Key Business Marketing Strategies & Metrics

April 16, 2020

All digital businesses depend on a well-structured marketing strategy to grow and develop. However, a well-thought strategy needs accurate, continuous analysis to identify what should be continued and what should be altered to obtain positive results. Without this, the whole strategy is just a fool’s errand. 

In this article, we’ll save you wasted time by telling you about key marketing strategies digital entrepreneurs need to know in order to promote their businesses. Beyond this, we’ll give you the key metrics to monitor the results from these strategies.

First things first, structure your plan!

To know what will really make sense for your business, you need to define a few things before you even begin to put your strategies and analysis into action.

In your planning, follow these 3 steps:

DETERMINE YOUR GOALS

Setting goals helps you understand what you want to achieve with your digital marketing strategy. It can be, for example:

• generate brand awareness
• generate traffic
• build engagement
• make sales
• build customer loyalty 

It doesn’t necessarily have to be just one of them. You may want to achieve multiple goals combined.

The important thing is that by having defined your goals, everyone involved in the marketing process understands the actual purpose of their tasks. This makes it easier when deciding what to do and how these objectives will be applied.

DETERMINE YOUR BUYER PERSONA

Buyer persona is a semi-fictional character that represents the profile and behavior of your ideal client.

The buyer persona of your business will guide your strategies and make it easier to imagine the actual person you are trying to reach. 

It’s pretty straightforward to find solutions for your potential customers when you have their profile in mind. 

To create your buyer persona you will have to do a lot of research and interview your customers or potential customers.

You need to find answers to the following questions:

• Age?
• Where does this person live?
• Where does this person work?
• Occupation?
• Education level and area?
• Characteristics and personality?
• What are this person’s values?
• What does this person do on a daily basis?
• What does this person consume?
• What is this person’s dream?
• What is this person’s goals?
• What are this person’s pain points?
• How can my business positively impact the life of this buyer persona?

With the answers in hand, create an avatar to illustrate your buyer persona and describe their profile in a short text, as in the example below:

STRUCTURE YOUR MARKETING PLAN

The definition of your goals and the buyer persona is already a big part of the marketing plan. This plan involves all the groundwork of marketing actions for the business.

Your marketing plan should include:

• The business objectives and goals
• The SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, Threats)
• Market analysis
• The buyer persona
• KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
• Deadlines and budgets

After all of these have been  defined and documented, you’ll have a deeper understanding of your own business and the market. Consequently, you’ll have everything you need to choose your communication channels and the most efficient strategies for your digital business.

Now, shall we take a look at the strategies you can use?

Main marketing strategies for digital businesses

CONTENT MARKETING

On the other hand, some customers need several steps in the buyer’s journey in a non-linear process. If you try to rush them along or skip a step, you lose them altogether.

Content marketing is one of the most used strategies in digital marketing, it consists of generating value and attracting customers with quality content in different means of communication. 

In addition to being very efficient, this strategy allows you to:

• Become a reference in the market once you generate valuable content about your niche.
• Educate your audience, which helps generate more qualified leads to buy your product.
• Handle sales objections, since, unlike in traditional marketing, you are not going after the customer with offers and promotions, but indirectly attracting them to the purchase by offering relevant content.
• Reduce the acquisition cost, since there’s no need to invest money to acquire the customer, this process happens organically.

Therefore, we can all agree content marketing is pretty much essential right?

But how and where to do content marketing?

Here are a few of the channels you can use:

Blog

Blogs are one of the most used channels for content marketing. With a blog, you can publish content related to your business on a regular basis.

It’s essential that it is quality content and it needs to be relevant to your persona because only then will you be able to turn it into a business opportunity.

If you want a visitor to your blog to become a customer, you also need to think about how to keep that visitor in touch with your business to get them to purchase your product when they’re ready.

For this reason, it is also important to offer free materials in exchange for their email, so you can nurture them with more content of their interest, as we will see later in email marketing.

Youtube

Just as people constantly search for answers on Google, they also use YouTube as a source of learning.

In fact, YouTube is currently the second largest search engine in the world, coming second only to Google itself.

