powerful means of communication.

Here are a few killer email marketing tactics you can try:

49. Capture your prospect's email through opt-ins on your website.

50. If you want free publicity, you can organize sports events or sponsor a local sports team.

51. Ask for your prospects' email in exchange for gifts, access to a platform or event, an ebook, or a free download. You can also try contests, coupons, and incentives.

52. Build an email list and regularly send emails to them.

53. Subscribe people for a free monthly email newsletter. Click here to know more about cold email marketing.

54. Track the performance of your email marketing campaign. Various tools offer inbuilt analytics. You can also use A/B testing to know what works best for your campaign regarding content, promotional offers, frequency, open rate, CTR, and sending different emails to different customer segments.

55. Optimize your email signature and include links to your website and social media handles.

56. You can use email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, Constant Contact, Hubspot Suite, Moosend, or Drip.

Customer-Focused Marketing Tactics

Here are some more customer-focused and innovative ways to promote your business:

57. Organize contests and promote them aggressively.

58. Create coupons or tie-ups with other brands and offer vouchers and discounts.

59. Launch reward-based loyalty and "frequent buyer" programs.

60. Launch a brand ambassador or an affiliate marketing program.

61. Launch a customer of the month program and announce it on social media.

Pro Tip: Check federal regulations before you promote any giveaways or contests. Check and follow the related rules.

62. Focus on building relationships.

63. Conduct customer satisfaction surveys to check out how satisfied people are with your services. The customer satisfaction ratio is directly linked to your revenue and survival as a business.

64. Use the power of referrals. Request your happy customers to provide referrals.

65. Leverage charity events and humanitarian work. Besides getting the opportunity to work for a noble cause, you'll also get free publicity.

66. Leverage the power of networking. Tie up with local businesses and cross-promote your products and services with them.

67. You can also create a buzz by joining a professional organization and delivering value to the community.

68. Leverage holidays and make a plan to promote the next holiday. It can trigger sales from "ready to buy" customers.

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69. Identify your best and most loyal customers and plan holiday gifts for them.

70. Surprise your bonafide clients by sending them birthday cards, greetings, and gifts.

71. Positioning yourself as an expert or mentor always helps. Neil Patel, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Tom Bilyeu, Tony Robbins, Brian Dean, Rand Fishkin, and even Mark Zuckerburg are renowned mentors apart from business owners and entrepreneurs. Educating others helps you build trust and allows you to make sales happen.

72. Leverage content marketing. Enticing, informative, and engaging content attracts customers to your website, where you can encourage them to buy. Move beyond advertising and create useful and value-adding content.

73. Conduct free teleconferences and webinars. These are some of the most effective techniques for building email lists, lead generation, and boosting sales flow.

74. Leverage podcasting. While live podcasting continues to grow, podcasts are slowly gaining prominence in Google search.

75. Make press releases a part of your marketing strategy. Share press releases to local newspapers and periodicals and paid services like PR Newswire, etc.

76. Repurpose your blogs into videos, podcasts, and infographics. Share such content pieces on different platforms. For example, you can slice your YouTube videos into small videos for TikTok, Instagram Reels, Twitter, and Facebook.

77. Use storytelling in your sales copy and ads.

78. Publish a book to help your target audience and widely promote it. Offer it for free during events and seminars.

79. If you are too busy with day-to-day business operations, recruit a marketing expert or hire a consultant.

80. Increase your PR activities by hiring a PR professional.

81. Hire a trained copywriter to write attention-grabbing sales copy to boost conversion and sales.

82. Hire a search engine marketing agency or, still better, hire PPC services from a professional white-label agency.

83. Another cost-effective method is to hire an intern for regular marketing tasks. You can also go to sites like Fiverr and hire a virtual assistant to help you with daily marketing tasks.

Agency Management Tools & Apps

You can use various tools and apps to help you manage your agency tasks swiftly and efficiently. If you're on a tight budget, you can use such tools to automate tasks like scheduling social media posts.

Here are a few killer tools and apps that will save you from the daily grind:

84. Monitor and report on all of your marketing campaigns in one place using the Analytics App. You can try it for free. For example, you can integrate your Google and Facebook Ad campaigns into the dashboard to monitor your campaigns performance in real-time.

85. Now handle your sales CRM and get your contacts data at your fingertips through Contacts App. It's not an average sales CRM; it helps you effortlessly manage your people and business contacts with beautiful contact cards.

86. Manage all your data in one place with the Dashboard app. Use dozens of pre-built widgets across all your apps and extract your data into one unified dashboard for better monitoring and management. Create your dashboard view using drag-and-drop widgets to create your perfect view. It enables you to run your entire business with one platform.

87. Experience the power of automation when managing leads and deals within your sales pipelines with the Deals app. Additionally, this app also allows you to generate reports, gain insights, and showcase your leaderboard. Sales is an extremely tough and exhausting job, but this app creates a truly transformational experience for your sales team.

88. Improve your workflow and turn data collection into an exciting experience with a powerful Forms app. Online forms are designed to meet all your data collection needs. Manage unlimited form submissions with the Forms app, and collect them straight away from your dashboard.

89. If lead management is a hassle for you, try the Inbound app and organize all your leads like never before! This app can streamline and manage your inbound leads across different platforms. Later on, you can assign them to your sales reps, so they can easily track progress and do a follow-up. With this app, you don't need to log in to multiple third-party softwares to manage inbound leads; you can fetch all those leads in one place.

90. If you need in-depth performance reports, use the InstaReports app; Data is complex, so you should prepare reports so that everybody can understand them and interpret the complex facts. The InstaReports app offers a grading scale that is easy to comprehend and helps in decision-making. If you manually try to compile this much data, it might consume several days, but with InstaReports, you can do it in a matter of seconds.

91. Are you struggling with website building for your clients? InstaSites app, the instant website builder, comes to your rescue in this. Create a custom website in seconds from hundreds of niche templates. You can choose from hundreds of pre-built niche-specific templates to design your dream website for your clients with a few clicks. These site templates come ready with the content, thanks to the white-label fulfillment services from DashClicks. So, you don't need to create content for most web pages.

92. Projects, a projects management app, is good news for agencies as it allows them to swiftly manage their projects, teams, customers, etc. The Projects app helps you execute your tasks with lightning speed.

93. If website management becomes a hassle for you, download the Sites app. It allows you to create and manage your websites using a drag-and-drop website builder. You can swiftly edit your website using the app's custom content management system (CMS). So, you don't need any IT background or coding skills to manage your website.

94. With the Templates app, you can create custom email and SMS marketing templates. It streamlines your communication across the organization.

Other Marketing Ideas

The ultimate objective of marketing is to differentiate your brand. You can go a bit crazy, creative, or even provocative to grab the attention of the masses.

95. Partnerships work wonders for a business. Identify a complimentary brand and cross-promote each other's products. This way, both parties will find newer audiences.

96. Invent a lucky charm for your business and aggressively promote your brand using it.

97. Launch your startup business coaching for your target audience and cite your business as a case study. You'll get many benefits through free publicity, strong branding, lead generation, etc.

98. Distribute corporate gifts and branded wearable items such as t-shirts, caps, sweatshirts, polos, fleece jackets, shorts, wristbands, office stationery, etc.

99. Get your office building and the car painted in your brand colors. Add logos everywhere.

100. Sign up for the most popular business coach or mentor online and get yourself trained in cutting-edge business skills and strategies. They will help you scale, revamp, and restructure your business if needed. They will also teach you marketing skills to outperform your competition.

101. Research the businesses doing it right in your niche and generating handsome revenue, and learn from them. You can also borrow ideas to succeed if you don't want to reinvent the wheel.

102. Use Amazon's "trigger phrases" while marketing your products. Amazon filters its top reviews according to the trigger phrases that define the customers' pain points in your niche in customer lingo. You can use that to exploit search results and reach the right audience.

Here is an example of a few trigger phrases for Amazon Kindle eBook readers:

You can also fetch such trigger phrases from forums and online communities and collect them in a file.

103 Ask for success tips from your suppliers and vendors. Since these guys have been in your business for a long time, they are the best people to advise you on the best practices to survive in your industry.

