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PM Forum - Dublin
Digital Marketing Plans – Implementation in Practice
Raphael O’Donoghue, Digital Fundraising Manager at Unicef spoke about putting digital marketing plans into practice at April’s PM Forum Ireland seminar. Fresh from a flurry of activity involving online campaigning and fundraising for Unicef after the disaster in Haiti struck, Raphael painted a picture of the power of the digital marketing space and of the practical steps firms can take to establish themselves in this fast moving space.
Many a marketing professional will be asking: Should we be on Facebook?
Should we blogging? What is this web 2.0? For many people, marketing professionals especially, this is a fast moving space which can be hard to navigate. Raphael’s answers to these questions were quite straight forward – yes you should be using these social media tools but find the right fit for your firm.
Get found, convert and engage are magic words when it comes to digital marketing. When you consider that 70% of traffic arrives at your site as a result of search, it makes sense to take SEO and other tools seriously according to Raphael. So how do you get found in the first place?
Make your firm easy to find by living by the rule that content is king.
Generate strong content in the form of a blog for example and then optimise your content through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing). The principles within SEO are quite simple – develop a key word list and regularly review it, benchmark against your existing marketing material, use keyword suggestion tools like www.wordtracker.com to help and make page titles work for you.
Promoting your content is an important factor in getting found and this can be achieved through social media channels such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. A lot of digital marketing tools are circular in motion – a presence on one can feed into another.
On Linkedin, Raphael’s advice to any marketing manager is to take the initiative to empower your team to network on Linkedin as a means to promote your firm. This will allow for the all important ‘multiplier effect’. After all it’s counter-productive to be on Linkedin and not networking. And so it’s important to empower your team to have a presence on Linkedin.
Convert is another key factor and convert will mean different things to different firms. Unicef’s website for example is centred around the three things that Unicef wants anyone who visits their site to do 1.
donate, 2. shop and 3. get involved. For professional services firms convert may mean getting someone to sign up to a newsletter, filling in an online survey or signing up to an event. The key is to get people to engage.
The beauty of digital marketing is that it’s measurable, according to Raphael and the important question here is – what is important to our firm? Who do we want coming to our site, how are people behaving in relation to our site? Another checklist of questions to consider are: Am I creating effective content? Where and why are my visitors abandoning my site? How do I improve site interaction? Google analytics can answer these questions and once you have the answers, analyse them and make the necessary changes so the exercise is worthwhile.
Instead of feeling daunted by this space consider the following point –‘Most firms view digital marketing as a new way to market, rather than a new way of improving their marketing’. A way of living up to this is to integrate digital marketing tools into your overall marketing strategy. Raphael advised to draw up a digital marketing plan, starting out with a SWOT analysis as opposed to merely dipping a toe into the digital marketing sea. Without this plan, there’ll be no benchmark at a later date.
Now, go forth to unlock your digital marketing tool-box. Get found, convert and engage.
Myra Mc Auliffe
Drury
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