No matter what kind of brand you have and no matter the vertical, eventually you are going to want to grow your business in a way that’s sustainable and feasible without having to spend tons of money on digital marketing.
Digital marketing does not have to be daunting or hard. In fact, when done right, growing your business through digital marketing can be the most cost effective and scalable way you have in your brand’s toolbox.
Here are 4 digital marketing tips to you can use to drive growth for your business:
1. Identify your target audience
This one sounds easier than it is - but finding your target audience is the number one step to being able to grow your brand digitally. If there’s anything that you do from here on out - make sure this stays step one.
Some ways you can start identifying your target audience includes asking yourself these questions to help you get started -
- Who is your ideal customer?
- What are their habits? Interests?
- Where can you reach them? What social platforms do they live on?
Create a fake ideal person that you would want your customer to be and then start mapping backwards once you’ve answered all of the above questions. Doing this exercise will not only help you pinpoint an ideal persona but then also take it one more step further and be able to define your target audience as a whole.
2. Try out different marketing tools
Start building your email list to stay in touch with your audience, nurture leads and promote your brand and services. Email is a unique tool that reaches users that have already shown interest in your brand and mission. These users have already signaled interest in your brand and handed over valuable first party information (email handles)! Let’s take it to the next step and see how we can start converting them.
1. Create welcome nurture sequences for new email subscribers to introduce them to your brand. Make sure you try and lean on welcoming them to your community by providing them with brand specific or industry specific exclusive content that is not available externally.
2. Learn how to segment your audience properly so you can better serve these users. This will not only help you define what type of content you should be serving up but also will help you give them relevant information. For example, segment users by where they signed up (newsletter sign up vs. for a free PDF), what they signed up for (podcasting tips vs. general newsletter) and more.
3. Test, Test, Test
The importance of testing is severely underestimated! Don’t forget to test everything. By testing, I mean really sitting down and thinking about what your assumptions are, what outcomes you expect and how you’re going to achieve them.
Let me give you an example - if you did the persona exercise from above and came to the assumption that your ideal target audience is a millennial who lives with their parents and regularly goes to Target to buy their household needs. That persona uses instagram most often and TikTok as a secondary channel.
Great! Now that you’ve come to the assumption from above - how are you going to prove it? Time to test it out! Create 2-3 different types of content across both those social platforms that really speak to your brand or the audience you’re trying to reach. Don’t let your tests run for longer than 4 weeks maximum. After your test is over, look at the data and see whether the persona you picked engaged with Instagram more or Tiktok more. Did they engage with the type of content? If not, where did you go wrong? Do you need to test your assumption somewhere else? Pro-tip - create a quick Notion template or Google Sheet where you dump the data from your test week over week so you can clearly see the ups, downs or where you are flat. Need help getting started? Duplicate Norby’s easy to use template to get you started here!
These are the action items you should be thinking about across multiple needs in your brand. Whatever you do, just remember that testing is a critical component of growing your brand sustainably and without a huge budget. Tests don’t cost money, keep them low touch and low lift so you can focus on getting to your conclusion faster.
4. Decide whether you want to incorporate paid channels
Performance marketing channels such as Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook and Google can play an important role in how you acquire more customers. How do you know if it's time to start testing these? Here are a few pointers - If you can’t answer yes to three out of four of these questions, I’d recommend you hold off on paid ads.
- Do you already have paying customers?
- Are you confident that you have achieved product market fit?
- Do you have a way to measure your ads? Google Analytics or any other related platform?
- Do you know the type of content your audience engages with organically and that you can replicate?
Paid ads can be used for scale or testing - it depends on what you expect your outcomes to be. If you would like to use performance marketing for testing, make sure you understand what results you are trying to achieve. If you are using paid ads to scale (assuming you’ve already tested in some form), then you must have a basic understanding of your customer. Paid ads can only grow something that’s working.
Take these four digital marketing tips and turn them into a growth machine for your brand. Norby can help you grow your brand through an all-in-one affordable and accessible marketing platform with email + sms marketing, landing pages, analytics and so much more.
Ready to get started? Click here to join Norby today.