104. Subscribe to industry magazines and publications to get tons of valuable insights and information. It will also help in lead generation.

105. Use emotions in your advertising. Apart from the four basic emotions, i.e., happiness, gloom, fear/surprise, and anger/disgust, you can use a wide range of mixed emotions to connect with the audience. It always works.

106. A deeper understanding of the local demographics will always help. It includes purchasing power, taste, and buying behavior. If you don’t want an unexpected outcome, spend some time understanding the local demographics.

107. Make it a practice to listen to customers’ queries, needs, and concerns. When you prioritize listening to them, you get deep insights into what they expect from you. It will also help you generate lots of content ideas for content marketing.

108. Set Google Alerts and track every “brand mention.” Tracking brand mentions is a good way of social media monitoring and getting to know what people are saying about you and your products. Likewise, it’s also crucial to know if other businesses mention you, link to your website or social accounts, or simply complain about you.

109. Over 42 million people in the US speak Spanish, so it’s a good idea to translate your website into multiple languages. It will help you target new audiences.

110. Optimize your website to load faster. Fast-loading websites attract more traffic and enjoy better Google rankings. To achieve this, you can compress files, optimize images, remove heavy elements and reduce the number of active plugins.

111. Add fresh content and regularly update your website and give a reason for visitors to come back to your site again and again. Add value by providing helpful content. Update your website by adding new landing pages dedicated to new products or events, etc.

112. Reduce your response time. According to Forbes, the average lead response time was 47 hours. Businesses that respond within an hour of receiving the leads are almost seven times more likely to have meaningful conversations with decision-makers. It clearly shows that the sooner you respond, the higher are your chances of closing the sale.

113. Respond to all online feedback. Customers like the seller who cares about what the customers say and responds to them. Whether negative or positive, make it a priority to respond to customer feedback as soon as you receive feedback from a customer. You should monitor customer feedback on your eCommerce platform, blog comments, Yelp, Google, or other review sites.

114. Leverage blog commenting. When you leave thoughtful comments that add value and provide additional information on other blogs in your niche, you create awareness about your brand and attract the eyeballs of the audience visiting those blogs.

115. Create a digital brochure. You might have used your printed brochure for offline publicity. Consider creating a digital brochure in PDF format and promoting it everywhere, including your social media accounts and through email marketing. Upload it to a visible place on your website. You can also use additional graphics to highlight it and attract eyeballs. Encourage people to download it.

If you want to keep it in an online form with additional interactive features, consider converting your PDF brochure to a flipbook format.

116. Focus on personal branding and thought leadership. People respect influencers and follow their advice. So, when you promote yourself as an expert, people trust you and flock to you for advice and industry updates. You can create your personnel website for this purpose. Apart from that, you can also try these things:

• Participate in industry events
• Get featured in media outlets
• Write columns for industry-specific websites or blogs
• Host or get invited to a YouTube or podcast channel of another influencer in your niche

117. Use retargeting to bring back your ad and site visitors. Retargeting is extremely powerful. A study claims retargeted visitors are 70% more likely to convert to your website. Stats also confirm a tenfold increase in brand searches after running retargeting ads.

118. Make it easy for mobile users to contact you. You can make your phone number “tappable” so they can call you with a single tap.

119. Use Canva to create stunning professional-grade graphics and banners. You don’t need to know Photoshop or Illustrator to do that. With Canva, you can create beautiful marketing templates, banners, and graphics to use on your website, social media, email, etc.

A Canva template

120. Try SMS marketing. The average CTR of SMS marketing is an impressive 35%, which is pretty high for any marketing platform these days. The open rate is 99%, which is surprisingly high.

121. Use more visual content for your marketing. Visuals convey messages faster, making them invaluable in creating engaging content. Whether through professional graphics or eye-catching photos, having the right materials enhances visual appeal. Consider unique and personalized items such as a coffee table book photo album to showcase your business’s journey, milestones, and achievements; this can resonate deeply with clients and visitors.

Conclusion

These are the handpicked ideas and tips that will help you succeed in your small business venture. Your ability to understand your audience and their buying behavior is highly crucial to your success. Apart from that, you should also work smarter using apps and technology rather than doing everything manually. It will reduce the cost, time, and efforts involved and help you execute things faster and manage your campaigns in a better way.

Marketing automation platforms revolutionize the way that businesses and agencies handle their advertising.

With the assistance of these smart tools, professionals can unburden themselves of the countless manual tasks that are necessary for managing and optimizing campaigns. AI assistants automatically compile audience data, guide performance, and oversee advertising budgets.

However, why use a marketing automation platform if your traditional strategies are already working?

Below, we’ll dive into what a B2C marketing automation platform is, the benefits of using one, and help you determine if it’s the right choice for your organization.

What is a Marketing Automation Platform?

A marketing automation platform is a collection of software that automatically manages and processes manual everyday marketing tasks.

This can include:

• Lead & sales pipeline management
• Email & SMS messaging
• PPC campaign analytics & optimization
• PPC campaign budget management
• Website analytics & optimization
• Product/service upselling
• Directory listing syndication
• Social posting & promotions
• Measuring ROI for all marketing channels

The software acts as a virtual assistant that can automatically oversee all of these processes, leaving you and your teammates with the ability to focus on more involved tasks that require hands-on attention.

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With that said, a marketing automation platform does not give your organization the freedom to be complacent or uninvolved. Though these smart, automated tools may be able to rapidly handle certain tasks, you still need an experienced agent to help your efforts to ensure that the gathered data is utilized effectively.

Why Use a Marketing Automation Platform?

The benefits of using a marketing automation platform are powerful enough to make them a no-brainer for any company or agency.

1. Optimized Workflow

The first major benefit that we touched upon above briefly is that this smart software will help your team improve their workflow. Users can quickly visualize the entire process of lead management, from lead acquisition to closing the sale.

Then, you can set up your custom automation based upon your company's unique needs to rapidly complete monotonous tasks. This saves the organization a tremendous amount of time and frees the talent up to focus on tasks more deserving of their attention.

2. Improved Accuracy and Mitigation of Human Error

Equally important, these AI assistants will provide far more consistent and accurate work than is possible with human efforts. Even the most careful individuals make mistakes and one unchecked error can upset the overall workflow.

Marketing automation tools collect data and manage key processes almost instantaneously, leaving you with the cold, hard data you need to guide your future marketing decisions.

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3. Real-Time Analytics & Behavior Tracking

The minute you publish an ad, web page, or some other form of content online, your marketing automation software will immediately begin tracking performance. Without any additional effort, you can track:

• Impressions
• Page visits
• Traffic sources
• Session duration
• Keyword rankings
• Form submissions
• Intersite navigation
• Cost-per-action
• Cost-per-lead

These metrics simply scratch the surface of what is possible depending on the software you're using. You can not only monitor your performance but can quickly glance at competitor analytics to see how your efforts stack up in comparison.

4. Automatic Bidding & Budget Management

Finally, marketing automation is essential for staying competitive when it comes to paid search or paid social campaigns. You can utilize your platform to automatically set your budget minimum and maximum limits as well as your desired daily spending.

The software will then seek out opportunities to utilize your budget effectively when reviewing current bidding costs. It can even automatically allocate funds to higher-performing ads or landing pages when A/B tests multiple creatives at the same time.

This is a significant boon as it ensures that your organization maximizes its available ad spend. You can easily avoid getting caught up in fruitless bidding wars and focus your budget on ad sets that are delivering a worthwhile ROI.

Let's consider an example.

A PPC campaign manager creates their initial ad set and landing page for lead discovery. The minute these assets go live, their automation platform (i.e. Google Ads, Facebook Ads) automatically begins to capture performance data.

The campaign manager also sets a maximum daily and lifetime budget they wish to use for the campaign. Thus, the automation platform also automatically tracks and manages bids in real-time to help your better-performing ads gain more exposure. All of these things happen around the clock without any additional input from the campaign manager.

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With all of this additional time, your campaign managers can easily oversee several client accounts simultaneously. They can also utilize their extra time to prepare new ad sets, landing pages, or offers based upon the performance data they're receiving from the active campaign. They can be more proactive and make decisions with reliable data as opposed to testing with guesswork.

