5 Things To Get The Most of Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Want to see some results from your digital marketing efforts? Here’s five steps that work well to build a marketing strategy that’s realistic, effective, and adaptable.

1: Set Effective Goals

If you go into your digital marketing program without any goals laid out, you might think that you’re being smart and flexible — but really, you’ve got no way to measure your success.

You need to be able to say whether something was successful to be able to learn from it. So set relevant goals that are attainable in the time period you have, that are worth achieving, and that you can say whether you’ve not you’ve achieved. For example, don’t say:

“increase traffic”

Say:

“increase traffic by 10% over the course of this campaign”

2: Commit to the Time, Effort, and Resources Needed

Don’t just say you want to do something: actually do it. Estimate what you’ll actually need in terms of time, effort, and resources, and set that time aside. If that means you have to move some things around, do it.

Don’t wait until you’re halfway through the month to find out that you don’t have what you need in order to properly execute your plan. Budget for everything and do it right.

3: Build Your Foundation and Technology Stack

If your company hasn’t done much with digital marketing before, you might be wondering what technologies you’ll need to use. You might not even have a CRM — maybe just using Excel spreadsheets to manage your contacts.

The foundation of everything we do is the HubSpot CRM. But we pull in many other technologies as needed. Many of which can be integrated with HubSpot for a smooth, holistic technology stack.

Whatever you end up picking, make sure that the technology works for you, does everything you need it to, and that it all talks to each other.

4: Track Results, Analyse Data and Most Importantly, Be Patient

Once your marketing’s going, make sure you’re actually tracking what’s happening. The last thing you want is to set up an ad campaign and then check in two weeks later to find out that it’s been costing you money without bringing any results.

At the same time, be patient. Marketing doesn’t work overnight — especially with B2B organizations. It’s going to take some time to actually start working at an effective rate, and it’s going to take some ongoing work to guide your digital marketing toward success. In other words…

5: Always Optimize

Learn from what you’re doing. With every ad, every email, and every social media post, take note of what’s working, and what isn’t. Then, do more of what’s working.

Sometimes, you’ll want to A/B test. This allows you to try two versions of the same thing, with one difference. So you could send out an email with two different subject lines. One half of your contacts gets the first, the other half gets the second. You see which did better, and as you work through your digital marketing strategy, you try to spot trends that unite those types of subject lines that tend to do better.

Every audience is different and audiences even change over time. Tracking those results and acting upon your data analysis allows you to optimize. Ultimately, this means more results for the same effort. If you’re not doing that, you’re missing out on the biggest benefit of digital marketing.

Need a digital marketing partner? We’ve helped more than 80 B2B companies across Canada and the US set and achieve their marketing goals. Reach out here, or learn more about what we do.