- PPC (Google, Bing, social platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram).
- SEO.
- Social media (organic/traditional/customer relational).
- Blogger outreach and guest blogging.
- Remarketing.
- Display advertising.
- Email marketing or electronic customer relationship management (ECRM).
- Affiliate marketing.
Some of these may have been profitable for your business while others not so successful. It’s vitally important that your marketing agency provides you with data in easily digested form, so you can make the appropriate financial decisions. At this stage, dedicated marketing managers may be required to work in-house to collectively bring together the myriad of data from across the business to provide you with greater insights into your customers and how you can improve conversion rates.
Alternatively, you can outsource the work to an experienced marketing agency who can report such data and work closely with the business to help it reach its goals.
A digital marketing drive should be fully ingrained within the business mindset. At this point, you should be considering ways to increase traffic to the website and increase conversion potential.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), involves continuously optimising a website to influence purchase / lead behaviour in order to maximise the value of every visitor on the website. Businesses at this stage probably won’t have a full CRO program in place, but will have dabbled in some split-testing and other internal tests based on conversations and debates that regularly take place in the office (‘What’s more important to our customers, this page or that page; this USP or that USP?’) Additional tracking and data will probably be required for this to be successful.
Nurturing your customers’ lifetime value
Thinking about the customer and how to nurture their overall lifetime value should also be considered at this point.
Email should already be an ongoing activity, but with increased traffic, sales and data other avenues open up in addition to a standard blanket email, such as:
- Lapsed customer lists: reaching out to old customers.
- Abandoned shopper emails: attempting to claw back lost business.
- Upselling / repurchase emails: trying to increase the lifetime value of customers by offering them related items based on what they already purchased.
Email activities like these should include a level of automation that provides effective reporting and attribution of email activities.
An important question that every business at this stage should be able to answer (and if not, they should at the very least put a plan in place to work on it) is, what is the customer lifetime-customer value? The LTV figure helps to forecast growth and moves the business away from quick-win profitable sales or leads, to truly understanding what their affordable cost-per-acquisition is for future growth. More on this in your Step 4. Checklist below.