Determining Which B2B or B2C Marketing Automation Platform to Use

With how significantly marketing automation can improve your efficiency and customer experience, our answer is clear.

Your organization needs a marketing automation platform if it wants to remain competitive and grow in an evolving digital landscape.

However, not every platform is the right fit for every business. You'll need to ask the right questions to ensure that your team gains the right tools for your offerings.

1. What Are Your Business Goals?

Every business has unique objectives that they wish to achieve with their marketing. Clearly defining these goals and the process to get there will help you identify the tools you can leverage to improve your strategy.

If you wish to improve lead generation on your website, you'll want to focus on tools that can provide clear analytics and custom goal tracking.

If you're struggling with your sales pipeline workflow, you'll want to investigate lead and pipeline management tools that can automatically define deal stages and move your lead through the process accordingly.

Defining this is important as not all marketing automation platforms offer the tools you need. Some position themselves as a comprehensive package, while others are highly specialized to serve organizations in key areas.

2. How Can We Measure Our Performance?

As we highlighted above, you can instantly measure the performance of any marketing channel with the right software. In addition to defining your goals, think about which aspects of the process you need assistance with measuring.

This can vary whether you're focusing your efforts on social media, email marketing, paid ads, etc. Think about the specific types of metrics that are success indicators for the channel and seek out software that can help capture data and make the overall process more efficient.

3. How Does the New Platform Mesh with Our Existing Tools?

Finally, you need to perform an analysis of how these tools can augment existing strategies. To keep the transition simple, you may want to look for software that simply improves existing processes.

However, if your analysis determines that your existing strategies are inefficient, you may need to consider a major change. You'll need to perform a cost-benefit analysis of what it will take to not only upgrade to the new platform, but the time it will take to retrain all of your employees to effectively utilize new automation tools.

You may also need to incur additional costs depending upon the available subscription plans to that platform and the account limits for each tier. Smaller businesses can typically take advantage of low-cost plans due to their smaller client base, but growing organizations may need to make a substantial investment to gain plans that effectively suit their needs.

Marketing Automation Platforms Are Essential for Your Organization

Your organization must mobilize and find the right platform for its specific needs. If you're still relying on traditional marketing management methods, you're moving at a snail's pace while all of your competitors are lapping you in the race.

Because marketing automation platforms offer universal benefits and features to all types of industries, you must make one the center of your tech stack. It can make your workflow more efficient whether you're content with your current success or positioning yourself for future growth.

Aside from the initial cost to transition, there are little to no arguments to make against using a marketing automation platform. These tools are long proven to be reliable, accurate, and will allow your talent to perform more effectively than ever before.

Though every marketing channel has its struggles, perhaps no other medium deals with the same bed rep as social media.

It's unfortunate as these platforms are powerful digital marketing tools. When leveraged correctly, it can generate engagement and conversions like no other.

The issue is that many brands don't take social media seriously, skimp out on the talent/costs, and perpetuate common misconceptions of social media.

If you want to conquer social media in 2022, it's time to dispel these 20 social media myths from your marketing vocabulary.

Social Media Myth 1 - My Target Audience Isn't on Social Media

While this can be true in some niche cases, the probability is highly unlikely.

According to Statista, there were 3.6 billion social media users around the globe in 2020. They project the user count to reach just under 4 billion in 2022 while reaching upwards of 4.41 billion by 2025.

If you're unsure of what this means, know that nearly half the world's population now uses social media in some capacity.

There are several unique platforms for those users to find a home online. While apps like Instagram and TikTok largely appeal to Gen Z and millennials, Facebook boasts a fairly wide array of demographics. Meanwhile, LinkedIn secured its place as the social media app for professionals and is consistently used to great effect for B2B advertisers.

The TLDR - segments of your audience are most assuredly on social media.

Social Media Myth 2 - Social Media is a Young Person's Game

This is another misconception of social media you can quickly dispel with basic research.

According to a Pew Research study, a significant percentage of users between the ages of 18 and 64 utilize at least one social media site regularly. The results are as follows:

• 18-29 years - 84%
• 30-49 years - 80%
• 50-64 years - 64%
• 65+ - 40%

The only age demographic that shows a noticeable dropoff is the senior citizen range. This makes sense as older adults are less likely to adapt to technological changes. Nonetheless, 40% is nothing to scoff at when it comes to potential leads.

Furthermore, young people below the desired age for advertising are the ones growing up with social media. It wasn't long ago that our current 30-year-olds (Millenials) were considered the young ones. Now, they're prime targets for consumer purchases.

By investing your brand into social media now, you position yourself for better results as the expected social media usage continues to grow in the coming years.

Social Media Myth 3 - Social Media Marketing is Free

It's free to create an account and free to post, but the free ride effectively ends there.

If you want to get the most out of social media, you need to invest in them the same as you would any other marketing channel.

As a baseline, you'll want to appoint a dedicated social media marketing manager to oversee your accounts throughout the week. This will account for daily post creation as well as everyday user engagement. You wouldn't run paid ads without an account manager, so you shouldn't treat social media as set it and forget it.ā

Since we mentioned the feature, you'll want to take advantage of paid promotions on social media to boost your campaigns. You can choose to boost or promote individual posts on the platform or use the promotion to gain more clicks on your landing page or sales funnel offer.

Social media can be free, but you can't expect to get much out of it if you aren't willing to invest.

Social Media Myth 4 - Social Media is a Job for an Intern That I Can Undercompensate

We wish this were a joke, but this is how companies all too often treat their social media accounts.

It's a major misconception that anyone can run social media marketing. All of the talents should go to big earners like paid search, while up-and-comers without experience can manage social posting.

And yet, these same companies perpetuate the myth that social media is not a worthwhile marketing investment.

The reality is that social media is one of the most dynamic marketing channels available. Your content plans can change at a moment's notice depending upon breaking news or events relevant to your brand. Because social media is conversational, you need a rep actively managing engagements and making the right calls on how to approach your posting.

If you need proof of how easy it is to make mistakes, just look at these painful blunders from famous brands. It happens more than you'd think.

Rather than risking unnecessary damage to your brand online, take the time to interview and hire a dedicated social media marketing expert. Allow them the opportunity and resources to show you firsthand how much social media marketing can impact your bottom line.

Social Media Myth 5 - Social Media is All About Negativity

If you find yourself agreeing with this point, there's a good chance you've been on platforms like Twitter or Reddit personally. We won't argue that the negative vocal minority tends to be loud, but that's not all there is to see.

Users regularly post about the exceptional experiences they have with brands. It takes little effort to @ā  a company and talk about a positive thing that happened. By engaging with these types of mentions, you can reinforce the positive effects by showing that your company is aware, thoughtful, and concerned about public opinion.

Furthermore, running away from social media isn't going to protect you from online negativity. Countless platforms from Yelp to Google Reviews actively seek to provide users with a way to share their experiences with other users. If you ignore those platforms and negative reviews, then your reputation remains that way forever.

Instead, you can have your team actively engage with those talking about you positively or negatively. Showing kindness and patience to customers or prospects can often quell negativity and allow your brand image to come out as more positive on the other side.

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The trick is to not take these users for granted. They're aware that you're a brand, so you shouldn't pretend to be something else.

Social Media Myth 6 - Likewise, Any Negative Feedback is Just from the Haters

Not only is this false, but it's also a fairly juvenile attitude to have toward existing or would-be customers.

Your average social media user may not voice their frustrations gracefully, but that does not make their complaints less legitimate. This is not your personal social media account, it's for your company. You should be able to disassociate from difficult comments and aim to extract useful information from the interaction.

It's unlikely for dissenting voices to appear for no reason. It could indicate poor customer service, a product or service error, or shipping issues. If you simply ignore negative feedback, the relevant teams will never hear about it and your brand never gets the opportunity to improve.

Finally, publicly acknowledging negative feedback isn't easy, but it shows gracefulness. Users don't stay angry long, and if your company is willing to take its lumps, it leaves a window of opportunity to win customers back in the long run.

Social Media Myth 7 - I Can't Share or Promote Brand Content

While it's true that social media is more about the conversation, there are zero reasons for you to avoid posting brand-related content.