Therefore, publishing videos with the most sought-after content by your audience is a great bet to generate acknowledgment, authority and traffic.

SEO

There is no point in posting quality and relevant content if you are unable to reach your target audience.

Therefore, good SEO (Search Engine Optimization), practices are key. Optimizing your content will cause search engines to display it when searching for phrases related to the subject that your content addresses.

Though pinpointing exactly how the algorithm that places websites in the first results is not possible, some practices work when it comes to optimizing your content for top ranking. They are:

• Choose a keyword wisely. If you want to create content that answers the question: “How to start a blog”, for example, you need to include this key phrase and related phrases throughout your content, in the title and description that appear in the search results.
• Produce quality content. Search engines are smart. They recognize whether your content makes sense and can analyze how long a user stayed on the page or watched a video for.
• Have many quality backlinks. A way that the algorithms use to recognize the authority and reliability of a page is by analyzing the quantity and quality of pages and websites that refer or link to it.

These are just some of the most common practices to rank well in searches.But keep in mind that the parameters and what influences ranking may change according to the channel you use.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Nurturing at least one social media channel is well worth your time. It will pay off in brand recognition, stronger customer relationships and by attracting new customers. And that’s not just for the online market, but pretty much all businesses today, as social networks can be considered business cards.

Managing content marketing on social networks has the same premises as previous channels: the need to constantly publish quality content.

For this reason, the profile of your business on social networks must be carefully considered and structured. It is essential to have a strategic focus and an analytical eye for each post and each interaction made, whether on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tik Tok or others.

Keep in mind that most social networks offer the option to create professional profiles, which allow you to analyze various metrics such as engagement, therefore, it can be handy when planning your strategy. 

Email Marketing

As you have seen, email marketing is considered a more advanced content marketing strategy.

In order for it to be applied, your user must have gone through one of the channels mentioned above and opted to provide your email in exchange for valuable information or material. After all, you can’t get a person’s email for nothing. As a matter of fact, in compliance with the GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, you’re not allowed to collect visitor’s information and store them without their consent. Getting this consent usually means your need to offer them something in return.  

Having obtained a visitor’s email, either by getting them to sign up for a newsletter or in exchange for rich content, you can send content by email to attract your potential customer to purchase.

You can rely on email marketing automation tools to create automatic email flows that take the lead through the sales funnel.

BUYING TRAFFIC

Buying traffic can help you to not only promote your brand but also to get more targeted traffic quickly.

It’s possible to pay to appear in the first Google search results or place ads on partner sites and on YouTube.

It is also possible to pay to boost publications on various social networks.

Take a look at two paid traffic options:

Google Ads

Google Ads allows you to advertise on the Search Network, the Display Network and YouTube.

To advertise on these channels you only need to have a Google account and create your targeted ads.

To create good ads you need to do keyword research. Google Ads itself provides a complete tool for your search: Google Keyword planner.

And, based on your planning, you will need to set the campaign so that it has the correct targeting and optimize whenever necessary.

Social Ads

Like Google, social media also have their own ad platforms, such as Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Twitter Ads.

Each has its particularity, but the strategy can be totally guided by your marketing plan to make the correct segmentation.

VIDEO MARKETING

Despite being a content marketing strategy, video marketing has gained so much relevance for digital marketing that giving a special focus to this strategy is in order.

And when we talk about video content to attract and convert customers, we’re not just talking about product videos on YouTube, but about:

• Institutional videos
• Educational Videos
• Vlogs
• Video Ads
• Live streams
• Webinars

Simply put, videos offer several possibilities to use in your business. They are easy to consume, adaptable to different devices and are more engaging than text content.

It is important to understand before putting your efforts into creating videos, you must also rely on your marketing plan and the stages of the sales funnel to deliver relevant content to your audience and at the right time.

The best thing about this strategy is that it can be used on several channels. Whether on a blog, on social media or on your website, video marketing is always a good option.

PARTNERSHIPS

Last but not least, the partnership strategy, which is an efficient way to increase your digital reach and grow your business faster.

