How many digital marketing plans should I have?
As many as you have target customer groups. Here are some tips.
You should have a digital marketing plan for each type of customer (or target audience) you intend to chase, that is fundamentally different from each other. This pertains to the customer journey, how they move from suspect to prospect to customer. There may also be demographic differences that can help you segment them, but eventually they all lead to their journey.
A Customer Example
For example, say you sell a telecommunications product, even something as simple as plain old voice telephone service or Internet access. Clearly there are many different types of customers for this service. Residential customers will buy the service directly, Business, or Enterprise customers need it to run their companies. They clearly will have a different buyers journey, evaluation criteria, and decision-making process.
A residential customer, may have just moved to a new house and needs a phone line and Internet This is the awareness stage. Then in the consideration stage, they will evaluate who has service in their area, what products and features are available (usually a single line with voice mail and some other basic features), what the price is (usually the number one factor for residential), and finally perhaps some reviews on service and customer. The decision stage may be executed by one person, say the head of the household, or two. Many residential customers use certain social media platforms, like Facebook during these stages.
An Enterprise (or business) customer may be moving too, but with dozens or hundreds of people. So, in the awareness stage, when they’re checking for service areas and products, they will be looking for very different features (usually multiple lines, complex features, 3-way calling, etc). In the consideration phase, they will clearly look at price, but the complexity of the service offerings being very different will then require a more complex way to look at the pricing. There may be TCO (total cost of ownership) issues, such as the ability to do changes without having to call the phone company, that go beyond price. Also, during the decision phase, there may be multiple people involved, not just the technology team, but the financial/accounting teams, the customer care teams, the building facility teams, and even the users themselves could weigh in on the decisions. Enterprise customers may use very different social media platforms, like LinkedIn for their consideration and decision phases.
These are just some of the differences in two customer groups. Your digital marketing plans should help each of these groups through their buying journeys in a different way that helps them specifically. What does the residential customer care about business features and differentiators and vice versa. The more you target the marketing strategy to each journey, the more success you will have.
Finally, in the telecommunications business there are other target audience too, for example resellers who sell phones and then want to sell your phone service (an indirect channel). Or even other phone companies who are trying to serve a customer that crosses boundaries will buy phone service in bulk or wholesale. They will each have different buying journeys. So you likely need a different digital marketing plan for them too.
So that’s four in total.
If you visit the digital marketing web site of any telecommunications company you will see that right up front, they start to segment the buyer journey based on these types of different targets.
This happens more often in any business than you know. Have a heartfelt look at your business and determine if you chase multiple target customers and then commit to making different digital marketing strategies for each one.
Wow, four digital marketing plans sounds like a lot of work and complicated. If you just have one plan that sort of supports them all, it likely won’t be the best for any individual target audience.
Helpful tips
It doesn’t have to be hard work or complicated. Don’t be overwhelmed. Here are some helpful tips.
- If you really are targeting multiple prospects, then make all four your digital marketing plan. Just like in our example four, then don’t deny that because it’s hard. Start with saying “Here are the four.” You may need four website paths, four social media strategies, four email campaigns, four advertising programs and budgets. Don’t kid yourself that the journey for one target is good enough for the others. Customers don’t care if it makes life easer for you. They care about them. That is not only okay, you can use it to your advantage. Make their special life easier, and you are more likely to have them during the entire buyer’s journey and you will have a delighted customer for a long time.
- It’s okay to start with the one size fits all marketing plan if you make the commitment to improve over time. Incrementally start to divide and conquer the strategy based on the different buyer’s journeys. Over time you will start to improve the effectiveness of your programs. Use analytics to measure the impact of the changes.
- You can reuse marketing materials in the multiple different journeys. Everything doesn’t need to be created from scratch. If there is one aspect that is exactly the same for each journey it should show up in all of them.
- Consider starting in one target customer journey first and go deep on that target first. It’s okay that you haven’t hit the others yet. Set a time when you will get to them as well. You probably will bet more satisfaction by getting more results going deeper into the journey of one group. Then you can make a conscious decision to move on to target group number. Never forgetting that you will still learn from target group one and continuously improve them.
- Customize Social Media by target customer. Is there one social media platform more used by one target than the other? Then use those for those targets. Use them differently, don’t always post the same material to every platform. Each social media platform has more optimal uses. For example, YouTube is obviously better with videos, and Facebook is good for storytelling. Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are different in their own rights.
- Don’t forget to find out what their journey is directly from the target customer. While it’s great that you may have a jump start by having been in the business for a while and own a great deal of experience, you should still strive to learn more direct from your prospects and customers. At the very least it will confirm your thoughts. You will likely learn new insights you never considered. You should even check with lost customers. They’ll tell you why you didn’t win. Then be brave and tackle that head on.
Conclusion
Don’t delay. If you are chasing multiple target customer groups, embrace having multiple digital marketing strategies to chase each one. You will find that you are much more effective in each one and in the end have happier customers. You will win finding more Sales Qualified Leads and make your Sales team much more successful.