The error comes from making a social media account and exclusively posting about your products, services, or offers. Anyone that spends time online already sees more advertisements than they can handle. When you flood your timeline with self-promotion, it just becomes more noise that's easy to avoid.

You wouldn't shove a company brochure into a person's face without first making conversation, so why treat social media differently?

Make the effort to engage with your audience and meet them on their level. If the opportunity reveals itself, you can then share brand-related content in a way that feels natural and applies to the person or group's actual needs or desires.

It's been said already, but it bears repeating: social media requires active attention and proactivity to get real results. As long as you dedicate yourself to a platform, you'll be surprised at how much you can get out of it.

Social Media Myth 8 - I Need to Go All-In on Every Platform

Not only is this statement false, we actively discourage it.

The social media platforms you should use are highly dependent on the following factors:

• Company type: B2C or B2B
• Target audience demographics
• Your budget
• Talent/resources
• Company voice / values

For example, B2B businesses tend to prioritize sites like LinkedIn as it attracts more employed professionals. You would want to emphasize social outreach to those types of individuals to get the best ROI possible from your social media efforts.

Likewise, B2C businesses can't go wrong with posting or advertising on sites like Facebook or Instagram. These sites feature users typically between the ages of 25-50 who have a lot of purchasing power.

Sites like Twitter typically exemplify a more casual, laid-back tone. While more professionalā  companies can still find success there, you may want to avoid it if you do not want to represent your brand casually.

Finally, it would be wise to research the average CPC (cost-per-click) for each platform. Facebook consistently possesses the lowest CPC, making it the most accessible to a wide variety of small businesses. Meanwhile, a site like YouTube has a higher cost-per-view and will be more resource-intensive to get the most out of it.

Companies should invest their marketing resources wisely when it comes to social media. As always, actively monitor your analytics, test new creatives, and don't be afraid to abandon certain platforms if they're not right for your brand.

Social Media Myth 9 - A General, Once-a-Day Post is Enough

While the rules are different for each website, this point will always be a myth.

We touched on this point under Myth 7. If you go into the process of creating all of your week's posts at once and scheduling them, don't expect to get much engagement. Your timeline will look cold and calculated because it is cold and calculated. This is the opposite of the dynamic, conversational approach that social is known for.

You need to be aware of best posting practices for each social media site that you utilize. For sites like Facebook or Twitter, you can help boost engagement by posting several times per day. However, this is contingent upon the type of content you post and whether or not it's worth sharing.

In some cases, it is recommended to post once per day as is the rule for a site like LinkedIn. However, this means you'll want to put thought and creativity into your post to get enough mileage to make it worth your time.

You'll also want to monitor times for peak activity on your platform and post accordingly. For most sites, posting first thing in the morning is a mistake. Users are on their way or at work and your content will get lost throughout the day. Alternatively, posting during lunch hours or on the weekends gives you the best chance for further engagement.

Social Media Myth 10 - My Employees, Friends, and Family Should Like My Posts

If you can count on people to give you easy likes, your numbers go up. If your numbers go up, then it will attract even more engagement, right?

This is true in a broad sense, but this approach effectively never works. Algorithms are intelligent and will understand the source of engagement. Not only will this small number of clicks not make you more discoverable, but it will also make your analytics unclean. It will only get harder to determine the effectiveness of strategies.

It can also make it more difficult for your content to get discovered by new audiences. Because your posts are not getting an opportunity to be discovered organically, it can teach the algorithm to avoid showing your posts to new potential groups.

If you want to utilize social media marketing, then do it the honest way. If a post is a dud, learn from it with analytics and testing, and do better with the next one.

Social Media Myth 11 - I Must Use as Many Hashtags as Possible

Don't you love #marketingposts that are #cool, #clever, and #funny? #marketing #social

If you want to post correctly, and to avoid harming everyone's eyes, stop using hashtags for things other than their intended purpose.

A hashtag is a platform-wide tool that serves to qualify and categorize the thousands of posts that go out every minute. If a user searches for a specific hashtag, they can quickly locate content directly related to that hashtag.

So, when you flood your posts with unnecessary hashtags, you are actively making everyone else's user experience worse. Furthermore, using hashtags on nonsensical words or phrases provides no benefit and makes the post look messy and amateurish.

An alternative way to utilize hashtags is to help promote and solidify a campaign. One of the most famous and successful hashtag campaigns was Coca-Cola's #ShareACoke campaign. You can see countless more examples of superb hashtag use thanks to Adspresso here.

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Social Media Myth 12 - More Followers = Success

If you're experienced with other marketing channels, your gut should already tell you that this is false.

For example, if you boost your website visitor count from 100 to 1,000, but see no noticeable increase in conversion, would you consider that a success?

The analytics could potentially tell more, but this example seems to indicate that those new clicks were not from qualified visitors. The same premise applies when it comes to your social media following.

In other words:

• Company A has 1,000 followers and receives 500 purchases as a result
• Company B has 5,000 followers and receives 500 purchases as a result

Though Company B has a much higher follower count, company A has a significantly higher engagement and conversion rate. This means they're spending time engaging with highly-qualified individuals as opposed to audiences that will likely never convert.

When it comes to digital marketing, quality almost always wins out over quantity. Keep this in mind when preparing your social media marketing strategy.

Social Media Myth 13 - You Can't Measure Social Media Performance

For starters, every social media platform offers built-in analytics that can highlight:

• Views
• Impressions
• Cost-per-view
• Cost-per-impression
• Potential reach
• Growth rate
• Virality rate

This only scratches the surface. The analytics available to you increases exponentially when you begin to experiment with paid social.

You can then track any activity that happens off of social media by using platforms like Google Analytics. This tool allows you to set up custom goals so that you can easily identify every time a user navigates to your website or landing page from a social media website. You can further qualify your goals to see which of those new visitors then go on to make a purchase, subscribe, and so on.

Those that perpetuate the myth that you cannot measure social media performance typically do not have well-defined goals. Without understanding what you're there for, you'll be hard-pressed to know which metrics to view and what to do with them.

Revisit the drawing board and determine what your overall goal is with your social media accounts currently. There exists a wealth of marketing tools that make it simple to track social media activity and how many conversions you're earning as a result of your presence on that platform.

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Social Media Myth 14 - I Can Just Crosspost Everywhere to Keep it Simple

Social media cross-posting tools like Sprout Social, Loomly, and Hootsuite often lead people to this conclusion. However, doing so with every post ignores what we've learned so far in this article.

Every social media platform has a different audience and a different way you should approach engagement. While it's typically safe to post similarly on Facebook and Instagram, you would want a unique, better-optimized post for a site like LinkedIn.

When you write a single post to publish on 10 different platforms, you're not truly considering the audience on any of them. The more general and vague you are with your posting, the less likely you are to establish any sort of meaningful connections.

With that said, this isn't a diss on the aforementioned tools. There are times when it is appropriate to crosspost when it comes to important company updates that concern consumers. However, using these options to simply be lazy will come back to bite you when your social media marketing efforts amount to very little.

Social Media Myth 15 - I'll Start Getting Engagement in a Week or Two

If you work as a digital marketer, you're likely all too aware of the unrealistic expectations companies have when it comes to social media.

You create your account, optimize it, and start posting every day. The expectation is that this work will immediately be rewarded with likes, follows, and shares just within a couple of weeks.

Unless you're a legendary social media marketer in disguise, we can assure you that this is not going to happen. As with all forms of content marketing, it takes time to build up a repertoire of content worth following to see.

Many of your initial engagements typically won't come organically, either. Your social media manager will actively reach out to potential audiences or like-minded individuals in the industry. When you create natural, pleasant exchanges with established presences, you give your content a better opportunity to get shared and noticed.

None of this is possible without effort and time. Every brand puts their time into social media to get where they are, and you shouldn't expect yours to cut the line without exceptional effort.

Social Media Myth 16 - Social Media Only Works for B2C

While it's true that some platforms are preferred for B2C targeting, social media can be used in similar ways for B2B transactions.

Though you will tailor your content to speak to ranking professionals within companies, those same people are still active online. Furthermore, when you locate potential leads on sites like LinkedIn, you already have valuable data such as their company, position, and some insight as to how your products or services can help them.

