If you’re ready to get serious about building your brand online, attracting more website traffic, and converting existing leads into paying customers, knowing which marketing efforts will lead to increased sales is key.
For our readers who are new to the world of digital marketing, hello! Further, to those who are new to digital marketing and all of the unique language, tools, and platforms that come with it, welcome. Edge Marketing is one of Australia’s leading digital marketing, SEO, and PPC agencies and we’re experts in all things that drive extra eyes and sales to your brands.
Before we highlight our top five recommended digital marketing tactics that can help boost your bottom line, we’ll first dive into the reasons for designing and strategising your campaign before taking action. From a better ROI on your dollars and time spent to an increased likelihood of hitting your campaign goals, we’re all for deciding who, how, where, and when your campaigns should be published before hitting ‘go live’.
Read on to learn more about the digital strategy design process and how to create a digital marketing plan foundation before checking out our top five tools, tricks, and platforms for increasing your sales.
Designing Your a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy and Campaign
Whether you’re a solopreneur, big business, or growing brand, having a solid digital marketing strategy that clearly identifies your target market, their problem, your product or service offer, and how your product or service offer meets their needs is critical. Further still–an effective digital marketing strategy should always connect back to your overarching business goals including increased sales, driving more website traffic, or growing brand awareness.
Assuming you have already designed a top level digital marketing plan for your business (if not read more about this from the Edge Marketing team here) every new campaign should start with a similar, but more refined, brainstorming process. To get started designing your next digital marketing campaign in a way that supports your to-level marketing goals, we recommend:
- Identify short and long term business goals:
Like we said above–the best digital marketing strategies for your business should directly connect to and support your overarching business goals. Assuming these have been identified beforehand, review and confirm which of these short (and, if possible, long term!) business goals can and should be targeted by your next digital marketing campaign. Interested in boosting sales by 30% during the holiday season? The more specific the goals per campaign, the better for deciding who, how, when, and where to action as well as identifying key metrics that will help track your campaign success.
- Reviewing your marketing strategy:
Once you’ve determined which goals will be targeted through your next campaign, we recommend reviewing your marketing strategy for a quick refresher on key details including: target market, ideal customer persona, buying characters, and online behaviour, and which digital platforms they’re most likely to use to find a solution for their problem or needs.
- Confirm the campaign product, service, and target market:
While we’re certain that every product, service, or solution your business has ever created is a genius one, it’s critical that every campaign has a specific offer. Why? Although ‘building brand awareness’ is a worthwhile business goal for your digital marketing campaign, we’re lining up a strategy you can follow to boost sales. The more specific and direct the product or service offer, the more targeted your campaign language, graphics, and platform use can be so it hits the targeted audience. Interested in boosting overall company sales instead of launching one new product? No problem–but marketing campaigns will be most effective when a specific product, product range, or brand collection is designed for a specific sub-section of your overall target audience. Running multiple campaigns concurrently is no problem–so long as each is unique to a specific customer or user with a unique creative direction and CTA.
- Identify deadlines, budget, success metrics, and other key campaign parameters:
Really, this suggestion could have been first. The deadline for campaign creation, the time period that your active campaign will go live, the budget available to fund your efforts, and the specific metrics that will help track the success of your campaign are key. Consider these final steps the framework that will give a structure to your campaign and not only help you get the best ROI, but also help you evolve and further define your future marketing campaigns to come.
Wondering about this last point? Metrics that track the success of your campaigns can arm you with real-time data about your actual live users, their online behaviour, and brand preferences. While we always want every campaign to be a wild success, this real-time data gives you invaluable insight that can help incremental adjust and improve each future campaign. If you’re interested in this topic, check out some of the other Edge Marketing blogs that discuss collecting and analysing user feedback to help strengthen your marketing campaigns.
Our Top 5 Recommended Digital Marketing Strategies to Boost Sales
Now that you’ve identified the focus of your campaign, who you’re campaigning too, what digital marketing goals you’re trying to hit, and the budget, timelines, and deadlines you have to work within, it’s time to start deciding which platforms and tools will help you boost your bottom line.
