How can you market a product if you don’t know your target market? The same question can be asked of digital marketing. In order to successfully reach your intended consumers, you need to employ targeted marketing techniques and you can only do this after extensive research. Using your customers’ digital footprint, it is now easier than ever to identify your target market, their Internet habits and adjust your online campaign accordingly.
Every time a consumer uses the Internet, a little more detail is added to their digital footprint. Their shopping habits, their social media presence, the websites they visit, all of this is valuable data for digital marketing teams if interpreted correctly and used in an online campaign. Although not all of this data will be useful, tracking your customers’ digital footprint can help you understand more about their online movements. Remember, however, that you have a duty to keep the data collected from your customers secure and to respect their privacy. It is important to only collect data which can be in some way helpful to your digital marketing and not abuse your consumers’ trust.
One of the most important aspects of using digital footprints when it comes to making targeted marketing decisions is that the data is all collected in real-time. Instantaneous digital marketing techniques can therefore be deployed in reaction to this data, taking your online campaign to the next level when it comes to engaging and responding to your users. Use knowledge of their web-browsers, location, behaviour, search engine terms and social media interactions to build up a picture of what your customer likes and wants.
In simple terms, analysis of digital footprints offers an overall impression of what your consumers are doing, buying and saying online. This can be particularly useful when you are researching how your brand is talked about and represented on social media. Positive posts, sharing of online campaign deals and liking pages or following accounts are all signs that your customers are interacting well with your brand. A growing following is vocal and can increase your online presence significantly. These are the people you want your targeted marketing to reach, using content they will not only engage with but also share with their family and friends.
However, even in the face of this vast data bank, offline marketing techniques are not obsolete. Don’t forgo all traditional market research methods in favour of the digital footprint because you’ll be ignoring a significant number of customers by doing so. Many people will not accept your company’s online cookie policy or use an incognito browser and therefore you will be unable to learn the details of their digital footprint. But there may be other ways they are willing to interact with your company, such as a poll or survey. Just because these are now digitised, doesn’t mean they are no longer traditional marketing techniques. They are now particularly useful when used alongside digital footprint data.
The best online campaigns today have strong targeted marketing behind them, steering them. Businesses need to not only effectively reach their audience but also engage them and convert those engagements into sales. By understanding your consumers, what they like, what they want and what they are interested in seeing online, your digital marketing will be far more successful than those which are generic and ill-informed. Start using your customers’ digital footprint to enhance their experience of your company today.
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