The best marketing strategy: care
Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO & Entrepreneur
This is a post in a series of posts that explore digital technologies that can be leveraged to amplify a business website capacity to generate leads. This series builds up the rationale for a business website to undergo its digital transformation in order to provide a user experience more conducive to generate a lead.
Have you ever noticed human billboards in high-street shopping areas advertising smaller businesses in side lanes? They are often funny and extremely visible, hard to miss, and they do a great marketing job at getting your attention to a business you would otherwise have never noticed. Online social marketing is akin to human billboards on the high-street, you need to get your business noticed where the crowds hang out. The vast majority of business websites are like these businesses in a slide lane hidden away from the high-street. However, unlike the local high-street, you can advertise your business to all the digital high-streets in the world should you so wish. In reality you want to focus your time and money on those portals where your target client spends their time.
Advertising online with Google or Facebook ads has its merit, there are many more marketing strategies that can lead to better customer experience, which in turn will develop into trust and better engagement. More and more users shy away from online advertising, and 90% of them will research a brand online before making a purchase. Videos are increasingly effective and favoured media for advertising.
Refining Your Marketing Strategy
A HubSpot survey reveals that the use of blogging as a marketing tool increases up to 13x the ROI. It increases the chances of your business being discovered online by users who seek information on this, and therefore are more likely to be converted into a lead.
Given the large number of marketing channels available to a business, how can one go about developing a strategy customised to oneโs business? Technology can play a decisive role, allowing marketeers to track and analyse the best performing marketing campaigns.
A marketing content medium can be traced on a given channel by using UTM parameters in the URL of the landing page on the business website. Each campaign will have an associated landing page. Two or more campaigns can link back to the same landing page. Targeted users follow the link to find out more. The URL will include a set of UTM parameters to trace the campaign details such as the source, channel, content, campaign name and even custom keywords. When a user visits the landing page, these UTM parameters can be scanned and stored in a Customer Data Platform to keep a trace of the visit. The UTM values determine the content viewed by the user on the landing page, but more importantly, this accumulated data, from multiple users over multiple campaigns, can be analysed and compared to understand which ones are successful, identify potential trends across time and channels and therefore contribute to the development of a marketing strategy for your business.
Campaign data can be cross-related to data users (see the previous post) to identify the ideal target audience for a given campaign. This systematic and empirical approach to online marketing will ensure a steady and predictable stream of potential leads, both as new and returning customers.