In the world of marketing, contacting, connecting with, and convincing your target audience remains the goal, and there is no shortage of ways to go about this.
Contacting the audience is about placing your message where those targets will encounter it. Connecting is about dragging your targets’ attention away from whatever else they were doing so they pay attention to that carefully placed message. Finally, convincing is about getting those prospects to take you up on the offer in that message they connected with.
This means putting your message in the right place in order to encounter that right prospect at the time he or she happens to be open to the message, and the rise of digital media is making accomplishing that more precise. With this in mind here are nine digital media advantages you should be putting to work.
- Speed – Digital media works fast in just about every way. Online assets such as videos, display ads or eBooks can be deployed as soon as they’re completed and updated just as quickly if necessary. This means online marketing efforts can be a quick way to augment an existing media push, or provide a timely messaging burst around a new product launch, event or other significant time period.
Digital media also displays its speed in the response time when a prospect follows the call to action. You get these responses almost instantly, and thus you’re able to follow up quickly while your message is fresh in the prospect’s mind.
- Customization – Freed from the confines of a fixed size, digital media can be easily reworked to present your content from a unique stance. This isn’t to say templates, don’t have a place, but when it comes to digital media, even templated designs offer plenty of opportunities to make the final message fit with your brand. It’s also easy to customize your creative to look good and get noticed in the variety of places the creative is being used. One look might be best for one sight, and part of your target audience, and a slightly different appearance with the same message might prove to be the way to go for a different segment.
- Targeting – Digital media allows unprecedented opportunities to aim your messaging at the prospects most likely to become customers. Whether its by properly tagging and labeling the videos and images you load to social media so the right prospects will find them, or working with an online ad provider to target your ads to an audience exhibiting specific interests, you can make sure you know who your message reaches, and stop hoping those ideal prospects happen upon your content in more static formats.
- Data – Everything online is tracked and measured, and this turns out to be a great thing for marketers. Online media makes it possible to evaluate how effective a campaign actually is, and opens up the possibility of tracking every time a prospect comes into contact with your content before becoming a customer. With all this data it’s possible to learn what formats, platforms and messages play best for those people who will be your next customers, so you can direct your resources to doing more of what works, and fewer things that fail to connect.
- Fine Tuning – Putting all that data to work isn’t something that has to happen between campaigns. If you track the effectiveness of your programs and you see something not performing, digital media is easy to adjust on the fly. You can also get active about putting that data to work, and start off campaigns with some A/B testing to see which of several options are most effective. Once you know what works best, abandon the low performing designs and kick the campaign into full gear.
- Shareable – Even in our digital media landscape, the first-hand referral is still the gold standard when it comes to convincing someone to use a new product. Luckily, the digital media world is filled with social opportunities and everything thrown online is easily shared. This means the messaging you get in front of those key people who are most likely to become your customers is also shared by them with their peers, who then become a next wave of prospects. Digital media makes it possible for your best customers to also be your best spokespeople, and those honest endorsements are powerful.
- Interactivity – Digital media can be almost anything, and it can incorporate multiple formats to capture the interest of the audience in a range of ways at once. It’s a dynamic environment in which to connect with someone, and this means you can be extremely creative in the ways you make those connections. Let your prospects be active as they meet your messaging with quizzes, calculators, video, audio or a tool that lets them see your products in an exciting and engaging context.
- Connectivity – It’s rare that someone buys a product after encountering it just a single time. But guiding a prospect along the path of discovery, education and product selection is a difficult process. Digital media is able to help solve some of this by making it easy to link campaigns and score prospects based on actions they take and content they consume. Combine this approach with meticulous metrics management and some A/B testing and you can really refine the entire process you use to acquire customers.
- Accepted – When someone encounters and takes in content online, it is almost always content they choose to encounter. Sure there are ads (and when placed in the right places, those can be a great way to connect with prospects), but even those are viewed on sites the viewer chose to visit. This means when a prospect connects with your message online, that prospect made a choice to take in your content and to heed your call to action. Digital media makes it far simpler to connect with your targets when they are most receptive to your messaging.
Digital media isn’t the only way to reach an audience, but its flexibility and non-intrusive nature make it a great way to be sure you get the right message to the right prospect at just the right time. As a full-service digital media company, Dentalcompare is ready to help you with any digital project. Whether your aim is to increase branding, generate leads, gain a thought leadership position on a specific topic, or connect with more prospects any way you can, contact Dentalcompare at [email protected] to find out how we can help.