There has been a kind of “forced evolution” for marketers in the post-pandemic climate. Now, more than before, there is a renewed emphasis on reaching out to various audience segments online. To be effective during this process, your overall goal should be to build strong relationships with your digital market and to achieve a much higher level of engagement with that audience.
Effective digital marketing must account for higher levels of complexity in almost all the sectors. Marketers should consider numerous factors, such as highly niche audiences, additional regulation levels, and limited access to platforms.
But, as always, there are fundamental elements that can lead to increased performance from your marketing efforts. These include:
- Having a thorough understanding of your audience
- Setting clear and actionable goals
- Letting the data drive your decisions
- Ensuring that your content can be found by everyone
- Creating an omnichannel strategy
- Becoming a great storyteller
- Measuring your results
1. Understand Your Audience
With any marketing or advertising work, you need to know your audience and, most importantly, understand the questions or problems they are trying to solve. Even more important are the ways in which you can better understand the various segments within this field. You want to know your audience inside and out and understand their concerns, which takes time and effort.
A logical place to start is ensuring a deep understanding of what questions your audience is seeking to answer, as well as understanding where they are at in their online user journey. For instance, optimizing your site so that everyone can use it is a demonstrable way of committing to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance. As of 2021, fewer than 1% of website homepages currently meet these accessibility standards (link to the source of the statistics)
Yet, according to the World Health Organization:
- Around 15% (one billion) of the world’s population has some form of disability.
- Approximately 285 million people around the globe are visually impaired, of whom 39 million are blind.
- Roughly 2-3% of people around the world live with cognitive disabilities.
- English may be the most commonly spoken/written language on the internet, but it’s also a minority – with just 25.9% of users speaking English as their first language. This is followed by Chinese (19.4%), Spanish (7.9%), and Arabic (5.2%).
2. Understand Your Goals
Now that you know who your audience is, it’s even more crucial to make sure your goals are in sync. A strong game plan is essential for any form of audience building and relationship building. If you are not consistent with your aims, your credibility with your audience will decline.
You should have particular goals for each audience group based on where they are in their online journey. For example, if you are attempting to raise awareness for your clinical trials among certain HCPs, you may measure higher-level metrics such as impressions, views, and so on. If, on the other hand, you are attempting to enroll a particular number of randomized patients in the same study, you are most likely measuring lower journey metrics, such as website visits, form fills, bounce rate, and so on.
Make sure you understand not just how to reach your target audience, but also how to customize your website and all other content, so it can be easily accessible. That is the beauty of digital marketing; it enables us to target specific consumers with very specific solutions for their concerns.
3. Make Data-Driven Decisions
You’ve almost certainly heard that the third-party cookie has died. While this has created difficulty for many, it is also a great opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition. The loss of cookies encourages us all to embrace the first-party data we have access to, such as our own analytics, email lists, CMS, and other data about our earned and owned traffic.
It’s essential to understand the channels and platforms in which you MUST be engaged, as well as your overall performance. Digital media is continuously evolving, for example, it was only last year that Instagram made analytics available to all business accounts. This means your strategy and implementation must evolve as well.
Fortunately, conducting tests is simple because uploading anything like a tweet or a photo on Instagram only takes a few seconds. “Why are you bringing up Instagram?” you may wonder. It’s because technological advancements and changes happen all the time. If you remain on top of these new technologies and follow processes, like A/B testing, you can drive more quality visitors to your site.
4. Use an Omnichannel Approach to Build Trust with Audiences
As we all know, everyone’s user experience is unique, thus it’s critical to understand when to properly engage and cross the digital and analog realms. You may do this by using an omnichannel strategy. Omnichannel marketing is the integration and collaboration of the many channels that companies use to communicate with consumers with the objective of producing a consistent brand experience.
Maintaining consistency and accuracy is one of the challenges of omnichannel techniques. You must ensure that your messaging and image are consistent across all mediums, or you risk losing the credibility you have worked so hard to establish with your audience. Any channel that interacts with your audience should be constant from then on, otherwise you will lose their attention.
5. Maintain Accessibility
If you only remember one thing from this blog, make it that your content and website are 100% accessible to all audiences. Nothing is worse than a perplexing encounter when someone visits your page. You may quickly lose that individual, and you don’t want something as basic as that to be the reason they don’t notice all of the products, services or solutions you provide.
This is crucial essentially across the board, because we are attempting to reach people who may require assistance when accessing our website, so make sure your content and website provide whatever is needed for your audience’ seamless access. For example, include visuals for people with deafness and hearing loss and listening options for those who are visually impaired.
6. Use Effective Storytelling to Build Your Brand
Experience comes with accessibility. You want to generate content that is worth sharing, communicate your narrative effectively, and provide your audience with the best knowledge of your brand that you can. You want to create not only good content, in general but also content that focuses on each segment of your audience, understanding that content needs to be created with specific personas in mind. There may be times when your material can span all of your categories, but the goal is to narrow it down enough to be useful rather than simply dumping general themes out there.
The key to developing captivating content is to anticipate your audience’s queries and respond to them even before they ask. Not only do you want to tell your narrative as effectively as possible, but you also want to establish yourself as a thought leader and resource in the field. Then you understand how your services can benefit both your audience and the industry as a whole, and you become an expert in educating members of your audience, unfamiliar with the information you are sharing.
One approach to accomplish this is to convey your story utilizing different mediums, such as:
- Video
- Graphics
- Podcasts
Video is an effective storytelling medium; between 2021 and 2022, internet users spent an average of six hours and 48 minutes per week viewing videos, and 54% of consumers want to see more videos from a company they support.
Having said that, you want to develop information that is simple to understand. Consider the qualities of the articles that have connected with you and aim to incorporate those qualities into your own creations.
7. Ensure Your Content Is Mobile Friendly
How frequently do you check to ensure if your website appears correctly on a mobile device? Perhaps your blog has been shifted to the right and your graphics have been entirely blown up. These are the minor details that contribute to your overall image and are important when it comes to forming new relationships with your target audience. Notably, As per Statista 56% of all internet shoppers in the United States have used a mobile device to find local companies. This just emphasizes the need to ensure that your mobile material is correct and presents your company in the image that you want to project.
Here are some things to check when creating a more mobile-friendly experience:
- Page loads quickly
- Images are clear
- Ratio is relative to format
- Proper video time and size for mobile viewing
- Titles fit the screen appropriately
- Images and videos are optimized to help with loading speed.
With this in mind, be sure to test your mobile site on a frequent basis. Mobile sites are sometimes disregarded, although they have been shown to be the place where people begin. Run a Core Web Vitals analysis to assess how your UX is functioning.
Contact us here if you’d like to talk about your digital strategies and how we can help you improve your content for your target audience.