Many businesses grow in an unplanned kind of way. If there is a greater demand for the product or service, then the business owner will increase the supply. But you may not always make an effort to increase the demand. You may not always have a goal in your mind about how much you want to sell and what type of profit you want to make.
However, it's never a bad idea to put some thought into how you want your business to grow and what types of digital marketing efforts would help your business grow. In other words, you need to develop a digital marketing plan. Here are some questions to ask:
What's Your Quantitative Aim?
The first thing you need to determine is your business goals. And, you need to be specific. “I want to grow our website traffic” is not a goal. “I want to grow our website traffic 15% year-on-year” is a goal.
In some cases, even a 10% increase can be a lot, especially if you're already a medium-sized business. And in some cases, doubling your sales isn't that much.
So think about how many more customers you want to get. Be sure to set a time within which you will achieve this goal. Then, develop the appropriate digital marketing strategy to get you there.
What's Your Qualitative Aim?
Sometimes, you don't just want to increase your numbers. You might want to change your audience altogether.
Let's say your product currently appeals mostly to young people in their late teens and early twenties. Maybe you have an idea how to market it to an older age group in a way that will make them buy it.
This has been known to happen. Malcolm Gladwell gives the example of Hush Puppies in his book The Tipping Point. Hush Puppies were a type of shoe that appealed mostly to conservative middle-aged men. But as their popularity with this target audience declined, their popularity with young hipsters suddenly shot up.
So, if you're going for a qualitative change in your target audience, you need to communicate this to your marketing department or agency. This will give them an idea of how to alter the digital marketing plan to appeal to this new demographic.
What Are Your Digital Marketing Options?
There are many digital marketing options available to business owners today. They can generally be divided into outbound marketing options, reaching out from the company to the consumer and inbound marketing options in which the consumer comes to you.
TV and print ads, direct mail marketing and email marketing are examples of outbound marketing whereas setting up a website, blog and social media pages will help with inbound marketing.
Traditionally, marketing has been outbound. Over the past several years there has been a shift and inbound marketing is becoming more popular.
Depending on your quantitative and qualitative aims, you might want to do more inbound marketing or more outbound marketing. Unless you have an unlimited digital marketing budget, deciding where to put your efforts is critical.
What Has Worked Better For You In the Past?
Before you come up with a brand spanking new digital marketing plan, you might want to think about what has worked and what hasn't worked for you in the past.
If you've been running a business for some time, you must have tried a few different forms of marketing. And, upon reflection, you may find one method has unexpectedly good results while another has unexpectedly mediocre results.
Something as simple as a marketing email sent out to previous customers might result in a lot of orders. Sharing a piece of value-add content could be just the thing you need. At the same time, a well-crafted TV ad which costs a lot might not have any results.
It's ok to try to different forms of digital marketing but once you see that one thing is working more than another, you can do more of that to increase the demand for your product or service. When that well dries up, move onto the next tactic.
Contact us for more great tips to develop your own digital marketing plan.
