Internet Marketing Strategy for 2020
Every new year, entrepreneurs and marketers working at different companies are interested in online advertising tools (life hacks, news, trends), but only a few pay attention to digital strategies. How to promote and sell online more effectively in 2020, says expert Eugene Shevchenko, founder of the UAMASTER digital agency and the School of Digital Advertising.
Build a digital strategy
“To constantly increase sales with the help of online advertising, even in the micro-business, not only in a large corporation, first of all you need a digital strategy. It answers questions about your target audience, its segments and customer journey map, contains information about the benefits of your products, creative strategy, budget. Further, all this is projected onto online advertising tools, ”Shevchenko explains. But that is not all. When creating a digital strategy, pay attention to the development of IT infrastructure in your company: the work of CRM and other databases, a website, the quality of telephony, etc. You should also have a specialist who is deeply versed in web analytics and will be able to analyze the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.
Of course, to create an effective advertising strategy, you need to understand the modern tools of online advertising and understand the vectors of their development. Now let's talk about trends.
"Artificial Intelligence" will not do everything
Good news from an expert: with all the variety of marketing tools, for 80% of the tasks that are solved by paid communication on the Internet, you only need two: Google and Facebook advertising dashboards. But in these tools your expertise should be maximum.
You might have heard that Google and Facebook want to make life easier for marketers, so in 2018-2019 they took a big step towards automating advertising. They say: “Guys, set up tracking of your goals - requests, sales or calls. Then upload the advertisements, choose the right advertising campaign goal, and we will do the rest for you! Don't think about targeting, audience segmentation, or routine tasks anymore. Take time for creativity and strategy. ”
Indeed, machine learning, which is now used by Google and Facebook, can significantly increase the effectiveness of advertising.
At the same time, Shevchenko talks about the nuances important for a small entrepreneur: “Firstly, automation of advertising campaigns provides benefits for medium and large advertisers, but will not always work for small ones. Because machine learning needs dozens of homogeneous conversions per week or hundreds of heterogeneous conversions, ”he warns.
According to the experience of the UaMaster Internet agency, from the launch of a new campaign to a positive result, an average of 1-2 weeks passes. So much time is needed for the program to "learn" on your data.
And even when using advertising automation, Shevchenko recommends segmenting the audience and making different messages for “cold”, “warm” and “hot” users.
Hot users are looking for exactly your service or product and are focused on buying, while interest from a cold user still needs to be generated and shown what kind of company you are and what kind of service you provide, respectively, they need different messages.
Finally, it should be understood that no automation of advertising or the best marketer will help if you have a non-competitive price, a terrible site or sales managers do not pick up the phone.
Sell directly
To fully use the Internet to attract new customers, not enough site and paid advertising. Yevgeny Shevchenko talks about the most popular among Ukrainian companies, as well as the growing tools of Internet promotion.
CRM for Instagram
“Instagram works great for small businesses,” he says. - The main plus of this channel: convenient for your potential customers, shareware for the company (expenses include only the salary of your employee). Cons of sales through Instagram, which are not talked about: information on requests is poorly structured, with a large flow of messages and comments, it is difficult to track statuses, etc. So far, no internal solution has been devised for repeated sales and for analytics inside the messenger. ”
The expert’s main recommendation is to synchronize your Instagram account messages with your CRM, this will allow you to see sales analytics, order statuses, and build a repeat sales strategy.
Do not spam in Viber
Viber is a favorite solution for medium and large businesses. Marketers perceive mailings via Viber in different ways: as an alternative to SMS, replacing email newsletters. Evgeny Shevchenko recommends considering Viber as an additional channel of communication. “In a direct comparison, Viber loses email lists by three indicators at once: it is more expensive, the conversion rate is lower, the amount of information in the message is less,” the expert warns.
In practice, the company has only part of the emails and part of the phones of its customers, and these samples overlap by 30-50%, therefore it is better to use both communication channels - Viber and email - together to reduce the cost of communication.
LinkedIn Conversations
LinkedIn, according to Internet marketers, performs well in some B2B industries (in particular, when selling complex services) to search for new potential customers from the right industry. The main recommendation of Shevchenko: in no case try to sell head on on the first or second message. Getting to know the right people on LinkedIn, use more live communication, build non-trivial dialogs that arouse your interest.
It's time to create a chat bot
Since 2016, in Ukraine everyone promises a complete victory of chatbots over other Internet communication tools. However, artificial intelligence is still not massively replacing the human manager. From a commercial point of view, chat bots of mobile operators and banks that answer questions from existing users have become successful during this time. Chatbots that answer standard questions allow you to save a huge number of man-hours every year and reduce the payroll support desk.
Significant successes in the use of "selling" chatbots are among the information businessmen who will be happy to sell their webinar with the help of several automatic Facebook messages.
“For most companies, chat bots still remain an experimental or insignificant sales channel, which accounts for 1-5% of the turnover,” says Yevgeny Shevchenko. In order for their effectiveness to grow, it is necessary to adhere to two rules:
1. Constantly attract a new audience. Chatbot without new users - like a site without visitors - does not give sales.
2. Develop a strategy for repeat sales and reactivation of users.
In addition to technical support and sales, there are three more functions where chatbots can be useful, according to the expert's experience: HR (for recruiting and socializing new employees), training (for new users of your services, in particular), and corporate social responsibility projects aimed at young people.
Example: The social project # schoshpіshlonetak https://www.behance.net/gallery/86926917/SMTHWENTWRONG-Digital-Communication was implemented in Ukraine in 2018 and 2019. The task was to increase knowledge of their civil rights among children and adolescents. The chat bot was used as a key communication tool, as it is a familiar environment for teenagers, it is interactive and allows you to easily convey complex information in an easy way. Last year, this project received awards at five advertising festivals.
If your company does not yet have a chat bot, Shevchenko advises you not to rush to order it from a student or from a web studio. There are dozens of designers on the Internet that allow you to create a simple bot for Facebook and Telegram for free. “Test your ideas with interest and user engagement. If your experiment will be of any use, gradually complicate it. "
So, start Internet promotion only after building a digital strategy, taking into account changes in the market and in your company, and not just marketing innovations: “Allocate 10% of your time for web analytics and analysis of advertising effectiveness, and 10% of your budgets for testing new ones hypotheses and ideas, ”emphasizes Yevgeny Shevchenko.
