Five Tips for Creating a Digital Marketing Program
Lately, city parking administrators have been reaching out to IPMI for tips on how to create an effective digital marketing program. It’s easy to understand why they are interested. Digital marketing is accessible, scalable, affordable, and effective. It is essentially a ‘must do’ for any parking organization or business, big or small. But how to begin? How do you know how to create an effective plan that will support the organization’s mission and organizational or business goals? For some, it seems a natural progression, but others may find it a bit more daunting.
I reached out to my colleague Craig Wilson for some tips. Craig is a longtime parking marketing professional who specializes in digital marketing. He currently runs the digital marketing programs of several of our industry’s largest companies.
Here are Craig Wilson’s top five tips for creating a digital marketing program:
What’s the Point?
Take your time when you first get started and consider what it is you want to accomplish with the program. Do you need to extend your reach? Do more people need to know who you are, or do they need to better understand what you do? Or maybe you need to communicate how your brand or your offering is evolving. Do you want to develop a community with your current and potential customers? Taking these and other factors into consideration will inform many of your decisions going forward. It’s essential to give this step proper attention.
Who Are You Trying to Reach?
Make the effort to understand your target audience. Perhaps the greatest benefit of digital marketing is that it affords the capability to deliver directly to individual target audiences. But it is up to you, the marketer, to define and understand that audience. How digital platforms compartmentalize and categorize their demographic data is worth familiarizing yourself with.
Wade Into the Current Digital Marketing Environment
Listen to others, both in your space and in other parts of the parking industry, who are already using digital strategies to communicate with your audiences. Simply put, get to know your competitors (both direct and direct) so that you can craft messages that are both effective and unique to your brand and offering.
Tell Your Story
Commit to making content that reflects your brand and tells your story. After working through the above steps, begin to create assets of communication (either yourself or with the help of an agency) such as potential social media posts, online ads, blog posts, etc., that support your communication strategy.
If At First You Don’t Succeed, and Even If You Do
Try, measure, adjust. Choose your media outlets and get your message out there. Watch how your efforts perform (digital marketing is highly measurable; don’t fail to take advantage of that) and make changes as needed to boost performance.
One More Thing
Here’s a bonus suggestion. Think about how you can use digital marketing within your overall sales and marketing strategy. Consider the through lines of marketing to sales and how your efforts are working to drive positive business outcomes, and ultimately to improve sales.
Marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every strategy, every tactic, should be designed to create an outcome that promotes your organization and its organizational or business goals. Be sure to keep track of how your digital marketing program is performing and whether it is helping you to achieve your goals. And don’t be afraid to adjust when called for.
stock.adobe.com / pikolorante
