How To Do Digital Marketing Effectively: Essential Strategies

Having a digital marketing strategy doesn’t guarantee you’ll have a successful digital marketing campaign. It’s not uncommon for companies to underperform when compared to their expectations. But don’t worry, we’ve compiled this list of the essential digital marketing strategies. Follow these tips and we’re sure you’ll improve your results.

Before we start, have you defined your metrics and objectives? Did you define your KPIs and outline your customer journey? These are the first step to any successful digital marketing campaign. If you haven’t, we suggest reading up on those topics and coming back to this article when you have. We’re sure they’ll help your campaign run smoothly.

If you answered yes to all of the previous questions, then we’re ready to begin.

How to Do Digital Marketing Effectively: 8 Common Pain-Points

Have a Strong Communication Plan

Define your communication strategy for each channel, each segment, each device, each step in your conversion funnel, etc. separately. Obviously how specific you’re able to get is going to depend on the size of your team, but as many unique segments as possible will help create a more impactful message for your audience.

Along with this, it’s important to define your brand’s overarching communication strategies, that apply to all segments, keeping things consistent across your whole team.

Leverage Your Multi-Channel Strategy

A common mistake made when running online campaigns is not taking into account the ways in which your different channels interact. Information generated through Facebook Ads could be useful information for you Google Ads campaigns for example. Do people behave differently when searching for your product on Google if they’ve already watched a tutorial for it on your Facebook page? Everything online is connected, and your digital marketing strategy should be too.

Capitalize on Sub-Conversions

Sub-conversions are the small steps that a user makes on their way to converting for real. They’re important steps in your conversion funnel, and can shed light on what happens after someone clicks your ad, but before they convert. That allows you to optimize for the way that your customers actually  behave.

Along with the strategic benefit of tracking sub-conversions, they can increase the functionality of automatic optimization tools. These automatic campaign optimizers need more conversion data to increase their statistical certainty. Businesses with fewer, more lucrative conversions can let these tools track sub-conversions and optimize every step of the conversion funnel.

Optimize Desktop & Mobile Separately

You shouldn’t set up your desktop and mobile campaigns in exactly the same way, as if they were a single entity. They are extremely different devices and they have different functions in the life of a consumer. That means that the way someone interacts with you brand depends on the device they’re using.

In general, desktop campaigns have higher conversion rates, but are also more expensive because, in general, the desktop market is more saturated but, it depends on the market.

Clearly your investments should vary from platform to platform. Other factors like message and landing pages should be considered separately for mobile and desktop. Last, but not least, make sure to do cross-device analysis.

Implement Tools

Depending on the size of your campaigns, there are tools that can help you achieve your desired results. They increase optimization intelligence, saving your team’s time and allowing for complex strategies that wouldn’t be possible without automation.

A good bid manager, for example, can considerably increase results, freeing up time for your team to address strategy and the more important and nuanced aspects of your digital campaign that can’t be done using robots.

A/B testing tools allow you to test more variables with greater accuracy and speed. There are a ton of good options on the market. Do some quick research and find out which one fits your company best.

Test Everything!

Testing is at the core of any good online marketing campaign. The biggest resource available to digital marketers in the enormous amount of data digital marketing generates. Leveraging that data makes it possible to execute scientifically valid tests, creating hypotheses, and testing them against the data you collect to potentially change the way you market.

That doesn’t only mean A/B testing, you can also test new segmentation models, communication methods, campaign configurations and pretty much every other aspect of you digital marketing presence. Any data that is collected you can observe as you change variable in your campaigns.

It’s extremely important to plan your testing structures before you run them. That way you guarantee that they’re set up in an effective and efficient manner.

It is also important to remember that just because something is commonplace and suggested by all the “experts”, doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. If you implement a “fix” for your campaign but it doesn’t bring results, don’t feel like you have to do it just because everyone else is. For example, market standards say that including a price in a product ad increases the ad’s CTR, but if your tests are showing the opposite, listen to the data. If it’s necessary, you can rerun tests, but don’t let the status quo reduce your campaign's efficiency.

Define the metrics a test needs to attain in order to be valid. Minimum volume, clicks, or conversions are all good examples of elements that play a role in a quality validation model. There aren’t any set equations to find out when a test has reached an acceptable confidence level. The idea is to find out what works best for your business. Once it’s set up and thoroughly tested, a good statistical model can ensure the truth behind the numbers.

You should be constantly running tests. It’s important to always be in pursuit of the most optimized campaigns possible, increasing efficiency through insight.

However, testing just for the sake of testing doesn’t change anything. Make sure that the tests you’re running have potentially valuable results. For example it doesn’t help to discover that a certain color scheme increases your ad’s CTR if it goes against your brand guidelines.

Creating an adequate way of storing your data, and test results, is important so that you can compare data over long periods of time, or return to old data if necessary.

Pay Attention to Attribution Modelling

Digital Marketing is still very reliant on the last click attribution model when it comes time to evaluate results. But that’s changing, finally. More and more companies are using other, more nuanced attribution models when analyzing results.

Here’s an example to show how last click attribution can be misleading in display media. Remarketing lists often have the highest last click rates among display network campaigns. Without a good attribution model you might start leaching fund from other campaigns to fund this more successful remarketing campaign. That will increase your ROI in the short run, but sooner or later, your remarketing list is going to start to dry up as you move your budget away from other campaigns, reducing the number of new impressions your brand receives.