Even if the individual you engage with is not your end target, they can be the gateway you need to bring your brand before a company. As you use social media to build a relationship with members of that company, you position yourself to be a strong contender for their business.

In short, social media marketing works quite similarly with B2B as it does with B2C. It's still all about connecting with the right individuals where they happen to spend time online. Social media can be one of the most effective marketing tools of all as B2B-focused platforms naturally qualify the types of individuals you want to connect with.

Social Media Myth 17 - I Can't Create Enough Content

Unique content creation can be tough if you're currently engaged with:

• Blogs
• Paid ads
• Landing pages
• Sales funnels

Adding several social media profiles to the mix can leave your content writers stumped as to what will make for ideal social media content today.

The truth is that not all of your marketing content needs to be unique 100% of the time. Creating high-quality content and utilizing it for one purpose should be considered a waste of resources.

Instead, revisit a high-performing blog or page and think of how you can repurpose that content for the social media format. Perhaps a new, hot blog contains some engagement metrics that make for a compelling infographic to share on Facebook. With a bit of love and elbow grease, you suddenly have excellent content for social media posting.

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Instead of thinking about how you can plan for more content, consider strategies to help your content teams synergize for the best possible ROI.

Social Media Myth 18 - New Trends Like TikTok, Reels, or Shorts are Just a Gimmick

Sometimes a hot new feature burns out as quickly as it's introduced. In other cases, like the aforementioned examples, those features are here to stay.

Even those who embrace social media can quickly find themselves falling back into the initial trap of believing a new tool is not for them or won't apply to their audience.

However, the brands that are finding the greatest success on social media are the ones who quickly embrace and adapt to new trends rather than ignore them. Remember, it's never about your personal bias, but about engaging with audiences in the way that they choose to speak on social media.

Embracing these types of silly, fun new trends can also provide a necessary burst of inspiration for your social media team.

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So, instead of writing yet another cold, text post, consider making a fun Instagram Reel that you can share with your followers. They will take notice and your metrics will thank you for it in time.

Social Media Myth 19 - Social Media Will Deliver Results to Anyone with the Right Strategy

Now that we've spent the entire article highlighting what you're doing wrong, it's time to acknowledge the reality.

Social media is not always the way to go for every brand. Even those who dedicate the time, energy, and resources can struggle to generate any worthwhile engagement.

While we do believe that with enough consistent effort, anyone can succeed, not everyone has the budget or ability to get there. It's in these times that your team will need to make the tough call and choose to devote those resources to marketing channels that provide a better ROI.

However, you shouldn't take this as a sign that social media does not work. Instead, consider postponing social activities indefinitely while you focus on growing your brand elsewhere. When your company is better positioned to approach social media once again, you may find your team in a new place with a refreshed mindset that can give them a leg up in the social media game.

Social Media Myth 20 - All of My Established Strategies Will Work Forever

No matter how well a strategy is working for you now, never rest on your laurels. Digital marketing, itself, is a dynamic industry that will never stop evolving.

Social media is an already dynamic channel that can make creating a reliable strategy for your brand even more tumultuous.

If you choose to be in social media marketing for the long haul, do your best to establish a short memory. Celebrate your victories quickly and be ready to embrace the newest trends and techniques as they come. The more agile you are, the faster you can adapt, and the further you can get ahead of the competition.

Start Doing Social Media Marketing Correctly

Now that we've successfully dispelled the most common misconceptions of social media, it's time to adjust your approach.

Social media marketing can not only be beneficial to your bottom line, it creates a great opportunity to establish fun relationships directly with your audience.

Social media is a place for all ages and will continue to grow even more commonplace in the years to come. Use your analytical tools to observe the latest patterns, investigate which platforms are better for your brand, and treat each of your accounts with the care they deserve.

Building a marketing plan is essential if you want your brand to survive in the digital landscape.

The shocking reality is that many brands are unaware of what a marketing plan is or looks like. What results is much-wasted effort and budget throwing tactics at the wall to see what sticks.

Your marketing strategy doesn't need to look like this. Every business goal is far more attainable than you think as long as you have the right marketing strategy outline that works for your team.

Let's dive into what a true marketing plan is and what you can do to start creating a marketing plan template today.

What is a Digital Marketing Plan?

A digital marketing plan is a blueprint of your business objectives and how you intend to use digital marketing channels to achieve them.

A well-formatted plan should include a realistic timeline for near and future business goals. It might also include mini-objectives you can use along the way to chart your progress and navigate potential pitfalls.

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With a marketing plan template in place, all members of your team should have a clear vision of how best to use their marketing channel and specialty to help the brand reach its destination. It should also reveal ways for various mediums to synergize for a greater impact on your ideal customer.

Building a Marketing Plan

With this definition in mind, you may have a better overall idea, but still need some instructions as to where to begin.

Thankfully, creating a marketing plan is not so daunting as long as you follow a basic, proven template that's helped countless businesses achieve marketing success online. First, we'll start with the basics and then expand on key ideas as we learn more about the process.

Step 1 - Conduct a SWOT Analysis of Your Current Business Status

First, let's define a SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for Strengths,ā  Weaknesses,ā  Opportunity,ā  and Threat.ā  It's a popular planning strategy that helps individuals choose how to best attack a personal or business project. You may also hear this referred to as situational analysis.

The reason for the popularity is that this template allows you to immediately identify four key factors that most heavily impact any plan and its potential outcome. Let's look at how this applies to a business marketing plan.

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A. Strengths

What is your company's greatest strength? This can highlight your best products and services, your best marketing channels, access to greater ad budgets, and so on. Any company asset or utility that can give you a leg up in achieving your goals can be classified as a strength.

B. Weaknesses

Conversely, which areas leave your company most vulnerable? You need to be completely honest and assert which offerings are not competitive and which areas of your current team require improvement.

Turning these weaknesses into strengths can be a long-term goal, but are ultimately things you want to keep at the forefront of your mind so that you can plan for potential problems.

Both your company strengths and weaknesses are a direct result of factors you can actively control within the team.

C. Opportunities

On the other hand, your opportunities and threats are the direct result of factors outside of your immediate control. This includes the potential customer base and the direct competition that poses a threat to your overall success.

Opportunities can come in many forms. Is there a particular demographic that expresses interest in problem solutions that your brand can solve? That demographic is now an opportunity.

It can also include economical changes, events, or even physical proximity to a customer base with high potential. Consider everything happening at the community level, nationally, or even internationally that might set your brand up for unique opportunities that otherwise would not be as prevalent.

D. Threats

Finally, your threats would be the same forces of opportunity but are actively working against your success. Perhaps the employment crisis as a result of COVID-19 leaves your target consumer with less money to spend on your product. This is an easily-identifiable threat to your brand.

Brainstorm every community and environmental factor that's relevant and classify them as either an opportunity or a threat. This will come in handy when building your actual plan.

Finally, and perhaps the most important part of threat analysis is to closely examine direct competitors. You'll want to remain acutely aware of their offerings as well as the strategies being implemented in their digital marketing plan. You'll want to be less reactionary and more proactive in creating your digital marketing strategy that can capitalize on the competitors' weaknesses.

With all of this initial data accumulated, we can then proceed to the next steps in creating a digital marketing plan.

Step 2 - Define the Ideal Customer Persona - Then Segment Your Audience

The upside to performing a company situation analysis first is that it can help you get a leg up with this next step.

Every brand has its ideal customer persona. This is the fictitious profile of an individual that naturally stands to benefit the most from your offerings. Your products or services help the individual solve a problem, and your pricing conveniently meets their income level and buying habits.

Essentially, you want to consider your lineup of offerings and think about the group(s) that would genuinely benefit from them. If you run a landscaping business, it wouldn't make much sense to make a marketing plan that sells to apartment renters. Instead, you might want to target the associations that own those buildings. You could also target homeowners if you observe a need for your services in local neighborhoods and income levels that support that need.

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Beyond realizing your ICP, you'll then also want to start segmenting your audience. Realistically, your team will be able to come up with several different groups that stand to potentially benefit from your brand. You'll need real marketing data to determine the strongest buyer group, but that will come later.

