Digital Marketing Tactic Prioritization: Where to Start

Before you start planning out your digital marketing tactics, you need to have a good grasp on your digital marketing strategies. You need to have a full understanding of your resources, your goals, and how your target market behaves. All that information allows you to create an effective marketing plan and set milestones so that you know if your strategies are effective or not. But all that information can also be paralyzing when you’re trying to take your first steps down your digital marketing plan and trying to get traffic to your site. So focus your digital marketing tactic prioritization just by asking yourself (or your team) these two questions:

1. Where is your audience?
2. Are you playing a long game or a short game?

Where Is Your Audience?

Whether you’re looking for organic traffic or trying to generate leads with PPC ads, you need to know where to find your audience. Customers aren’t going to go searching for your business (especially at first). Instead, they’re going to spend time on their preferred platforms and search for answers to their problems as those problems develop. To generate good leads to your site, follow these steps:

1. Develop your buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal buying demographic. For example, a buyer persona for car window sunscreens might be new parents who are working professionals with a suburban home. From this information alone, you know they probably own two vehicles (one each) and spend time on LinkedIn. So you can place ads, post articles about child safety, and know that if they are interested enough to consider buying one sunscreen, they’ll probably buy two. This information is valuable, and the more detailed your buyer profiles are, the better. Each persona should include specifics about:

• Demographics
• Motivations
• Goals
• Behavior patterns, including the media they consume, their preferred social media platforms, and how they prefer to shop

2. Place ads where your customers spend time.

Paid advertising is an excellent tactic for getting your brand right in front of potential buyers, but you have to put your ads in the right place. That’s where detailed buyer personas come in handy. Once you’ve identified where your market spends their free time and where they go to do product research, put your ads front and center. Here are a few ideas to get started:

• Google: Pay for paid search ads based on keywords so your website or landing pages show up at the top of the search page as sponsored results.
• Over-the-Top (OTT) Channels: These channels include Internet-based programming like Hulu or Peacock. Direct ads on these platforms reach users based on their viewing profile and preferences.
• Podcasts: Buy ad space from large podcast platforms or talk to podcast hosts about endorsements. Podcast listeners who trust the host’s opinion are great potential leads.
• Social Media: Social media ads (which are different from posts) get placed in your target market’s feeds.

Once you’ve run ad campaigns for several days, you can review the number of click-throughs and lead conversions to find the best-performing tactics.

3. Start creating content that solves their problems or builds up trust.

Supplement your paid advertising campaigns with original content. Business blogs, how-to guides and videos, and social media posts (not ads) are delivered in your company’s voice so you can interact with shoppers. By creating content on platforms where your target market spends time, you’ll engage with prospective buyers. The more touchpoints, or moments of engagement, you have with a lead, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

Are You Playing a Long Game or a Short Game?

This is the second question you need to ask yourself as you decide what digital marketing tactics to prioritize. Neither answer is wrong. Your digital marketing plan might include a short-term campaign to build interest in seasonal goods and long-term campaigns to grow your subscription services. But once you identify your timeframe, you can immediately focus on the best tactics.

Tactics for Short-Term Lead Generation

Paid ad campaigns get your brand in front of your target market immediately. As soon as you identify your keywords and upload your pre-made ads on a specific platform, they start going out in front of your audience. It may take a few days for the platform’s algorithm to zero in on the most responsive audiences for your ads, but you get traffic quickly. Set up paid searches, social media ads, and endorsements in podcasts and YouTube videos.

Ads are great for short-term campaigns because you control the on and off switches. But remember: as soon as you stop paying for ads, the momentum from that platform dies away.

Tactics for Long-Term Lead Generation

If you want to build up momentum and create long-term traffic channels, focus on content marketing. Building up a back catalog of helpful articles, regularly creating entertaining YouTube videos, and consistently posting on social media keeps your brand front and center in those spaces. But unlike paid ads, your original content sticks around and continues to draw in leads for months and years.

Now You Have Your Answer for Digital Marketing Tactic Prioritization

Just by answering those two questions, you can quickly start generating leads and converting them to customers. If your target market spends a lot of time on Instagram, and you need traffic now, pay for ads on Instagram. If your target market always has YouTube on in the background and you want long-term growth, start creating evergreen videos. Most businesses use a wide variety of tactics, so get started!