8 simple yet powerful steps to maximise your digital marketing

GROWTH

How you can cut through the noise and stand out in a crowded digital space

We’re at a stage where getting cut through is increasingly difficult, with digital platforms and algorithms constantly changing. Yesterday Google Ads was the place to be, today it’s Facebook and Instagram ads, tomorrow chatbots and influencer marketing. So as marketers, how do we ensure messaging cut through and recall? More importantly, how do we achieve the holy grail of turning cut through into action?

Let’s take our work at Canva as an example. We have a focused set of goals when it comes to digital marketing:

With a lot of audience research and experimentation, we were able to:

In this blog, I’ll share how we achieved these figures by following 8 simple yet powerful steps.

Ask yourself the following questions of your audience — Who are they? What are their goals? What problems are they trying to solve? What are their frustrations?

Know who you’ll be talking to, because this will be the basis of how you’ll engage with them. Know your top 3 audiences and create personas for them.

Now that you know WHO you’ll be engaging with, the next question to ask about your audience is — WHERE is their attention? And then understand the channel in which they are spending most of their time in.

For example, if they spend most of their time on Facebook, what are they doing there? Are they there just to connect with friends, or are they very involved in particular groups and communities? Do they get a large amount of their news and/or entertainment content from Facebook?

If it’s Instagram, what are they doing there? Linking back to step #1 — If they are a teenager, are they there to impress their friends? To connect with their friends? To chat? If your audience are entrepreneurs, are they there to build a following? To share tips/insights? To provide edu-tainment?

Now that you have a solid understanding of your audience/s and where they spend their time, we need to link this back to the product or service you are looking to promote. Therefore you need to understand your unique selling proposition, and learn more about your value in the eyes of your users by seeking out qualitative and quantitative data. This step cannot be underestimated, as your audiences’ behaviour can tell you a lot about why they use your product or service.

Why do people spend 10x more over a Gucci logo shirt, over a non-branded one which serves the same purpose? This is where we start looking into motivations behind human decisions, and threading steps 1, 2 and 3 together by developing the message that will connect and resonate with your audience. It is also important that you now consider the channel you’re communicating in, and the product/service you’re trying to sell.

To do this, we need to understand that as humans we buy for one of 3 reasons:

Knowing this, you can begin to identify the ingredients to craft the right message of WHY your audience should care.

This 5th step is easily overlooked, but ignoring the “when” can lead to a CPA (cost per acquisition) up to 20 times more expensive than your competitors. Let’s expand on this with the example of teenagers; they are most likely school students, so knowing this we ask ourselves, when are they on their phone and/or laptop? Before school? During lunch? End of school? On public transport to and from home? Are they on-the-go? Are they actively seeking your product out, or do they need to be convinced? Do they have high or low intent? Ensure your marketing efforts are present at the height of WHEN they are active and/or seeking a solution to their problem.

Now that we have a comprehensive understanding of the above, this is what it looks like when we put it all together!

A conversion happens when you deliver an ad to:

These are your major levers. As you build upon each, it has a compounding impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns.

After lots and lots of experimentation with these levers, you will begin to see how the varied permutations of Audience x Channel x Time x Product x Message come to interact with one another, and how that impacts your desired performance results. Over time you will begin to identify the recipe for success, but there is no silver bullet as the levers will constantly evolve.

Set goals before every campaign and experiment with an understanding of what your expectations are, then measure and track your results.

Something I see many marketers forget to do is reflect on the results. It’s as simple as asking the following questions:

As you exercise reflection more and more, you will develop your marketing skills to the point where you can say with high accuracy what will, and will not work. As new ad channels become available, or you have a new product to sell, this new found “intuition” will give you a significant head start when the time comes to launching that first campaign.

Even though the focus of this post has been on paid channels, these principles are also applicable to owned channels such as content marketing, email and messaging. Therefore it’s critical to note that users do not experience your brand in isolation of other channels. Depending on the size of your growth or marketing team, the need to ensure a cohesive user experience becomes more important the larger your organisation is. If you feel like you’re starting to create a disjointed user experience, get alignment with other teams, because you should all be working together for a common mission.

I’d love to hear what stood out for you from what I’ve shared, and if this article has changed your approach to digital marketing.

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