Momentum. Shama Hyder

does “conversion” mean to you—in the context of your overall marketing strategy, as well as in the context of each channel and campaign you plan to use? Maybe you want sales—okay, good. But maybe you’re after email addresses instead (or also!), or likes on Facebook, or something entirely different. That’s fine, too—the important thing is that you define what you want up front and make sure these goals are measurable and trackable. Email addresses and Facebook likes can be counted; “brand awareness” is a more nebulous goal.

      » Business X’s old marketing strategy had a vague focus on brand awareness and attracting leads, but nothing really quantifiable. Instead of actively targeting specific conversions, they had simply been going through the motions—doing the blog, doing social media—without any concrete purpose in mind.

      They set a new conversion goal: gathering email addresses to market to. Now, all digital marketing efforts would be aimed at reaching a wider audience through thought leadership, and then gathering as many email addresses from that new audience as possible, in order to add prospects to their email subscriber list. That way, they could begin moving them through the sales funnel, directing them towards the specific relationship Business X wanted to have with them.

       4. Quick Check: Do your conversion goals correspond with the stated goals of your business?

      Take a look at what you’re striving for online and whether it matches up with your real-world goals for your company. Getting Facebook likes is all well and good, but if it’s not leading to more sales of your gadgets, and that’s your goal, then you need to rethink what you consider a conversion online. If your real-world goal is building a larger audience of warm leads to market to, then collecting email addresses should be first and foremost.

      » For Business X, email marketing was the digital marketing channel that they felt would be most effective at helping them reach their overall business goal of lead nurturing. Therefore, all other efforts would now ultimately be geared towards persuading people to share their email addresses.

       5. Define your target profiles.

      Next, you want to figure out who it is you’re targeting with your online marketing efforts. Get specific—not just “women,” but “married women with kids, between the ages of thirty and forty-five, who make more than $50,000 a year and like animals.” Come up with at least three different customer personas for your ideal customers, focusing on demographics, interests, and pain points, then research where those people hang out online and what speaks to them there.

      » Business X already had a very in-depth understanding of the kinds of business customers it wanted to target. What it didn’t know, however, was how to reach those people online. So the marketing department did some research into which social media platforms their customers used most heavily—Facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Instagram? Pinterest?—and what sort of content they engaged with while there. They looked at what sorts of blog posts and email newsletters truly interested their target audience, and what kind of resources they wanted to see on an IT solutions provider’s website. They polled their current customers, asked prospects, searched for industry conversations happening on social media, and drew up complete profiles that detailed where and how to reach the exact people they wanted to reach online.

      They found that their target audience mostly hung out on LinkedIn and Twitter, and appreciated industry-related information—tips for choosing an IT solution, for example, or explanations of how various solutions could help with different issues.

       6. Create an overall digital marketing strategy.

      Based on the above goals and information, develop your new strategy. It may be similar to your existing one, or it may be completely different. The key is that you now have specific goals to work toward, the results of which are measurable and based on concrete data. You’ll determine which channels you’ll use and what type of content you’ll create based on your target audience’s preferences. You’ll decide which conversion goals to pursue, based on your overall business goals.

      » Since Business X’s overarching marketing goal was to gain email addresses for email marketing, all other marketing activities had to be geared towards that end. So social media campaigns needed to entice people to click through to a landing page that collected their email address. The website needed to give visitors the chance to share their email on every page. And even the email newsletter going out to current subscribers needed to ask them to forward it to a friend who might find it useful, in the hopes that they might subscribe, too.

      

       7. Develop individual marketing campaigns and initiatives.

      Within your new strategy, you can now finally begin to create individual campaigns. Again, these should all be geared towards driving the specific, quantifiable conversions you’ve decided on, which should all contribute clearly to your larger business goals.

      » Business X decided they would post educational blog posts filled with useful industry information on LinkedIn on a regular basis, as well as taking an active part in the conversations in relevant LinkedIn Groups. They also planned to create a free e-book containing valuable information for their target audience, promote it on Twitter, and give it away to anyone who subscribed to their emails. And they decided to start updating their website with new, search-friendly content, in order to attract more prospects via Google.

       8. Realize that the marketing strategy and campaigns you just spent so much time on will need to change—many times.

      You already know this, but knowing something and really being ready and willing to do it are two different things. In order to become an agile marketer, you’ve got to be truly willing to make changes—sometimes tiny, sometimes drastic— based on what you see in your analytics. And not just once, but over and over again—every single time you see something that needs to be acted on. Creating a strategy is not a one-and-done–type thing. Your strategy and campaigns will need constant tweaking.

      

      » Business X committed to thinking of each change they would make as the next step in an ongoing process, not as revisiting something that had been finished.

       9. Don’t expect instant results.

      Unless you’re a growth hacker looking for instant results from an intensive marketing push, it’s not just okay but necessary to give your strategy some time to work. Don’t get worried if orders don’t start pouring in immediately once you publish that blog post, or if no one has signed up for your webinar yet, even though you sent the email yesterday. Look at what’s happening week by week, and often even month by month, to see where trends are emerging and where changes need to be made. As a general rule of thumb, the newer your online marketing strategy is, the more time it will need to work. A company that’s brand new to blogging or to social media might not see results for ninety days or even longer, while a company simply making tweaks to an existing strategy might start seeing results within a week.

      » Business X decided to look at their analytics on a daily basis in order to see what was taking off and what was not so successful, but determined that they would hold back for at least ninety days and give their campaigns a chance to work rather than get frustrated and change things too soon.

       10. Put things in motion, and then fan the flames.

      Take action on your campaigns, and start watching your analytics. Now that the groundwork has been laid for agile, analytics-driven marketing, the real work begins. This is where you monitor, analyze, and then tweak, over and over again, until you have optimized and fine-tuned your campaigns and your strategy to achieve their highest possible levels of success. This is where you find out where the momentum is slowly beginning to build in your marketing efforts, and then fan the flames by adding more and more fuel to those successful areas.

      » Business X launched its campaigns, and then saw that their conversations in LinkedIn Groups were having a real effect on quality traffic coming to their site, so they decided to ramp up their efforts in that