Regardless of who’s in your target audience, there’s a good chance that they’re spending more and more time online, whether your audience is browsing, shopping, or making connections. Therefore it makes sense to designate more of your overall marketing budget to digital marketing each year. The size of your budget and the amount you have to spend on digital marketing may vary based on the size of your company but it’s important to optimize your digital marketing budget to get the most value for what you’re spending.
Tools for Digital Marketing
There are several different tools you can use as part of your digital marketing strategy, and not all of them cost money. Search engine optimization is an organic way to drive traffic and produce qualified leads. Email campaigns are considered a pull rather than push strategy, which means they can build customers over time rather than trying to make a sale immediately.
Social media marketing is a great way to find and build relationships with qualified prospects. Creating useful and informative content on your website or blog is an important part of online marketing and your marketing budget.
Know Your Audience
Effective digital marketing starts with knowing your audience and where they’re most likely to spend their time online. Having a buyer persona that represents your ideal customer is an important way to know who you’re targeting. Analytics can give your marketing team a method of tracking where your audience spends their time and what’s engaging them or causing them to leave.
Investing money into marketing on the wrong platform for your target audience is a waste of digital marketing dollars. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and test across multiple channels to gain better insight into what’s working and what’s not working. This can help you avoid investing time and money into areas where you’re not getting results.
Remarketing/Retargeting
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) allows you to reach your prospects based on tight demographics and it can be very effective since you only pay when a prospect clicks an ad. Prospects who have some interest in your product or service can be nurtured using remarketing, also called retargeting. This allows you to show ads to people who have previously been to your site. If they leave your site without making a purchase, retargeting can help you reconnect. Using cross-channel remarketing, if someone clicks on a Google ad, they may see follow-up ads on Twitter or Facebook. This gives them another chance to interact with your company.
Analyze and Tweak
Optimizing your digital marketing budget is an ongoing process that requires analysis and making changes when needed. Continually test and measure results. Pay attention to what your competitors are doing for ideas on things you may need to change to better optimize your digital marketing budget. Sometimes very small tweaks such as changing an email subject line can make a big difference.
Softline Solutions has helped hundreds of companies develop a strong and profitable online presence. To work with our experts on your digital marketing budget and strategy, get in touch today.
