How to Fix Your Brand’s Digital Marketing

Businesses need to maintain a digital presence to stay relevant in the age of digital media. Often, companies struggle with establishing a well-run digital marketing presence. They approach digital marketing from a standard marketing viewpoint. Although many basic principles remain the same in digital marketing, many differences require digital marketers to expound upon the basic principles. Trying to adapt digital marketing for your business can cost time and money if not integrated properly.

1. Strategy Meeting – Start with strategy meetings to set your digital marketing up for success. Gather your marketing team and chief decision makers to generate ideas and establish goals for your digital marketing campaigns. Ask questions to help shape your goals. These questions also establish the metrics you use to measure the success of the campaigns. (Established companies know their target market, product, and price. This post assumes that you already defined your market, product, and price. Defining your target market, product, or price is beyond the scope of this blog post.) Questions might include: What segment are we focusing on for this campaign? What return do we want to see on this campaign? What message resonates with this segment? How long will this campaign run? How much will we spend on this campaign? Remember, segmentation dominates digital marketing. Using segmentation helps narrow your messages focus to address the needs of one segment. Consider a razor company who sells razors and blades. A campaign targeting 18 to 25-year-old men differs from a campaign targeting 65 and older men, or 25 to 35-year-old women. Understanding each segment’s perceived value allows you to address what they value in campaigns constructed specifically for them. Segmentation reduces costs per click and results in higher conversion rates if executed properly. End strategy meetings with a clearly defined target segment, short term goals, long term goals, and an action plan for your campaign. Also, your creative team needs to know what channels you want to use and need a budget for their planning meetings. Finalize those details in the strategy meetings as well.
2. Creative Planning – The strategy meeting develops the message, the goals, and addresses other managerial issues. In the creative meeting, the marketing team develops the stories. Remember, people hate when you sell at them. You want to create content that tells a story. Selling to people pushes them away while telling a story draws them in. Producing a story takes more creativity and time than spewing sales data at a customer. Sometimes marketers struggle to keep creative ideas flowing. Ways to increase creativity include reading, writing, and brainstorming sessions. The best ideas come from teams rather than an individual. Many companies use fun brainstorming games to develop fresh content ideas. After developing your story, select which type of digital media to use to tell the story. (Budget constraints and the channels your superiors want you to post on affect this.) According to data, people currently seem to retain more information from videos than any other form of content, especially videos that tell stories. Utilize video effectively and tell a story about your company or one of your customers who your product/service positively impacted.
3. Content Creation – Start the production of content. Make it visually appealing and remain consistent with the story. Pay attention to color schemes, text size, and space. Remember that less is more. Don’t clutter your projects with unnecessary things. Blank space does wonders for graphic projects. If producing video, remember that poor video and audio quality ruins the story.
4. Editing – Review your content. Scan for grammatical mistakes, color grading issues, and other flaws to fix. Remember the quality of the content effects how customers perceive the brand.
5. Publishing – Post your content and upload it directly to each channel instead of embedding links. Make sure to monitor and reply to comments and messages promptly!
6. Analyze – Use analytics to understand how customers interacted with the content. Did it drive traffic to your website? Did it lead to any conversions? How long did people stay on each page? Use this data to then construct a new strategy for each new campaign. Data driven campaigns result in better conversions.

Companies underestimate the work that quality digital marketing requires. They believe boosting a few Facebook ads addresses all their digital marketing needs and yields results. Unfortunately, the digital marketing process only succeeds with hard work, in depth planning, and excellent story telling. If executed properly, it contributes to the development of strong relationships with your customers as you gain their trust. It establishes creditability and positions your brand as one that cares about their customers; however, poor execution hurts brand image and customers’ perception.

A few barriers prevent companies from optimizing their digital marketing presence. Small businesses lack the financial capacity to establish their own marketing department. They rely on employees from other areas to throw together the marketing materials. Their digital marketing consists of the secretary running their social media accounts, posting a few mediocre graphics, iPhone shot videos, and hastily composed emails. It lacks quality and consistency. Successful digital marketing requires consistency across all channels and high-quality content. To avoid the secretary marketing, outsource your digital marketing to a professional company such as Origami Technology Group. Origami Technology Group provides digital marketing services with customizable packages that directly addresses your needs. We act as your marketing department instead of your business paying to hire a whole department. This frees your business from bad content, managing your digital marketing presence, additional payroll, and other HR processes. After joint strategy meetings, Origami handles the rest of the process from development to analytics. Alternatively, if you hire an in-house marketing department, you also pay for their equipment, tools, and their salary, making it a more expensive option; however, in-house marketing allows for the marketing team to understand the brand better than outsourced marketing.

You need digital marketing to remain competitive in today’s business world. If you have any questions or are thinking about outsourcing your digital marketing, please contact Josh Okumura at jokumura@origamitg.com. He would love to assist your business with all your digital marketing needs. As always, follow our Facebook page for more content each week.