Segmenting your audience is essential for marketing success as online marketing channels become overly saturated. When users are flooded with ads daily, they're more likely to click away from anything that's not highly personalized.

When you segment your target audiences by age, gender, income levels, living status, or personal interests, you're better poised to market-specific sections of your offerings to the groups. This will result in running multiple campaigns and ad groups simultaneously, but the clicks you receive will be from more qualified customers.

Step 3 - Create Immediate and Long-Term Objectives

We now have our results from our SWOT analysis and understand the type of customer we want to emphasize in our marketing plan. Now is the time to start visualizing and creating an objective roadmap.

While long-term goals such as achieving X profit by the end of the fiscal year is great, creating several smaller objectives will help you better chart your progress. If you aren't hitting your smaller objectives, you'll be more agile in identifying problems and coming up with new solutions. Setbacks are inevitable for every business and planning for them is what sets a successful business apart from a failing one.

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It's ultimately up to you to define the goals you want to achieve as they are contingent upon your business plan. However, all of your goals should be realistically achievable, measurable, and have firm dates for completion. You may want to boost brand recognition on social media channels, increase your email listing subscribers, or achieve a certain ROI progressively over the entire year.

Defining your goals is crucial in creating a marketing plan as all great digital marketing occurs as the result of experimenting, measuring, and optimizing. If you don't have the means to achieve a goal or a way to measure performance, you have no feedback loop to help you guide future business efforts.

Step 4 - Position Your Products and Services to Sell

This one's a bit trickier to get into place as your business will naturally have limitations regarding what it can offer the customer. However, it doesn't matter how much of a demand there is for a product if your selection costs more than the average customer can spend.

Getting your pricing right, however, is only one piece of the puzzle. Consumers will be critical of product/service selection, as well as the quality or build of those offerings. You need to find the best middle-ground of satisfying customer demands without overextending your budget or capabilities.

This will all tie back into identifying your ideal customer as well as the direct competition. Your brand will be best positioned to sell more if it offers one or more of the following:

• Better pricing
• Better quality
• Better customer service
• A better selection of goods
• A selection of goods that differs from competitors

Not only will product positioning help you connect more with existing audiences, but it can also help you branch out and market to new groups that were initially less qualified. A strong foundation for your brand will help you to achieve both short and long-term goals when it comes to new customer acquisition.

Step 5 - Create an Action Plan for Each Marketing Channel

So far in our digital marketing plan, we have:

• Identified the company’s strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities
• Discovered our ideal customer(s)
• Established the business goals we want to achieve through digital marketing
• Established an attractive product and service lineup

The final step is to utilize this well-earned data and use it to guide our digital marketing campaigns. The marketing channels you choose to use will be contingent upon your resources and budget.

For new brands looking to make immediate customer acquisitions through spending, you will want to consider utilizing PPC campaigns on popular platforms such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. The CPC offered through these channels is relatively low and will also allow you to collect a wealth of data from your audience segments.

For long-term growth and brand awareness, you'll want to start bolstering your website's SEO and content. Blogs are an exceptional way to boost your search rankings and make for great content to share on your social media accounts.

While brands would benefit from leveraging every digital marketing channel, it's important to create a realistic plan for the ones you intend to use. Study up on each channel and consider how you can use them to help you achieve your short and long-term goals. Set up micro-conversions and custom goals to help you track your progress along the way.

Bonus Step - Continuously Monitor and Optimize Your Campaigns!

With your digital marketing plan in place, know that your job is far from over. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving game and you shouldn't be surprised when best practices change not long after you've created a new plan.

Thankfully, most digital marketing platforms feature convenient smart automation tools that allow for better optimization and tracking. However, your team will still need to monitor this data and use it accordingly to help you achieve sales and growth. Anticipate changes and trends ahead of time and pivot your creatives as you go or else you'll fall behind.

This new data creates a feedback loop that will bring you back to earlier steps in the digital marketing planning process. If you're struggling to achieve goals, use your new data and circle back to your ideal customer or goal objectives. Modify your strategy and work your way forward once more.

With meticulous attention to detail and continued effort, you'll have a living marketing plan that will help you achieve your business goals.

If you want to retain clients for the long term, you need to confidently display the digital marketing metrics and KPIs that translate to results.

Contrary to what you may think, a quick boom in website traffic, the account follows, or page views isn't going to cut it.

At the end of the day, your clients care about acquiring high-quality customers and improving their bottom line. To that end, you need to create actual results to build a reputation that stands the test of time.

If you want to start convincing your clients to stay on board, start taking a closer examination of these 5 important digital marketing metrics now.

5 Important Digital Marketing Metrics to Show Your Client

When you measure the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns, quality often scores over quantity. In the reports, a client is not interested in several irrelevant indicators. What matters most are the metrics that clearly show where you are and what you still need to achieve.To figure it out, we have compiled five important digital marketing metrics for different types of campaigns:-

1. Traffic to Quality Lead Ratio

Traffic is a valuable metric for any business online. If your website is your virtual storefront, then your traffic equates to getting new customers in the door to browse your offerings.

However, traffic alone is sometimes considered a vanity metric. A vanity metric is a digital marketing metric that can indicate great performance but ultimately tells you very little about your progress toward a goal.

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For example, if a business sets an arbitrary goal of acquiring 1,000 new customers from an ad campaign, page traffic tells you little about your performance. This metric simply tells you that people are visiting, but not what they actions they are taking whenever they visit your landing page or website.

Make no mistake - improving your client's online traffic significantly is something that you should share and highlight. The issue arises whenever you are not simultaneously seeing improvements in conversions, page session duration, or revenue as a result of this traffic. Your client will quickly realize that these numbers matter very little if they are getting a quality ROI.

Instead, you want to highlight to the client how much of this new traffic is high-quality. You can demonstrate this by revealing how many of these users become leads. You can highlight this by comparing the traffic increase to conversion metrics such as follows, subscribers, form submissions, or calls.

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In other words, quality is always better than quantity. If you gain 1,000 new leads out of 10,000 visits, you have a lead ratio of 10%. Compare this to 100,000 new website visitors, but only 1,000 leads, which equates to 1%. That's a lot of wasted budget and effort reaching users that are not interested in your client's offerings.

2. Conversions

Continuing from the head above, tracking conversions is crucial for demonstrating the value of your digital marketing efforts. A conversion is the result of a website visitor completing an action on your page that happens to be one of your goals. For example, if the goal of your campaign is to earn more subscribers, then any new subscriber can be considered a conversion.

Common conversion goals are purchases, submitting a form, subscribing, sharing, following, or downloading/installing a file or app.

Whenever you set up custom goals for your campaign, you are better able to gather important digital marketing metrics that better tell the story. Instead of simply using a general traffic boost as the highlight of your presentation, you can support your metrics with those sexy conversion rates. Doing so provides undeniable proof that the client's advertising budget is being put to excellent use.

The types of conversions you'll want to show your client depends upon their immediate business goals. If the primary goal for the previous and coming months is to boost brand awareness, you may want to highlight an increase in subscribers, follows, or shares. An increase in views of a specific page or time spent on that page may also help you and your client to understand user intent.

Likewise, if the primary goal is to gain direct sales from a sale or promotion, you need the purchase conversions to back up your efforts. Failure to produce these conversion metrics will not only leave you exposed but will serve as a clear indicator that your campaign requires additional testing and improvements to get the job done.

3. Engagement

Engagement is crucial for illustrating to clients what types of actions users are taking regarding their content. You can identify engagement in the form of likes, reactions, shares, follows, or even an increase in page session duration.

Engagement is valuable as it demonstrates that your marketing efforts work. On the flip side, a lack of engagement typically leads to an increase in bounce rate - quick page visits that result in no action whatsoever. Not only is a high bounce rate indicative of poor creatives, but it's also something that Google can and will hold against a site when it comes to SEO and search rankings.

You should utilize this important digital marketing metric as a measuring stick for your digital marketing efforts. Regularly A/B test ads, website pages, and social posts to determine which images or copy yields improved engagement. An increase in engagement naturally improves the amount of organic traffic your client receives, which, in turn, can further boost conversions and sales.

