Locally Grown Episode 7: Get Real ROI with Digital Marketing

You want to launch a marketing campaign for your services, but it’s tricky to know where to start.

According to eMarketer, as of 2019, the place to start is digital marketing. Traditional mediums can be difficult to measure and plan for, and the analytics you need to see to know how effective your efforts were won’t be available for weeks or months after. Joe and Andrew discuss how digital marketing is the answer to that problem with immediate ROI, real-time analytics, and even the ability to start with your price and work backward.

Join us as we discuss:

• Your summer 2022 digital marketing campaign blueprint
• Reverse engineering your marketing strategy so you don’t overspend
• What does a successful marketing campaign look like?

Your summer 2022 digital marketing campaign blueprint

Digital marketing has become the go-to way for marketers to get started with campaigns compared to traditional. And it’s no surprise:

1. Quick to start up
2. You aren’t required to work with an agency
3. It’s attributable
4. Little to no buyer’s remorse

Think about how much easier it is to see your return on investment — With traditional, you may have a design printed in May and hear back on it in June. With digital, you could put $500 towards an ad and see results back within a day or a week.

Defining digital

Digital marketing can be broken down into channels: Organic search engine ranking, social media, and search engine marketing. Joe and Andrew walk through each.

Organic search engine ranking

When it comes to showing up on search engine results like Google, you want to show up on the first page. To do that, certain keywords need to show up within your website content. Tell Google exactly what you want to be known for.

Social media

If you want to dive into social media, first make sure you’re diving into the right pool. If you spend all of your time on Twitter when your customers are primarily on Facebook, you’re wasting your time and money.

Another area of social media: Advertising. Especially if you’re a local business, this gives you the opportunity to target a very specific group.

“Social is a great and easy tool, like digital marketing, where you can adjust it and create it around your ideal customers.” — Andrew Adams

Search engine marketing

If you want immediate gratification and leads for your business, SEM is a great way to pay for a term that you eventually want to rank for.

Creation of the campaign

So, what would a campaign typically look like? Think of a diner owner that wants to advertise their new hamburger combo for the summer. The owner would first figure out who they would like to target. Then, figure out the why — The owner wants to drive more business. Finally, they make an outline of everything they want to do: Starting with SEO and going from there.

Once they have all of that, it’s time to figure out the budget…

Reverse engineering your marketing strategy so you don’t overspend

Finding out how much you should spend on a campaign can be complicated. You have to take into account your chosen industry and which digital marketing tactics you’re using.

The best way to make sure you’re not overspending is to research which keywords you want to rank for and then reverse engineer it.

And while that more official way can work for your business, you can always opt for a more casual approach — How much money are you willing to spend on marketing before you become frustrated? If you’re keeping your spend lower than your maximum, it doesn't matter as much if you’re overspending on keywords.

“There's always rules about what you should do, but at the end of the day it’s your business, and you need to be confident in how you're running it.” — Andrew Adams

What does a successful marketing campaign look like?

You’ve run your campaign, and it seems to be going well, but how can you know for sure that you’re getting a good ROI?

1. Make sure Google Analytics is set up on your website — Otherwise it’ll be hard to track later on.
2. Make sure you’re collecting data from the social sites that you use.
3. Use historical data to compare the current campaign to.

“Even if it's an utter failure, and you get zero leads, you will have done it. Practice that muscle and you'll learn a ton; and it should be better the next time.” — Joe Martin

More information about today’s topics:

• Joe’s LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joemartinmba/
• Andrew’s Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewsadams/
• Joe’s Twitter - twitter.com/joedmarti
• Andrews Twitter - twitter.com/astroma
• Company Website: www.scorpion.co