- Work smart to retain your existing customer base
- Get even more visible in front of your target market
- Focus on driving conversions
- Measure, measure, measure
- Test, learn, test
Five digital marketing techniques for powering through Corona
Businesses are looking more carefully at budgets, making sure we can squeeze every cent of profit out of our investments, and looking for the most cost-effective way to deliver products and services.
Marketing budgets may appear to be a soft target for businesses looking to make budget cuts. But a cut in marketing activity is a short term fix that is sure to have long term consequences.
Think Pepsi VS Coca Cola when Pepsi paused their marketing for 6 months to cut costs.. they lost total market share in the process.
Maintaining visibility in your market is essential for long term profitability and continued investment.
And your customers are also watching the cents, but they are still spending money. They may be spending less, but we need to figure out what they’re spending their money on. They don’t want to risk wasting a cent; they want to buy the right products from companies they can trust.
1. Work smart to retain your existing customer base
Out of sight means out of mind. You need to keep in touch with your customers or you risk losing them. It's always cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one.
Marketing automation is the lowest cost, easiest, and most effective way of keeping in touch with your customers. we’re not talking about sending automated email marketing spam, nor are we talking about broadcasting cold calling messages to get new customers. You need to be sending out personalised, contextualised, targeted messages to existing customers who want to hear your news. You need to be keeping in touch with your customers at every touch point in their digital journey through social channels, through exploring the web. And doing this systematically and automatically will ensure the job gets done, and will free up your more expensive human talents to deliver creative campaigns that will add even more ROI.
Klaviyo Segmentation is one of your best friends here
Content production is an essential ingredient for your tactical marketing campaigns and for keeping in touch with your existing customers. Share the innovations that you are currently making that differentiates your offering from your competitors, and promote your good news stories in terms of awards and customer testimonials.
Getting more social means engaging in conversations with your existing customers. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube & TikTok - these are places where you customers are reviewing your products, discussing their purchasing decisions, exchanging views on your business. Create a low cost plan for reaching customers at every point in the social media funnel. Use these tools to listen to your customers, hear what they’re talking about, learn more about your market. And remember, it isn’t about advertising – your contributions to the conversation needs to be valuable and appropriate.
2. Get even more visible in front of your potential customers
You have to build your brand awareness and get more visibility, which means driving visitors to your website to make the sales. And one of the best times to get found by potential customers is when they’re searching for what you’re selling. You need to get found at every stage of the purchasing lifecycle, from exploring new products to evaluating specific offerings.
The Mere Exposure Effect is the marketing phenomenon by which consumers develop a preference for your products or services merely because they are familiar with them. Now is the time to explore low cost techniques that will keep your brand visible in front of potential clients on a steady basis. It may feel counter-intuitive, but setting aside an advertising budget for keeping your brand visible will deliver long term benefits. Focus on creating high quality content that is going to get shared, and reduce your budget for generating low value, low impact content.
Update your evergreen content. Your business has an archive of perennially relevant, interesting content that does not become dated and is still of value to your customers… and the search engines. Revisit your content, update it, give it a spring clean, with the objective of improving your rankings in the search engines.
What other people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself. Another low cost way of getting visible in front of a larger pool of potential clients is to leverage the authority of other respected experts.
3. Focus on driving conversions
A low cost, high impact digital marketing technique to focus on is conversion rate optimisation. Small incremental changes to the user journey will turn more of your website visitors into customers.
Customer experience is king. Invest in your website to ensure you are giving a fast, personalised experience. And in terms of keeping costs down, remember that small changes on your website will have an outweighed impact on the final results.
Value Proposition. The first step is telling users exactly what you do, and promising them solid value.When a visitor lands on your store, you only have about five seconds to convince them why you are worth their time. New users are always looking for quick answers.
"Who are you? What do you sell? How will this benefit me?"
A. Navigation: There is a fundamental difference between having a search function on your site and having one that works well for your customers. We are not experts in writing search algorithms, but we do know that the better they work, the higher the conversion rates. Also, your average time-on-site increases and along with your average pages per visit.
C. Product filters: Product filters should be user-friendly and easy to navigate, as effective product filtering can increase conversions by 20 percent. Despite this, many e-commerce businesses still fall victim to inefficient product filtering. Filters should be optimally consolidated, and testing should always be conducted on desktop and mobile to double check that they are working correctly. A 2019 study found that 39% of online purchases last year were made on a mobile device, making this especially pertinent.
