The Pillars of Digital Marketing

When we start to talk about digital marketing to either a colleague, a workmate or potential client many 'uncontrollable' bells begin to go off. This can be very intimidating and at times overwhelming for many people handling anything related to the marketing journey from start to finish, but that doesn't have to be the case.

Today we shall look at the backbone of digital marketing and with that will come the ease with which we should handle this subject in as far as driving sales digitally is concerned.

Firstly, we cannot talk about digital marketing without having clear objectives and goals to start with. Any business or entity needing to employ the digital strategy in marketing must have goals to point in what direction you are willing or intending to go. Without this you will surely be 'driving a car with your eyes closed'. 

Goals are the ultimate starting point of getting things done with clear targets and hence less likelihood of a failure in the marketing campaign you are carrying out. These goals can be raising awareness about a product, generating leads, building your brand, making sales, customer retention etc. 

Having come up with the goals now you know what needs to be done to reach those goals, and hence things become less overwhelming because now you can see the resources that you need and how they can be obtained. Some of the resources in consideration may include ad spend, time, expertise or personnel to make the campaign happen depending on what you are marketing.

Secondly we have the acquisition step in the process of digital marketing. This is where your set out goals come in handy because now you know what direction to take from the goals. Out of the many acquisition channels available to us we can now focus on the one or ones that are most likely to lead us towards achieving our goals or targets. Many of us are familiar with these channels, however may not be well versed with how to harness their power.

We are talking about digital marketing channels such as Email Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Display Advertising, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Content Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Online Public Relations and more that I may not have heard of at the time of this writing.

All the channels above have their pros and cons depending on what they are used for, so knowing the capabilities of each channel is a good start for any marketer intending to put marketing funds to good use.

The third pillar after you have acquired the channels and setup your ad campaigns to run is to measure and optimize the campaigns. As the ads are running you are collecting reports from time to time. These reports are normally generated from the dashboards of the ad serving platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads and many more platforms that exist out there.

Measuring helps us to know what is working well and what isn't. This allows us to either continue using a particular channel if it is proving to work, or to drop it altogether and try another strategy. This is very important in digital marketing in that it saves a business loads of advertising resources because we can at least make some predictions regarding the performance of a certain ad campaign we are running, and that is referred to as optimization of the ad campaigns to serve a better purpose accordingly.

Our fourth pillar happens to be conversion and retention of customers. I do believe that there is no business without a customer, if there is one then am still looking for it. 

All the effort we have put already from the time we started setting goals, to the acquisition of channels to market our services and products up to measuring and optimizing the advertising campaigns all focused on one thing, that one this is the customer!

Now we have spent time and money getting in-front of our potential customers and now we have them buy our service or products, in the digital marketing world we call this conversion. We have converted a lead into a buyer, great. But we don't stop here. 

Our digital marketing goes beyond getting a conversion, this is because successful businesses retain their customers such that they become repeat customers, hence the term customer retention. We go on to convince the customers to come back to us using the most qualified channels within our marketing arsenal.

We can ad on a fifth pillar which is evaluation of the ad campaign. After all the above, having collected all the campaign Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), we can now look through them and see how we performed. Keep in mind that a campaign is a project, meaning it is time bound and hence at some point we need to review the projects to find out whether it was a success or not, plus what are the lessons learnt in this case.

Gerald Munduga - Digital Marketing Consultant

Yila Media

bladueet@gmail.com

+256 712 333 988