There are other attribution models that can be more insightful in tracking tools like Google Analytics 360. The most popular ones are Time Decay and Position Based, but ideally you would develop your own in-house model so you can exactly match your business’s necessities.

Internal or External Team

A common concern is whether your company should hire an internal marketing team or contract out to an external agency. It’s a complicated decision, and obviously every business is different, but some factors to take into consideration are:

• Do you have the means to hire a team with the qualifications necessary to execute the marketing plan you have in mind?
• Would your team be able to manage, create, and analyze your campaigns with enough time left over to test and implement new ideas and optimizations?
• How much time would be left over to work on increasing results?

In general, the results you see when you contract a high-quality, performance based agency more than exceed the value you spend on their services.

The best marketing agencies are constantly improving on their already advanced strategies and they will be able to customize their systems for your unique marketing challenges.

Measuring Your Results

So you’ve defined your metrics and KPIs for every channel, every level of the conversion funnel and every stage in your strategy. Now you need to make sure that you can accurately measure all of the metrics you want with exactitude. What should you do?

This far along in the process, you’re either using Google Analytics or you’ve thought about using it. Although it’s not the only analytics tool available, Google Analytics is far and away the most popular. For that reason we’re going to focus on Analytics and its various functions in this section.

Master Data Capturing

Google Analytics has to have an extremely well configured data capturing system because countless companies rely on it to properly calculate ROI, which affects media investments, the thing that Google wants you to increase.

For any company that exists on the internet it’s important to know how website visits are distributed across all of your media channels. If your data collection isn’t well structured, it’s possible that you would have discrepancies between the data gathered from you company’s back office and the data collected through Google Analytics.

A plausible cause is the improper implementation of data filters and data filter metrics. It’s always worth it to double-check that they’re set up like they should be.

Increase Data Confidence

Generally, Analytics works by collecting a user’s interactions on your site through a tag. This tag reports data from every session (session here meaning a visit to your site) to your Analytics account. To guarantee the tag properly captures and transfers data to your Analytics, you need these three things:

• Proper integration of your site with Google Tag Manager.
• Data collection tools in your site’s code so the tag can recognize and collect the data for preparation.
• A properly configured Google Analytics account, with good metrics and tracking structures, formatted to reflect the consumer journey.

If you’ve ever had to compile data reports, you’ve probably already heard the expression “trash it, trash out”. There’s a lot of truth in that saying. It’s important that the reports have high quality data to use so that they reflect reality.

If your tag isn’t correctly capturing and sending data from each media channel, your picture of how customers interact with your site won’t be accurate. That can mean a loss of business, poor brand opinions, and frustration on your end. If your tag isn’t doing what it’s meant to do, that’s a serious problem.

Think About Implementing a Data Layer

For the reasons outlined above, it’s important to keep in mind that there are two ways for Google Analytics to interact with your data, and each has its pros and cons.

The first way to go about it is to read the data directly from the page. It’s less sophisticated, but it can work. Keep in mind that the tag can’t read your site before it’s fully loaded. Because the tag only reads your site after it’s fully loaded, its possible to miss some important data. If the user was to click through to the next page before the page was fully loaded, you wouldn’t be able to track it, for example. Imagine if that were to happen at the end of a conversion. Some sales wouldn’t be counted, meaning that your ROI reports would be off, creating inconsistencies, and a headache for you to figure out.

The other, more recommended way is to manage your data via a data layer, especially if you plan on tracking income and sales on your site. A data layer works as an intermediary between your site and Google Analytics. It organizes your data and gives it to the tag for easy capturing. It’s also common for a site to undergo changes that inadvertently disrupt your tags ability to capture data. If you implement a data layer, the tag can capture and pass on all the data from the data layer once its functionality is restored, without losing any data.

It’s important that you understand the trade-offs between these two methods so you can choose which one is best for your business. Do you need extreme accuracy in your data, or can you function with numbers that are “close enough”? Do you need to need to track a large number of variables on a single page, or are your pages simple enough that they’ll load and read quickly? Is keyword competition high or low in your sector, for your target? Does you site undergo frequent changes?

The answers to these questions should inform the way you decide to collect your data.  

Adjust Your Strategy According to Feedback

As previously state, any knowledge gained about your media investment is valuable. Use the things you learn through the data captured while running your campaigns to improve them even more. That allows you to reinforce strategies that are showing good results, and correct mistakes in any suboptimal strategies.

Small changes can make a huge difference, so make sure that changes are well reasoned, especially for top of the funnel strategies, which should have a more long-term vision. Make sure that your strategies have enough time to develop before you mark them as suboptimal and change them. Also, make sure to analyze the data thoroughly, looking for any and all insights. For example, how do sales during the week compare to sales on the weekend? The more complexly you think about your data, the more in depth your insight will be. That will reduce cost and allow funds to be better distributed.

Get to Work

Now that you’ve explored your possibilities, it’s time to get down to business! Use the tips and tricks from this article to dress your digital marketing strategy for success.

If you properly execute every one of these steps, we’re sure that your digital marketing endeavour will be more successful than ever. You’ll see results faster than you’ve ever seen. Good Luck!