An increase in organic results means gaining brand awareness and increasing revenue without spending additional funds. Ultimately, this may well be the best digital marketing campaign metric you can show to a client to demonstrate an impressive ROI.

4. Revenue by Channel

Revenue refers to the amount of money gained by utilizing digital marketing tactics for a business on a specific channel. You should not confuse this with profit, which is what's left from the revenue stream after deducting expenses.

A channel refers to any platform used to implement your digital marketing tactics for a client. Examples of digital marketing channels include paid search, SEO, social media, or content marketing. You can further qualify a digital marketing channel by individual platforms (i.e. Google, Bing, Facebook, or LinkedIn).

You owe it to yourself and clients to demonstrate the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts by channel. While previous metrics such as conversions and engagement are important, the client's bottom line is what will ultimately have the final say in whether or not utilizing a channel is a worthwhile pursuit.

If a digital marketing channel produces a healthy revenue stream, then it's likely a no-brainer to keep improving your efforts there. If the client's brand is performing exceptionally well, you may even choose to double down. Inversely, a revenue stream that costs more than it's worth will indicate that the channel requires more love and care. It may be in the client's best interest to abandon certain channels altogether in some instances.

The important thing to focus on is your agency's actions regarding the revenue earned through a marketing channel. Every client loves to see a smashing success. However, taking the initiative to pull back on underperforming channels and prevent unnecessary budget spending can also go a long way in solidifying the trust and partnership between your agency and the client.

5. Lifetime Customer Value

If there's one thing each of these digital marketing metrics has in common, it's that each highlights the importance of gaining more for less. That's why the final important KPI we're featuring is the lifetime customer value (LCV).

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To better understand LCV, you'll first need to understand a few metrics that go into the formula.

Every customer has an average purchase value (APV). This refers to the value of all of their purchases from a business within a period. Similarly, they also have an average purchase frequency (APF), which is their number of purchases in a period compared to total purchases.

You can then determine the customer's overall value by multiplying your APV by the APF. Now that you know the approximate value of a customer, you can compare this data to the lifespan of the customer. This provides you with a customer lifetime value that you can use to better understand your ROI on a customer-by-customer basis.

While this may sound slightly complex, it's fairly straightforward. Let's say that your agency spends $200 on Facebook Ads to acquire a new customer. During that customer's lifespan, they make two purchases for a total value of $100. You effectively lost money when bargaining for that customer's business. On the other hand, if you acquire a loyal customer who completes ten purchases at a value of $500, you've now made money back and then some.

The takeaway here is being able to demonstrate that your digital marketing efforts do not simply result in one-off purchases. Such events can be classified as churn, and are generally indicative of unsatisfied or underwhelmed customers. The goal should always be to cultivate an engaged and loyal following from the conversions that you acquire. You achieve this not only from the initial point of contact but through an ongoing nurturing process.

The higher your average lifetime customer value, the more profit that awaits your client. Furthermore, a higher LCV also indicates that customers are happy with the product or service. Content customers boost your marketing efforts by providing social proof and boosting your organic traffic. The resulting snowball effect is how your agency creates a sustainable foundation for your service and will create a client for life.

Show Clients These 5 Digital Marketing Metrics to be Successful

Businesses outsource their marketing efforts to agencies like yours for a reason. They either lack the knowledge, the skills, or the time to effectively give their marketing channels the attention they deserve.

They're actively looking for you to succeed and looking for data they can trust. So long as you can provide them with high-quality metrics that indicate progress and care, they're generally willing to let you do what you must on their behalf. That means you'll have more time to cultivate a following and build better campaigns so long as you work to maintain their confidence.

You can do this successfully by regularly reporting on these 5 key digital marketing metrics. All of these not only show an increase in visitors, but also show that those visitors are interested, engaged, and willing to spend money on a product or service that they like. It's not always about maximizing attention, but getting attention from those that truly count.

Every business wants to ally with an agency that produces customers that are happy and ready to buy. By using these metrics to guide your marketing efforts, you'll be able to build long-lasting client relationships that set your agency up for long-term success.

What skills do you need for digital marketing?

The answer is primarily contingent upon your desired marketing role within a company or agency. While many marketing positions tend to require overlapping skills, you will benefit from learning and mastering the talents that are intrinsic to that station.

Let's analyze the key positions in a marketing team and determine the best skills for digital marketing you can acquire to give yourself an advantage over rival applicants.

Digital Marketing Skills You Need by Marketing Position

Paid Media Marketers

Paid media marketers are the individuals responsible for creating and managing advertising campaigns online. They are the experts that oversee the company's Facebook, Google, and Bing ads as well as manage the monthly campaign budget. Paid media marketers are invaluable as they're the ones that make your advertising dollars work and can help even small businesses gain attention in paid search.

Here are some of the skills you'll need if you want to succeed in PPC advertising:

1. Graphic Design Skills

Several aspects go into creating a high-quality paid advertisement, but graphic design is one of the more important skills you'll need to grab the user's attention. You don't need to necessarily be a master at this - that's why there are dedicated graphic designers - but a sufficient level of knowledge in using tools like Photoshop or Canva will go a long way.

Having the ability to rapidly respond to company or client requests and provide several ad creatives for the same ad will automatically help you stand out from others with the same job title. The more knowledge you have to bolster ad creatives on your own, the more effective your campaigns will be overall.

2. Copywriting

Strong writing ability is a skill that's fairly essential in every aspect of digital marketing. Content is king and being able to deliver your message effectively and succinctly is key. While you won't need to outline and write 3,000+ word articles, you'll still want to make sure those ad copy lines pack a punch. For some, creating great paid ad copy can prove to be more of a challenge as you need to communicate more with less.

Armed with the knowledge of what makes great copy, you'll be able to identify writing mistakes that lower ad quality and hurt your conversion rate. You'll be able to create several copy alternatives for similar ads to provide your company and client with equally effective options.

3. Ad Account Management

This skill is one of the most crucial for a paid media marketer and it is mandatory. While Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and the like contain similar features and functionality, they each require active participation and knowledge to make effective use of its tools.

More importantly, these platforms frequently make updates to their platform and the terms of use for businesses. This gets even trickier if you work for an agency and are responsible for creating and managing campaigns as a partner on behalf of a third party. It will be your responsibility to actively stay on top of the rules and regulations of a platform to guide your clients effectively through the process. It will also help to avoid inadvertent mistakes that can result in the takedown of paid ads or a suspension of the account.

4. Webpage Design

You've done the heavy lifting and created an engaging ad that earned the click from a new lead. However, you now need to provide them with a powerful landing page that can secure the lead's contact information. This is why having a decent level of web design can bolster your paid ad campaign efforts.

Fortunately, much of this is alleviated as numerous platforms allow you to build elegant landing pages with very little coding or IT knowledge. However, understanding the aspects that make up an effective landing page design will allow you to create a seamless transition between the ad and the final destination. Otherwise, you're simply generating some traffic without delivering any tangible results.

5. Mastery of Marketing Statistics

Digital marketing is entirely driven by data and metrics gathered from every customer interaction. However, it's not enough to simply understand what a metric represents. You need the working knowledge to understand how those statistics factor into your bottom line so that you can use that knowledge to guide your campaign efforts as they progress.

Content Marketers

1. High-quality Writing Capabilities

Content marketers generate leads and sales with their words. Few things are as immediately off-putting as a website or landing page copy that's grammatically incorrect, improperly formatted, and filled with blatant errors. Technical marketing knowledge will amount to little for content writers if they are unable to translate those ideas into engaging material.

Writing for marketing is also much different than writing an essay or a novel. The presentation of your words is highly dependent upon the audience you're attempting to reach.

2. Communication / Understanding of the Audience

This second skill builds off the back of the prior one. A major component in being able to create effective copy is to be able to quickly identify and understand the target audience. In short, you don't want to write the same way for an everyday plumbing service as you would for a doctor working in specialized medicine. The success of your content depends upon the tone, vocabulary, and delivery just as much as the actual message.

The better you are at asking the right questions of clients and nailing down the demographics you're trying to reach, the better you will fare in the copywriting world.

3. SEO

A strong marketing team will feature dedicated search engine, optimization specialists. They ensure that websites rank well by diagnosing webpage health issues, building links between relevant content, and effectively mapping target keywords for each new page. For this reason, an SEO may supply content writers with guidelines or preliminary research to guide the writing process.

