From Playground to Profit: How We Create Digital Marketing Plans That Convert
Over the years, we’ve been approached by dozens of leads and one-on-one consultation clients that have found themselves heavily investing in a single marketing channel (ie just Instagram) only to be left questioning why their sales results fall short.
Contrary to what they may expect, the answer is simple: the most effective digital marketing plans are those that engage consumers at every stage of the conversion funnel. Meaning, their single marketing channel likely isn’t cutting it.
Though it may make great strides at increasing metrics like brand awareness, a holistic and well-rounded digital marketing plan involving mulitple channels is likely necessary to further guide customers along their buying journey. Read on for our top tips!
THE FRAMEWORK OF AN EFFECTIVE DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN: THE MARKETING FUNNEL
To understand the importance of a holistic approach to marketing, let’s take a look at a marketing funnel. Also known as conversion funnels, this tool helps us visualize the customer journey from when a person is first introduced to a brand all the way to when they are officially converted into a loyal customer. Funnels allow us to break down this journey into four basic stages:
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
Loyalty
At the top of our marketing funnel, we have the (#1) awareness stage, where customers first hear about and discover your brand. Note that this is the largest stage in the funnel. Your brand will reach many people in its lifetime, but the number of people who continue to move further down the funnel will get smaller.
Why? Because not everyone that discovers your business will have enough, or any, interest in your brand to move into the second stage of the marketing funnel, which is the (#2) consideration stage. At this point in the funnel, users not only know about your brand but they are also interested enough to engage with it and evaluate how it might be of value to them.
From here, even fewer people will make it into the (#3) conversion stage, which is marked by a point of action indicating a commitment to your company, like purchasing a product or signing up for your email list.
Lastly, the smallest amount of people will enter your (#4) loyalty stage. This stage is for only your most loyal customers, those who repeatedly buy, promote, and engage with you.
Asking one marketing channel (i.e. organic social alone) to guide customers from top of funnel to bottom is generally not a realistic ask. Instead, you’ll want to diversify your approach and have multiple marketing channels that target different stages of the customer’s journey in order to further move the needle towards conversion.
CHANNELS FOR A WELL-ROUNDED DIGITAL MARKETING PLAN
ORGANIC SOCIAL
Now that we have the basics covered, let’s talk about the role social media plays in this funnel. Social media primarily covers the first two bases: (#1) awareness and (#2) consideration. With roughly 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook and 1 billion on TikTok alone, social media is ideal for exposing your brand and message to a large audience.
The best part? No opt-in is required. Thanks to features like keyword and hashtag search, location tags, and “Explore” and “For you” pages (among other tools), the world is your oyster on social media for reaching new users on a daily basis.
A social media marketer’s primary goal is to reach this large audience and pique enough interest over an extended period of time that users feel comfortable and compelled to head to the website where a conversion can occur, like buying a product or joining an email list. Only after this conversion occurs could a user potentially move to the final and everlasting stage of the funnel, loyalty.
Check out more benefits of social media marketing in our Why Your Brand Needs to Invest in Social Media and our Guide to Measuring ROI on Social Media blog posts.
EMAIL + SMS MARKETING
While social media is great for exposure and fostering a relationship, email and SMS marketing takes it a step further by supporting customers along their journey from the (#2) consideration stage into the (#3) conversion and (#4) loyalty stages of the marketing funnel.
Email and SMS marketing are more personal, direct lines of communication with your customers, meaning there is no algorithm determining whether or not they will receive your email or text. Think of your email and SMS subscribers as one step above your social media followers - these users have expressed enough interest in your brand to be subscribed to make sure they don’t miss a thing (literally: 90% of SMS are opened within 3 minutes of delivery). Consider these audience members as WARM 🥵 and near-ready to convert!
Arguably the best part of email and SMS marketing is how tailored the content can be to each subscriber. We love creating pipelines and separating our email list into groups so we can tailor the content subscribers receive to their interests and what we know they will find valuable. This form of personalization can create a highly impactful and persuasive environment for conversion to occur.
To segment your subscriber list, factors you might look at include noting:
Their consumer behavior (ie their past purchases with you, how often they purchase, what they purchase for, etc.)
How frequently they open your emails
Demographics and psychographics
Geographic location
And more!
Another email + SMS strategy we love that encourages (#3) conversion and (#4) brand loyalty is email + SMS automations like:
Abandoned cart flows
Back in stock flows
Birthday email with a small discount included as a “gift”
Post-purchase thank you email with a discount included for next purchase
And more!
Check out our Go-To Email Marketing Techniques to Increase Email Deliverability and Conversions blog post for more tips!
INFLUENCER MARKETING
Consider influencer marketing a near jack of all trades. First and foremost, it’s great for expanding the reach of a brand. By being exposed to the influencer’s thousands or millions of followers, this form of marketing is a strong strategy for building up consumers in the (#1) awareness stage of your conversion funnel.
To make it even better, you can rely on the expertise, credibility, and carefully fostered community of the influencer to further move users into the (#2) consideration stage of the buying process. Though they may not have been familiar with your brand prior to seeing the influencer’s post, the users may feel more comfortable with making a purchase because it’s coming as a recommendation from someone they trust and admire.
To further encourage (#3) conversion, we always recommend our clients provide influencers with a unique discount code (ie 15-20% off) to share with their followers. This will not only provide an additional incentive for their followers to purchase, but it also allows brands to track the monetary ROI of each influencer partnership. Keep in mind ROI is not limited to monetary return. Brand exposure can be equally as valuable - it just requires a little more nurturing for the consumer to feel comfortable or compelled enough to purchase.
SOCIAL ADVERTISING
From targeting top of funnel (#1 - awareness) to bottom of funnel (#4 - loyalty) initiatives, advertisements can truly be whatever you make of it. It all depends on how you choose to spend your ad dollars and the campaign objective you select. If you plan to invest in social advertising, ensure you have an ad budget large enough to actually produce the results you’re wanting… it’s a competitive world out there 🤠
We hope you found this blog post helpful in learning how to create a holistic digital marketing plan that converts! For more digital marketing tips, be sure to follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our digital marketing newsletter. Chat soon!
xx,
The Homies