- Upselling or cross-selling customers with relevant products is about more than boosting revenues (although it does that, too). From the user’s point of view, it’s an effortless way to see complementary products without browsing aimlessly. When done properly, upsells can truly enhance the user experience, while simultaneously increasing average order value (AOV) and generating incremental “free” money that the company or publisher would otherwise miss out on.
-
Using psychology in UX design is seriously cool. Using clever tricks and techniques, you can make your users feel, think, and do anything you want them to.
Psychology is the reason you buy something on Amazon before you realise you want it.
Their UX design makes us. These companies understand basic human urges. And they make them a core part of their website.
-
Social proof and post positive stories about your business. Revisit how you are using your case studies, recommendations and reviews at every touch point in your marketing, and take the time to weave this content throughout your website and share actively on social media.
- Leverage artificial intelligence. Now is the time to get up to speed on the latest developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence that will give your business competitive advantage and access to the right prospective customers at the right time. Taking advantage of current developments in AI will drive down your cost per acquisition of new clients by ensuring you are getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and reducing waste.
Learn more about driving Conversions with our FREE GUIDE here
4. Measure, measure, measure
If you don’t measure, then you can’t manage. And if you’re not managing, then you could be pouring money down the drain.
Measuring means accountability for your marketing spend. You need to be measuring against your success criteria. You may want to measure sales, numbers of lead generated, up sells, or referrals. Now is the time to ensure you have defined your key performance indicators.
Tool Box
Wherever there are low conversion rates, you will find them.
Wherever visitors are suffering through broken links and ineffective call-to-actions, they will be there.
Wherever visitor and customer satisfaction is threatened, you will find… The three (conversion) kings!
Right now, there’s a marketer starting at the company website with frustration building.
By all standards and best practices, the website looks amazing. It’s aesthetically pleasing with SEO-centred copy and mobile-friendly design.
Despite being set for a digital win, however, the website analytics tell a different story. The conversions just aren’t there.
What went wrong? Why aren’t visitors turning into customers?
Was it the call-to-action colour? What stopped the visitors?
Of course, our marketer isn’t alone in this scenario.
You could even replace “marketer” with a myriad of other positions, but the result would be the same. Just because a website looks good doesn’t mean it works well.
It takes deeper insight to understand visitors and their interactions to unlock the secret to explain why they aren’t converting.
Of course, we’re not talking about just any insight. We’re talking insight gleaned from these helpful Kings:
- Dynamic Heatmaps
- Google Analytics
-
Visitor Recordings
These three conversion Kings come together for the ultimate trifecta of insight to give your store the help it needs to fight against low conversion rates and save the day for visitors everywhere.
-
Dynamic Heatmaps
As the newest “kid” on the block, dynamic heatmaps are more than traditional static heatmaps that simply capture a screenshot of the website with limited data available.
Dynamic heatmaps make data come alive by visualising visitor click, move, and scroll data for elements such as a drop-down, hamburger menu, or pop-up, automatically as you navigate through a website.
- Configure your Google Analytics correctly. Ensure you are covering all the basics and that you are using the data to drive your marketing efficiencies. Do you have goals set up correctly? Have you connected your Search Console? Have you defined what you are measuring? Are you taking advantage of all the free data that Google Analytics provides to you that can shape your strategy?
-
Visitor Recordings: If you want to understand visitor engagement, nothing beats Visitor Recordings. You can actually watch visitors and customers interact on your website, seeing where they spend the most time, where they go to when, and a host of other behaviours.
You can watch it live or stored and tag it to certain behaviours, like checked out or signed up, to better understand the middle and bottom of the conversion or sale funnels.
- Measure your social media ROI. When budgets get tight, you may need to make tough decisions on how you are going to spend your resources. One soft option might be to put the breaks on your social media activity. Social media can appear to be very time consuming and an optional non-essential activity. But before you make that decision, ensure you have explored how social media is contributing to your bottom line in terms of engagement, visibility, and profitability.
If marketing budgets are tight, then knowing what works makes it easier to make the decisions of where to invest your cash.
Learn more here in our FREE GUIDE
5. Test, learn, test
And finally, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the digital marketing puzzle.
You will need to be nimble and creative. Measure your success, and learn from the experiment. Here are some parting tips:
- Experiments should be quick, cheap, and easy to deliver.
- If it works, then well done, and more of the same, please.
- And if it doesn’t work so well, then kill the experiment and move on. No harm done. Be quick and be ruthless. You will have tested something, learned from it, allowing you to move on and test something new.
