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Going Global: The 4 Key Components of a Digital Marketing Strategy

29 September 2017, 12:25 CET

In the digital age, it has never been easier for your business to go global.

This is thanks to the way in which technology has blurred geographical boundaries and eradicated many of the barriers that once blocked the international marketplace, creating cost-effective channels through which brands can source, promote and sell their products.

At the heart of this technological revolution is the concept of digital marketing, which enables your domestic brand to build an online presence in all of your chosen markets. To leverage this, however, you must create a viable strategy, and one that can achieve core objectives while also delivering a healthy ROI.

In this post, we will address four key components of a digital marketing and ask how they can boost your businesses growth:

Your Objectives

This may sound like a strange consideration, particularly as the primary goal of most digital marketing campaigns is to boost online visibility and improve search engine listings in response to specific, keyword phrases. Given that Google receives in excess of one billion search queries each month, this is a sensible goal that can easily be attained with the right strategy.

This is just the beginning of your customer's journey, however, and you may have a number of underlying objectives for driving traffic to your website in the first instance.

Whether you simply wish to build awareness of your brand oversea or target specific customer segments in a bid to generate leads and boost sales conversions in a chose marketplace, however, it is crucial that you have a clear understanding of these objectives before your launch your campaign. Remember, this will influence every element of your campaign, from the nature of your content and the marketing channels that you use to target consumers.

Tracking the Data That You Gather

Digital campaigns are increasingly data-led, particularly in an age where firms find it relatively easy to capture large swathes of information and segment this to create actionable feedback. Deciphering these data sets effectively is crucial to the success of your campaign, as this enables you to track relevant data and ultimately measure the success (or failure) of your efforts.

Most crucially, a constant flow of data can be used to review your campaign at various stages, so that you can identify any initial problems or market elements that are not realising their full potential.

The key is to determine the data sets that are most relevant to your campaign and target market, as there are numerous types of information that may be worth tracking. Your conversion rate is perhaps the single most important, although you can also measure the click-through-rate on specific content types such as email, SEM and display messages.

If you have hired a specialist service provider such as Ingenuity Digital to deliver a PPC campaign, you may also want to track the cost-per-click to help modify your approach.

The Channels Through Which You Will Interact with Customers

In today's marketing realm, there are a growing number of channels through which you can effectively target international customers and new segments. It is important that you select the right channels for specific target markets, however, otherwise you run the risk of wasting your businesses capital.

Clearly, an omni-channel approach is key for any digital marketing campaigns, thanks largely to the high volume of touch points that influence the typical customer journey. This will include staple channels such as websites and paid adverts, while your campaign should also leverage globally accessible social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

You may also want to consider more targeted social channels depending on the nature of your target market, as this represents a great way of boosting conversions and your eventual ROI. Brands with a largely female audience should consider marketing themselves through Pinterest, for example, which has a user base of which 70% of members of women. Tools such as Snapchat also offers an excellent way of communicating with younger consumers, so this is well worth consideration.

When adopting a cross-channel campaign (or an integrated strategy that includes both of and online channels), it is also important to remember the role of assisted conversions. These represent the various interactions that customers have with your brand prior to making a purchase, and each can be ascribed a fixed financial value. Understanding this can help you to recognise the most valuable parts of your campaign, and the channels that deliver the best return over time.

The Optimisation of Your Campaign Performance

Finally, we come to biggest variable of your marketing campaign. This is the ability of you and your team to optimise the performance of each digital marketing campaign, as you look to make the most of the data and technological platforms at your disposal.

Even allowing for the advances in marketing technology over the decade or more, it is ultimately the ability of human marketers and their penchant for thinking creatively that will bring every single campaign to life.

This is particular truly when expanding into international markets, as subtle variations relating to culture, behaviour and language cannot always be accounted for by algorithms.

So, make sure that you are constantly leveraging the power of the human mind to optimise your campaigns in real-time, paying particular attention to skills such as creativity and analytical thinking. This will help to ensure that you utilise all accessible data and marketing channels effectively, while increasing the ROI that you can expect for your initial marketing spend.

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