Evolving customer expectations, new industry trends and technological advancements mean digital marketing is constantly changing. In this post, we look at the ‘6 Cs of Digital Marketing’ and explore how they provide businesses with an effective framework with which they can create powerful strategies that boost sales and growth.
Contents
1. The Customer
In successful digital marketing strategies, the customers’ needs, preferences and expectations have to come first. Understanding these is essential if businesses are to create relevant content, communicate via the right channels and build meaningful relationships.
Data is central to this understanding. By analysing customer behaviours, demographics and preferences, companies can develop detailed buyer personas, map customer journeys and uncover insights that enable them to create personalised interactions and product recommendations.
Increasingly, the use of advanced analytics tools, including those powered by AI, enables marketing teams to find new behavioural patterns and predict emerging trends and user interests. This helps marketing teams improve content recommendations, refine ad targeting, automate engagement strategies and adapt quickly to change.
2. Content Creation
In digital marketing, blog articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, chatbots, social media updates and SMS are all effective ways to reach audiences. The content sent via these channels needs to be high-quality if it is to effectively inform, engage, persuade and convert. Quality also enhances brand identity and can improve search engine rankings.
High-quality, is difficult to define and will depend on the content’s context and the audience. However, it will meet criteria such as being relevant, engaging, accurate, accessible and understandable, while meeting the needs of the customer in terms of solving problems and providing the right level of detail. Presentation is also important. As audiences differ, businesses with different customer segments may need to create different content for each.
For marketing teams, quality content is also that which achieves objectives, such as targets relating to search engine performance, engagement metrics and conversion rates.
Get your content working, read: Top 5 Ways to Convert your Content into Traffic that Stays
3. Conversion
Conversion is the crucial step of turning audiences into subscribers, members, enquirers and customers. Getting someone who has seen a video or read a blog post to take action requires several important things to be in place:
- Effective landing pages, tailored for audiences and campaigns.
- Compelling calls to action.
- Creating customer trust in the brand.
- Convincing customers that what they buy or sign up for can help solve their pain points.
Small details can often play a key role in conversions, including the colour of buttons or the wording of CTAs. Using A/B testing, where marketers can compare the performance of two live versions of a web page, enables them to tweak colours, images, layouts and text to improve conversion rates. Fast loading times are also crucial to prevent users from leaving the site before they take action.
Struggling with conversions? Read: 8 Tips to Improve Website Conversion Rates
4. Communication channels
With so many communication channels available, effective marketing strategies need to pay careful attention to a customer’s preferences and behaviours. While some may prefer email marketing, others would rather view messages in their social media feeds. Knowing a user’s preferences ensures the most effective channel can be used.
In terms of understanding customer behaviour, marketing teams need to know the best times to send marketing communications in order for messages to be seen or interacted with. Of course, this can vary considerably from person to person depending on lifestyle.
On websites, AI chatbots are proving to be powerful marketing tools that can provide customers with real-time support, answering questions and providing recommendations. Chatbots that utilise sentiment analysis can even gauge customer emotions, enabling messages to be adjusted to increase engagement.
5. Community
By creating a community of engaged customers, businesses can benefit from word-of-mouth marketing, social sharing, brand advocacy and customer referrals. Those who participate in these communities are also more likely to remain loyal customers.
You can build online communities for your brand through:
- Setting up online groups or forums. These can be related to your products or services or be about other areas of interest to your community.
- Encouraging user-generated content. This can inspire user engagement and strengthen brand credibility. Think of DIY companies where customers post before and after images of their home improvements.
- Running loyalty schemes and referral programmes. These provide incentives to retain customers by rewarding them for engagement, purchasing and advocacy.
6. Cloud Hosting
Digital marketing increasingly involves using advanced tools and analysing significant amounts of data. For businesses seeking this capability, cloud computing is an important enabler. It is the most practical and cost-effective solution for achieving the scalability and processing power needed to run the analytics and AI tools necessary for real-time personalisation, predictive analytics and campaign automation.
Cloud-native marketing applications operate seamlessly in the cloud and can be deployed in seconds, ensuring speed to market without IT teams facing technical challenges. Moreover, the cloud also ensures that websites and online content remain available; perform flawlessly even during traffic peaks and periods of high processing; and that data remains secure.
Cloud backup solutions also allow data to be backed up at the frequency businesses require, enabling Recover Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives to be achieved, should a disaster occur.
For more information about AI, read: The Impact of AI on Digital Marketing
Conclusion
The six points discussed in this post provide a structured framework with which businesses can create successful digital marketing strategies. By focusing on the customer, content, conversion, communication and community, and utilising the power of cloud hosting, marketing teams are well-placed to create campaigns that increase user engagement and drive growth.
Considering utilising the cloud to power your digital marketing? eukhost’s managed cloud servers are designed for running mission-critical applications and are ideal for businesses that need guaranteed uptime, performance, scalability and support. For more information, visit our Cloud Servers page.