Among some of our favourite digital marketing tools and social media platforms that can help you directly increase sales we recommend:
- Instagram:
There are few things better than using the same digital marketing tool as the platform you used to buy and sell with. With the evolution of Instagram, brands and businesses of every size can take advantage of paid ads and organic search opportunities, list their products for sale in social media posts that link directly to their Shop, and directly sell to consumers with easy to follow website links. A great way to both build your social media presence, drive added traffic to your website, and make easy, automated sales, leveraging both free and paid Instagram tools is a great way to find new, highly relevant leads and convert them to paying customers. - Google Ads:
A fantastic way to find new leads who are highly interested in what your brand has to offer, Google Ads can show an excellent ROI on time and money spent–especially over the long term. Like we mentioned above, Google Ads campaigns (especially when paired with Google Analytics) can produce meaningful real-time data about your online audience, who finds you on search engines, and live website traffic. As a result, leveraging Google Ads for your next campaign can both widen the net of relevant potential buyers, but also give you better insight into leads and paying consumers to you can even further refine your marketing efforts over time. How’s that for a win-win? - Landing Pages:
Whether you’re hoping to drive traffic to your website via Google Ads, social media, links, or EDMs, we recommend creating a campaign-specific landing page that speaks directly to your campaign target audience. Why? Because CTAs or click-through-buttons that direct to your overall brand website will create additional steps and barriers for the customer to navigate before they can buy. While it may seem like a good idea to get your whole product catalogue in front of the potential buyer, we recommend limiting buyer overwhelm, limit their choice, and create a targeted landing page that highlights the specific campaign product or service. Once customers have a great experience with your brand, they can navigate through the rest of your collections. - EDMs:
If you haven’t started building out an email marketing list, we definitely recommend getting started. Why? Because inbox space is valuable. Instead of trying to direct a potential customer’s attention away from existing online traffic, inboxes offer brands a direct way to speak to their buyers one-on-one. A great way to offer tailored product or service solutions, most EDM email marketing delivery platforms like MailChimp, HubSpot, and FloDesk mean being able to track the effectiveness of your emails, CTAs, and click-through-rates. Better yet–most platforms offer drip-campaign functions which can help automate reconnecting with warm leads as they become further engaged with your brand. How’s that for an automated sales funnel! - Brand partnerships:
Say what? You heard us. By doubling down on your potential audience reach, working with brands that align with your business’ values, customer base, and yet still offer a non-directly competing product or service can hugely help increase your brand awareness and potential lead funnel. Some businesses will collaborate with complementary brands to come up with product or service bundles, buy-one-get-one, discount codes, or a limited edition product range to cross-market to like minded audiences. Using all of the above recommended tools and platforms, you can leverage most digital marketing tools from EDMs to social media to get the word out about your brand collaboration and significantly further your potential sales reach by tapping into your partner’s existing network.
Key take-aways and Points
When it comes to boosting sales via digital marketing, there are a couple of key points and considerations to keep front of mind:
- Limit buyer choice. Online shoppers can easily become overwhelmed with too much product selection and forget purchasing altogether. To decrease this risk, direct online leads directly to product pages or campaign landing pages that narrow their focus so they can complete the sales cycle.
- Creative must be designed with the specific campaign buyer in mind. This is particularly important if your brand targets multiple audiences with unique problems, solutions, and buying needs. All campaign creative should be designed with a specific buyer in mind to increase the likelihood of copy, graphics, and the CTA resonating with the lead so they can convert to a buying customer. Going too broad or ‘trying to catch everyone’ with your campaign will likely lead to no one person being sold.
In summary, we always recommend taking the narrow road when it comes to designing new digital marketing campaigns. By narrowing the customer’s potential purchasing choices and narrowing the audience that you target, you have a better opportunity to deeply connect with and convert more meaningful sales. (The result? New customers for both now and in the future who are highly relevant and engaged with your brand.)
Effective Digital Marketing Efforts for Boosting Sales and ROI
Edge Marketing knows the ins and outs of digital marketing campaigns and wants to help the small businesses and big brands around Australia boost their presence online.
Whether you’re interested in hacking your own search engine optimisation, learning more about popular social media channels, or how you can design digital marketing campaigns that result in real sales, follow along with our blog. Producing weekly articles and blog posts that deep dive into the world of website development, paid ads, and the best digital marketing strategies and opportunities, we want our community to take advantage of our hard-learned knowledge so they can start boosting their presence online from home.
