Look behind the scenes of Digital Marketing

The world of digital marketing was conquered by three-letter acronyms a long time ago, and one cannot say that “marketing cannot be measured”. How to manage the digital world? How to acquire critical business data and build sales? How to adapt activities to the stage the brand is currently at? These questions are asked by anyone who focuses on digital marketing or who is at least partially responsible for the brand’s image. The good news is one can have control over this process. The bad news is that everything requires time, determination, diligence, knowledge and budget.

Optimizations are more than just the struggle for good CPC

I am more than certain that most marketers believe digital marketing optimization is a term referring to the optimizations of Google campaigns.

However, digital marketing does not mean only Google Ads campaigns, paid display or sponsored links. The optimizations themselves cannot be limited solely to activities directly associated with paid campaigns.

One of the main flaws of many marketing activities is the lack of patience on the side of marketers and Clients. Yes, the lack of patience. After all, a campaign should be the sum of multiple activities and optimizations, not a single action. We should look at campaigns as if they were a picture formed out of the combination of many numbers. One skipped element or the wrong combination and the entire picture makes no sense. We eventually receive something which is far from what we expected. This works the same way for marketing campaigns. It’s enough to skip one element of the campaign for the whole effort to lose meaning for users and us alike.

Let’s start from the beginning

Business comes first. For digital marketing campaigns to stay effective, they have to be profiled with specific business needs in mind. Every digital campaign should start with an audit of the Client’s business needs, and optimizations should be made with these needs in mind.

The elements to be determined during the audit include:

• The business goals set for the campaign
• The information the sales depends on the most
• The tools (e.g., the website, contact forms, ebook) we will receive from the Client

Naturally, the audit also includes such fundamental aspects as target group, deadlines, and budgets. The data acquired during the audit will help us determine where we are and what we have to do before we begin the marketing campaign. Business goals give us an answer regarding the tools we should use and the channels we should select for our campaign. In conjunction with correct analytics, we will be able to study, analyze and optimize our activities. When made correctly, UTM links, the transformation of specific actions into unique events with ranks and business importance factors and their incorporation into analytical systems will allow the Client to see how much he earned through our activities in the future.

Conscious optimization

The technical side of digital marketing is one of the most important points that makes it possible to reach the right people with the right message. At the very beginning of campaign setup, it is important to check whether GTM and GA were correctly implemented, whether conversions are counted correctly and if the data acquired through this process is enough.

What events can be tracked on the website? The most popular ones include form filling, e-book downloading, familiarizing oneself with the offer, the time spent on the website, and the copying of email addresses and phone numbers. However, it is not a good approach to collect too much data. This is why, at the onset of our activities, it is so important to determine the way we are going to evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign. Thanks to good analytics, we are able to manage the campaign in a way that will yield increasingly better results in the future. Analytics allows us to “extract” the desired user behavior patterns and use the template to stimulate the same reactions among other users.

Design+thinking – nice to see you

For every DM, it is imperative to provide a good user experience for the target audience – without this, the potential even of the best campaign will not be fully realized. For example, if the user interface is not intuitive, our Clients will not be able to finish the process, or worse, they will feel frustrated and discouraged. UX optimizations can be analyzed both on the technical level (verification of whether every element of the system works as intended) or at the business level (verification of whether the system or process fulfills the business goals of the company).

Let’s be honest – how many chances will you be willing to give a company that has “attracted” your attention with an interesting ad design, but whose website is inconsistent, with a confusing message and which runs really poorly? Yes, the lack of a good UX is one of the main reasons for abandoned shopping carts, high bounce rate and wasted “clicks”.

An unfulfilled promise hurts twice

In a world so filled with advertising and with a society that is increasingly aware of digital marketing mechanisms, brands do not get a second chance and unfulfilled promises hurt twice. It is often the case that behind campaign promises (quick consulting, free e-book deliveries, estimation within 24h) there are additional systems and automations. It is easy to make a mistake, all it takes is to add an incorrect email address during the campaign configuration stage or to skip the sales department and our potential Client will never receive the promised analysis. At the design stage of every marketing campaign, it is worth to focus not only on user flow, but also on outlining everything that has to be provided on both the technical and organizational side. Only this way will we be able to provide a proper UX to our Clients.

The optimization of the technical side of the campaign should begin with the specification of the elements with which we want to reach the user. For example, for e-book downloading, we need to provide:

1. An intuitive contact form – which should be characterized by very good UX, integrated analytics and a mailing system thanks to which our user will receive the e-book while we establish a constant channel of communication with him. By creating dynamic headings and URL addresses that will change depending on user-provided keywords, the user will quickly become confident that this e-book is exactly what he needs the most right now.
2. E-book – interesting and containing information valuable to the user; optimized and designed with a focus on our needs (proper size that will be easy to download or share, appropriate CTA with UTM configuration thanks to which we will be able to monitor the traffic on the website).
3. Thank you page – it may seem like an obvious element, but it turns out it is often omitted even though most users expect it. Everyone wants to know what will happen next, and for us this is the next place where we can communicate with the Client.
4. Automation of the entire process – the downloading of the e-book is just the first step in the entire process, which should be followed by the initialization of the entire process of periodic and very personal communication with the user (subsequent newsletters should be connected to our Client’s behavior, they should answer his needs, which we will identify by analyzing his traffic and the behavior when he browses our newsletter.)
5. Design, copy, communication channels and ambassadors.

No traffic no money

The entire spectrum of SEM activities comes down to the aim of becoming visible on the internet. SEO is a huge part of SEM, and it includes optimizations of the website itself. SEO optimization features over 40 key, strategic elements of a website that have an influence on its position in organic rankings and paid campaigns. Yes, only websites deemed useful by Google bots have a chance of achieving high ranking positions in paid results. So, what do these robots take into account when evaluating our website? The factors include website performance, the length and quality of meta descriptions, text structure, keyword saturation and proper redirects.

Learn from your users

Only through the analysis of the behavior of current Clients are we able to properly optimize campaigns, modify the message, change communication channels and be effective. Campaigns are a complicated process consisting of many small but very important elements. The entire lifecycle of a campaign begins and ends with an analysis. It is important to learn from users who stimulate our business. We have to bear in mind that every activity requires time. Only a detailed analysis combined with testing and optimizations will allow us to choose the right set of activities that will be perfectly suited for the needs, time and place where your brand is currently at.