There isn’t any point in doing online marketing if what you’re promoting isn’t built to convert casual visitors to loyal customers. Your website needs to be built with customer conversion in mind otherwise you’re not going to hit your maximum ROI (return on investment).
First, what is Digital Marketing? It’s not just Google or Facebook Ads
As a premier to this article we wanted to start with a quick overview of what digital marketing is as we’ve had so many tell us and assume that Digital Marketing is only paying big money to run Google or Facebook ads. Yes this is a big part of it, but there’s so much more.
“Digital marketing is the component of marketing that utilizes internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services.
Digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of
search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, e-mail marketing, display advertising to name a few. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones (SMS and MMS) and callback. The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online marketing.”
~ Source Wikipedia
How To Review Your Marketing For Maximum ROI
There isn’t any point in doing online marketing if what you’re promoting isn’t built to convert casual visitors to loyal customers. Your website needs to be built with customer conversion in mind otherwise you’re not going to hit your maximum ROI (return on investment).
So, before you invest all your time and money into promoting your business and worrying about not getting the best ROI out of your marketing efforts, you should assess your current marketing. Start by looking at the journey your visitors are taking when they land on your website. Are you giving them what they are looking for? Is your website built with conversion in mind? Does it focus on the customer journey?
If you answered no to any of these items take a look at how you can further assess your marketing strategy and drive your website traffic into making a conversion.
Assessing Marketing For Your Audience
For a marketing strategy to work effectively you need to know your audience inside and out. The best way to understand your audience is by creating customer personas and using them to understand the wants and needs of your customers.
User personas are basically a fictional profile of what your ideal customer(s) looks like. You can create multiple personas based on the different products and services you offer in your business.
They can include things like:
- Age
- Income
- Marital status
- Do they have children?
- Do they own their own home?
- What keeps them up at night?
- How do they like to spend their spare time?
- What kind of work do they do?
- What are their beliefs?
- What do they like/dislike?
- Even understanding their political leanings my be taken into account
User personas are the perfect way to:
- Help your company understand who your customers really are
- Help you understand the behaviors and needs of your customers
- Helps you to start to create better messaging by talking about your audience, rather than yourself
- Have more focused business meetings
- Have a clear view of the situation when making decisions
- Increase empathy with your customer
If you’ve never created customer personas, or have but don’t use them, then you’re missing out on an opportunity to engage more with your customers and understand their wants and desires. This will easily help improve your conversion rates and help maximize your ROI.
Pro Tip:
When trying to sell a product or service to your preferred audience ask yourself why would they need your offering and what benefits does it have for them in their lives. Don’t try to sell them just features, sell them the real benefits and outcomes.
Your Digital Marketing Plan
When it comes to digital marketing you need to have a strategic plan at the ready. Without a plan, you’re simply going blindly into battle, and you’ll lose quickly. And when we say lose, we mean loss of money and wasted time.
The purpose of a digital marketing plan is to help your business succeed online - researching your target audience and knowing them inside and out, clearly outlining your goals and aspirations and setting up your success metrics will help you gauge how you're doing and set you up for success.
3. Set Your Success Metrics
Running a good digital marketing strategy is sure to help your business in the future, but you need to know the appropriate analytic numbers to be able to measure your success. In order to continue to improve you need to know how, what and why you did something, how your audience interacted with your marketing as well as why it had a positive or negative effect on your business.
Here are some key things you should track if your sending traffic to a landing page, social media posts or using email marketing:
If you’re sending them to a landing page on your website:
- Number of ad clicks
- Page views
- Time on page and site
- Form fills
- Phone calls
- Number of sales or new customers for each campaign
If you’re marketing is on social media:
- Ad or post clicks
- Content Interactions: Post likes, comments and shares
- Reach
- New followers
If you’re marketing is via an email blast to your list:
- Number of opens and open rate %
- Number of clicks and click rate %
- Unsubscribes
- Forwards (Shares)
- The Geographic location of the people who took action
To execute this properly you’ll need to ensure that you create the appropriate success metrics (or markers). Success metrics track your measurements properly and over time you’ll be able to see what is and isn’t working in your marketing strategy.
This is the best way to make the right changes to adjust your marketing and to keep your business moving forward.
Pro Tip:
For digital marketing there's nothing more important than the data (The Metrics). If you don’t have the proper data, look at the data or even understand the data on everything you do, how can you know if what you’re spending your time and money on is really working? Or for that matter when to change directions, shift, hit the gas or stop?
The Importance Of Driving Traffic To A Specific Landing Page
This is, by far, one of the most common mistakes in marketing campaigns.
For the love of all things marketing do not direct paid (Or unpaid) traffic to your home page, contact page or some random product category!
You want your customers to make a conversion (Take action with a purchase, form fill or call) as soon as possible. This means that if a customer clicks on an advertisement for one of your products or even a social media post you don’t want that ad or post to send them to the homepage - there are too many directions they can head in from there including off your site.
You would not believe how many businesses that we’ve spoken to over the past 23 years that have just started or have been doing Facebook or Google Ads for a while and have them tell us that they’re sending all that traffic to their home page or some other unfocused page on their site.
If your customer is sent to the homepage they can feel lost or confused. It probably wasn’t what they expected to see after clicking the link, and they definitely won’t spend a lot of time (if any) trying to find what they were looking for.
Which means you’ve just possibly lost a potential customer
You want those casual visitors to become customers as quickly as possible which means that your ads or posts should send them straight to the page that corresponds with what was advertised or posted about. This needs to be a very focused page with a Call To Action (CTA) offer as well as a way to directly purchase or communicate with you about your products or services. This will create a higher chance that your customer will make a purchase or reach out compared to if they were just sent to your homepage or other random page on your site.
Pro Tip: You also will want to track interactions and time on your landing page and tweak the content and CTA as needed.
To gain real traction in your market and get the maximum ROI for your investment, you need to look at your current efforts critically and constantly. By continually improving and honing your marketing strategy, you’ll reap the benefits of all that hard work in record time.
If you’re in need of help or guidance with your auto restoration, performance or restyling shop’s digital marketing strategy and efforts our Marketing Maximizer™ program is the perfect place to start.
About The Author
Barry Alt is the founder of Motorhead Digital, providing signature Marketing Maximizer™ programs specifically developed for auto restoration, performance and restyling shops. These programs are geared towards customer acquisition and conversion to keep those project bookings coming. With over 23 years of experience in digital marketing and web development Barry’s goal is to help clients market and grow their shops through strategic marketing practices. You can reach him at (585) 766-9785,
balt@motorheaddigital.com or online at
MotorheadDigital.com
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