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Digital Marketing Sales: What Drives Conversions?

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The other day I was speaking about digital marketing to a group of highly successful entrepreneurs who have great marketing in place and solid knowledge of what their competition is doing. But they were unclear on two things:

  1. What should my digital marketing mix be?
  2. Which digital marketing channels will work best to drive sales?

Which digital marketing sales channels should I use, when and why?

To build a comprehensive digital marketing plan we need to look outside tactics (social media, email and such) and look at the stages consumers go through from where they  become aware of your brand or product to where they are actually ready to buy. Digital marketing channels will each play a part in one or multiple stages of the process.

There are many models that illustrate the process consumers go through before they buy a product or service. One such simple model is the AIDA marketing model. AIDA is an acronym that stands for:

  • A – Attention (Awareness): attract the attention of the customer.
  • I – Interest: raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features, as in traditional advertising).
  • D – Desire: convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
  • A – Action: lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

I updated the model to make it relevant to the digital marketing space, where forming an opinion through review-seeking replaces the “interest” stage. So we have AODA: Awarenes – Opinion – Desire – Action.

Digital Marketing Sales: Awareness to Buy

Next, let’s see how each digital channel can help consumers move through this decision-making process.

Awareness:

Before a person can even think of buying they need to know you exist. Even more importantly, they need to know how your product or service will help them.
Social marketing and content marketing are highly effective at telling your story, allowing you to create awareness of benefits. SEO, work-of-mouth and online advertising are all highly effective at gaining impressions for your product name, but may be limited in their storytelling options.
For a full awareness push you will need all marketing channels. Email marketing may not be a good fit here if you don’t have established email list. If you do have an established list and brand, and are simply marketing a new product under that brand, personalized email marketing can do wonders for you.

 

Opinion:

Storytelling and online reviews are critical at this stage. Today’s consumers are comparison shoppers. They read reviews, ask for referrals and feedback on Facebook, Twitter and in forums, for most of their purchasing decisions.

In B2B in particular, they want to feel like they made their own decisions without pressure from the outside. So before they even call you to talk  their opinion is made.

  • Monitor review sites and offer help so that they get to see what you have to offer.
  • Write, teach, publish: establish thought-leadership.
  • Invite your friends and fans to leave reviews, at all touch-points: from Yelp to LinkedIn, you want trails of social proof.
  • Publish interviews with happy customers and their stories (text and video).

Now you just need to make them desire to work with you!

Desire

This is where social, online ads and email marketing are particularly useful. So they know about you and they’ve formed a favorable opinion of you. Now it’s time to deliver the last punch – buy now for 10% off. Or give them some other reason to buy. Maybe they should buy that bracelet now because a celebrity just wore it. Or they should start working with you because you just won an award. Or you have a limited time offer. Long story short, give them a reason to want to buy right now.

Email marketing will be your best friend here. A study from eConsultancy shows that email is the most effective conversion method as a contributing channel. So make sure you have a solid email marketing plan in place and you will get action!

Action

This is what we’ve been working for. Most digital channels are out of the picture at this point. They got the leads to the conversion point and now those conversion mechanisms are expected to function flawlessly. How your website will convert these customers is a function of the website’s usability, not a function of social media or email marketing. How apt your sales team is at closing a deal is a function of your sales processes, training and capabilities.
You may say that we start with Action in mind and end with Action in mind. Digital marketing will provide what needs to happen in the middle to get your leads to act. And if you put all of the mechanisms in place, sensitive to where the customer is at in the sales “funnel,” you will have your best marketing year.
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