Because these aspects of SEO are so essential for high-performing copy, you would do well to gain a solid understanding of SEO principles. You'll have a greater understanding of what search engines like Google look for in content so that you can pinpoint the best result in the first couple of drafts and avoid unnecessary rewrites.

4. Diverse Content Writing Experience

There are several types of content writing in marketing, but the two you may be most concerned about are informational content and promotional content. Having knowledge and experience in working with both of these will make you a more well-rounded asset to your team.

Informational content is the type of material that you'll often see posted to a website's blog to improve rankings. Users are encouraged to subscribe or follow this type of content which educates or serves the user without overtly calling them to spend their money with the brand. Your focus is to generate brand recognition, build traffic numbers, and provide a worthwhile experience when visiting the site.

Conversely, promotional content requires a different approach. You're attempting to sell either the brand or a specific product to a very specific group of individuals. You'll need the ability to dissect the ideal customer's pain points and leverage them into your copy.

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Both are very different approaches, but equally necessary to build a strong digital marketing strategy.

5. Script Writing

While text-based content will always have its place in organic search, more companies are turning to new media such as infographics, custom images, or videos for their content. Video, in particular, is hugely effective at driving conversion rates and can easily replace a landing page worth of content when done correctly.

For this reason, you'll want to sharpen your writing skills for yet another type of format. Writing for a script that someone will read aloud requires some finesse and understanding of what makes for a natural way of speaking. Being able to translate your copy ideas for a vocal vehicle is yet another skill that will make you an invaluable asset to your team.

SEO

1. Excellent Research Skills

Marketing research makes up a significant component of an SEO's role. You'll be spending hours researching the most effective keywords to implement. You'll then need to determine how to map them throughout the site as well as what type of content will best support the goal of ranking for that word or phrase.

You'll also be regularly researching the competitor's SEO strategies. You will want to remain aware of the top-ranking sites in your niche, assess what's working for them, and be able to use this knowledge to imitate where necessary and differentiate your brand wherever you can.

Finally, Google is known to regularly revise and change its search algorithm, making your job an ever-evolving one. Being able to effectively research and uncover the best SEO practices is crucial even when Google won't provide a definitive answer.

2. Data Analysis

Equally important to your research, you'll need to be able to review the data and ask the right questions once you start putting your SEO efforts into action. Even effective SEO strategies can take weeks or months to take effect for a new site, so it is imperative to diagnose issues early and get yourself on the correct path.

You'll need to be comfortable in regularly analyzing where you stand in rankings, fluctuations in traffic, and be able to pinpoint what's causing success or failure quickly with your chosen SEO strategy if you want your brand to have a chance in duking it out with the top-ranking competitors.

3. Web Design and Coding

While you by no means need to be a web dev expert, you'll need to understand the principles of page design and how it impacts a site's SEO value. While you won't be responsible for making major design changes, you'll want to identify and remedy common presentation errors and look for ways to improve the user experience where you can.

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Furthermore, SEO-specific aspects of web design such as metadata and schema markup will be your responsibility. While these are not overly complicated tasks, they do require some basic HTML knowledge to implement correctly.

4. Knowledge and Experience with Third-Party SEO Tools

Thankfully, an SEO's job is not performed blindly. There are countless recommended tools that an SEO should have in their arsenal including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Google Trends. Beyond these obvious recommendations, countless tools serve as keyword planners, link-building assistants, and mobile optimization helpers.

Experienced SEOs are all going to have their preferred program for getting the best results. It benefits an SEO to remain up-to-date and aware of the latest technology and make the best choice as to what tools can best bolster your SEO strategy. Familiarity with a powerful platform can greatly expedite keyword research and help you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

5. Content Marketing

As discussed among our skills for the content marketing role, SEO and content are undeniably intertwined. While high-quality SEO offers far more than the copy on a page, that same text serves as the vehicle for providing a strong UX and ensuring that your pages rank for the correct keywords.

While you may not be creating this content yourself as an SEO, having a strong knowledge of what makes great content will make you a better asset to your team. You can not only ensure that articles work in the right direction but can greatly expedite the time it takes for a copywriter to complete a piece by arming them with solid SEO research before they begin.

Of course, it's always beneficial to have content marketing skills firsthand, so that you can always help out and deliver great content to coincide with your SEO efforts at any time.

Social Media Managers

1. Knowledge of Social Platforms and Audiences

Perhaps no one has a harder time gaining the respect they deserve than social media marketing managers. Too many brands find it acceptable to simply post whatever comes to mind on any social media timeline and then question why they aren't getting results.

Successful social media marketing requires extensive knowledge of the platforms you use. Each website tends to feature different demographics that can vary greatly by age, gender, geographic location, and income levels. Furthermore, the way those users communicate can also vary greatly either by deliberate choice or due to platform restrictions (i.e. Twitter's character limit).

You'll need to be someone who's in the know when it comes to the tricks and trades of fostering engagement on each platform. It's no small feat and you'll be juggling your efforts across multiple websites at all times.

2. Impeccable Communication Skills

You need to be a social butterfly to succeed on social media (it's in the name). Simply creating a customized account for your brand and posting any old content throughout the day is going to result in one thing - zero engagement.

What truly generates those coveted likes and shares is actively pursuing new connections with your target audience and fellow industry members. That doesn't mean mindlessly promoting your business or products. Users are looking for genuine interactions and will be able to sniff out anything that's not immediately.

You need to truly embrace your role as the voice of your brand and start getting social. You'll want to think about the people you're interacting with and come up with creative ways to incorporate your brand into conversations in a way that speaks to people personally.

3. Copywriting

The importance of content marketing reveals itself once more. Though social media content tends to be short and sweet when compared to blog articles, it's equally important for grabbing attention and inviting users to join the conversation. It's arguably more important than ever to be able to create content that actively incentivizes users to participate.

However, knowledge of social platforms can help you instantly make your copy more dynamic. Experts will be able to not simply post, but effectively utilize popular features such as Instagram Reels, Facebook groups, or various third-party media creation tools. Social media managers are less concerned about dumping loads of information, but packing a punch in a short, concise message.

4. Customer Service

Due to the conversational nature of social media, you can and should expect to use your brand's accounts to provide customer support. Not only will users frequently message you directly, but they will also comfortably see fit to tag your brand with any messages - positive or negative as they deem fit.

For this reason, an exceptional social media manager will not only be able to identify these scenarios but carefully navigate these encounters. Successful interactions can not only remedy a poor experience a customer had, but can also boost brand integrity by offering social proof to all other users that might witness your public interactions.

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5. Project Management and Planning Skills

Effective social media strategies do not work in isolation. Instead, an effective social media manager will be tuned in to what other departments are working on regarding content and devise a strategy that helps all departments succeed.

For example, your SEO team decides to pursue keywords directly related to a major industry event. Then, your content writing team moves quickly to create engaging material that's valuable to your audience and supports those ranking efforts.

Rather than allow these events to happen separately, a social media manager will have strong project management skills to coordinate scheduling for these types of events alongside their regularly scheduled postings. This not only applies to industry events, but can apply to company-wide promotions, holidays, and topics that start trending naturally on various social media platforms.

Strong social media management requires a proactive approach, not a reactive one. With a content calendar in place, you then have more agility when it comes to those times when you simply must pivot and react to the tumultuous landscape that is social media.

Arm Yourself with the Best Digital Marketing Skills for Your Position

Digital marketing will likely always be a viable career choice and it only continues to evolve with technology. However, that same viability makes this field a highly competitive one, so you need to sharpen your skills to stand out and help your company get the results it requires from you.

Not only should you take away the five skills you need based on your desired marketing position, but you should take additional care to acquire those valuable crossover skills that are consistently required everywhere.

Lastly, understand that what you learn today can become quickly outdated a month from now. To truly be the best marketer in your role, you need to actively participate in the industry, stay up-to-date with the latest changes and occurrences, and work toward where the marketing industry is going, not where it's at. Otherwise, you'll find yourself becoming stagnant and falling behind those who are gunning for your ideal marketing role.