We have always been persistent here at Social Barrel in saying that you must have great content before setting out to do digital marketing.
However, great content is not the only be-all and end-all of a digital marketing campaign.
Let’s be clear, it plays a significant role in an effective digital marketing campaign. But with just it, this endeavor is incomplete. Notwithstanding that this role is important, marketers need to go beyond just great content.
Great content is very effective in reaching out to potential customers. Furthermore, great content is also a very powerful tool to use to keep current customers engaged with your organization.
However, without belittling this role, digital marketers also need to focus on what goes on beyond when potential customers are enticed to visit one of the organization’s portals such as its social media pages or its website.
A more effective digital marketing campaign is one that not only generates traffic, likes, shares, retweets, +1s, inbound links and the like, it’s one that translates to real sales for an organization.
We’re not saying that an increase in these is not great. In fact, these are key measures to look at when judging whether your digital marketing strategy is working. However, beyond getting people to explore your content and products, get them to act and go through with it.
A very useful tool to get beyond reaching out in digital marketing is to develop an effective marketing funnel or purchase funnel. As the name suggests, it’s a step-by-step process that ultimately leads to a purchase.
Though some may argue otherwise, great content should be involved in all of the steps of the marketing funnel. Nonetheless, its main purpose is in reaching out to people.
After getting the attention of people and having them explore your content, your marketing funnel should have a plan to influence their decision making which leads to a purchase. After a purchase, go one step further and turn them into advocates.
How does one influence the decisions of the people they interact with? One very important aspect of this is to earn the trust of people. This is why great content is still key. What one shares needs to be of value to those they share it with, as we have mentioned in the past.
By making yourself useful, you earn the right to sell. Capture the interest of people, make them desire your product by giving them a reason why they need it. Convert this desire to sales by a call to action.
We’ll be posting more about the purchase funnel in future articles so stay tuned to Social Barrel.
Image from Katie Laird on Flickr (CC)