Don’t be afraid to contact companies that are related to your business and can complement and boost your marketing strategies.

Some partnerships that can be established in digital marketing are:

• Exchanging links
• Guest blogging
• Video or podcast collab
• Content co-production

Keep in mind that the benefits need to go both ways, so be sure to tell your potential partner about how this relationship can be beneficial for their brand.

Main marketing metrics for digital businesses

Analyzing metrics in digital marketing is essential for the success of your strategies, and if you think this is simply one more stage in the process, you’re in for a surprise. Analysing metrics needs to be done during the entire process. That is to say, from the moment a strategy comes into play, monitoring it is key. 

If you’re a digital entrepreneur, Hotmart offers a free download of an automatic spreadsheet to calculate the main metrics of a digital product.

It is also important to create a complete report from time to time (every quarter, for example) to document the data history and improvement actions for the next phase.

Now let’s look at some of the key metrics that need to be analyzed in digital marketing. Don’t forget that the ones you should pay the most attention are closely related to your goals and objectives.

REACH

Reach is about how far your strategies have gone, for example: post views, ad views and website views.

If that number is high, it means that you are promoting your content very well, as it is reaching many people.

ENGAGEMENT

It is not enough to only know if a lot of people are looking at your publications, a much more significant metric is engagement. That is, are people who are looking at your publications enjoying it? Are they clicking on your ad?

Therefore, engagement can be measured by:

• Likes
• Comments
• Clicks
• Channel Subscriptions
• New followers

among other forms of interaction of people with your content.

TRAFFIC

Traffic is a very important goal to figure out if your content marketing, SEO or paid campaigns are doing well, as it shows the number of users who’ve reached your blog or website.

It is important to know the source of the traffic to understand which strategy is working best for your business.

To access this information you will need to create parameterized links (UTM), which will capture important data about the users who access your pages, such as: source, media and campaign.

CONVERSION RATE

The conversion rate is how you can monitor the progress of your goal achievement. Therefore, it is very important to determine, in advance, what the purpose of your marketing strategies is.

If they are submissions on a landing page, for example, your conversion rate will be the number of submissions divided by the number of traffic and multiplied by 100.

Example:

Traffic = 1000 visitors

Conversion = 300 submissions

(300/1000) x 100 = 30%

This example shows a good conversion rate for landing pages. If this conversion rate is very low, it may mean that the page is not convincing the person or that the registration form is causing dropouts, among many other reasons.

Converting is the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy. If you are not converting, your effort is being wasted.

CUSTOMER ACQUISITION CAC

This metric is the sum of how much was invested to convert a user.

To know what is considered acquisition, again, you must look at your goal.

Now, let’s assume that acquisition for your business is a customer who buys a product.

If you’ve invested $ 100 in paid media on Google and $ 50 in sponsored posts on Facebook, and this generated 50 purchases from different users, go ahead with the following calculation:

Divide the total amount invested by the number of purchases.

$ 150/50 = $ 3

This means that each customer costs you $ 3.

ROI

ROI is nothing short of the most important metric for a business.

It shows what the return on investment was, that is, whether the business is making a profit.

To calculate it, just subtract the total invested from the profit obtained and then divide it by the total invested multiplied by 100.

Example: if the total investment was $ 1500 and the profit was $ 10,000, then:

(10000 – 1500) / 1500 x 100

ROI = 567%

For every $ 1 invested, a return of about  $ 5.70 was obtained. Therefore, in this example, it can be concluded that the business is making a profit.

Make a habit out of this practice

As you can see, metrics can help you refine your strategies, understand what must be maintained or changed in order to be successful in achieving your ultimate goals.

Creating the habit of analyzing them will make your work more smooth and efficient. So, don’t wait until later, start applying everything you’ve learned in this post right now!

Now that you’ve seen the main marketing strategies and metrics, how about learning how to calculate your sales metrics? Click here and check out the 7 main sales metrics for digital businesses.

 

 

Guest post written by the Hotmart team

Hotmart is a complete platform for anyone who wants to sell, promote or buy online courses, videos, subscriptions, ebooks, tickets to events or any other digital media.