Sharing secrets of Digital Marketing we learned over the last 13 years

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, Social Media management, etc are tools within the Digital Marketing toolkit. Disparate and powerless as one, but when combined can become a dominant force. These are tools that need to be carefully cultivated and deployed for achieving the appropriate business goals. There are no one-size-fits-all strategies in Digital Marketing, and hence what works for one client may not work for others.

We, at MangoLeap, have been practitioners of Digital Marketing for over 13 years and if there is one thing that has stood the test of time, it is that Digital Marketing must and will generate business results. If executed well, Digital Marketing can be made accountable to results, demonstrate exponential sales growth, and responsible for reducing the cost of acquiring customers, while building a powerful brand.

In our previous roles, our foremost responsibility was to generate leads for more than 50,000 small businesses that were paying us for leads across 250+ categories and 1,200+ geographies (cities and even localities). This meant that at a given point in time, our team managed more than 10,000 Digital Marketing campaigns managing the complexity of marketing for thousands of city-category cells across hundreds of categories. The goal was to acquire motivated customers who would buy a product or service, and not just generate visits or likes. We had hungry mouths to feed with a limited budget and our KRAs/KPIs were about achieving these marketing goals.

Thanks to our campaigns for multiple clients, we have result-oriented, hands-on experience across multiple categories so we now know what works best without having to make expensive trials using our client’s money. Our team has worked in Google’s premier partner agency for 5 years where they had a client retention rate of 90+% with a consistent spending trend.

What have we learned from our experiences?

1. Digital Marketing is both a science and an art. Science because it involves copious amounts of data that helps make the right business decisions. Art because it involves creativity — not just with the ad, but with the media mix, with audience group selections, with determining budgets, and with the ability to read insights.
2. Watch over your website. The website is the primary communication medium. The website is the best avenue for generating high interest leads in the inbound method. In effect, SEO and Content marketing become key, and Chat a way to convert unsure visitors into hot prospects.
3. It’s all about costs. PPC (Pay Per Click) is more about managing costs than about generating leads and sales. Unless daily budgets are determined judiciously and the funnel of leads monitored carefully, it is very easy to overspend at a per-customer level.
4. Relevance is key. Leads or prospects are requirements shared by consumers for free. Hence, they need to have a validation process to ensure there are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). You do not want to see a lot of leads generated and then discover they were junk leads!
5. Bullets galore, but no one silver bullet. Dig your heels with the successful channels. Sometimes a combination of channels will work with the right creative mix. Determine early on which channels provide for the best RoI and can be sustained over a period of time, and dig deep in those channels for better results.
6. What you track improves. Make sure you have systems to track spends at the granular level. Digital Marketing can be cruel at times, sucking away the budgets in days or even minutes. Hence, the need for robust systems to track spends and results.
7. Unit economics is key. Determining how much can be spent to acquire 1 customer is made based on the lifetime value (LTV) of a customer. The metric is computed by dividing LTV by the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC). Based on this ratio, the benchmark is set for CAC to achieve the holy grail of ‘unit economics’ — or profitability at a customer level. In other words, if the lifetime value is high then the cost of acquiring such customers can be justifiably high.
8. Leads have a short shelf-life. Leads and prospects need to find a proper home — with the right salesperson. Assignment of leads and prospects to the right team members and keeping track of conversions is key to success.
9. Delighted customers turn into messengers. Determine successful customer personas. Knowing who the happy customers are and what works for them which can be replicated across all other customers. Encourage advocacy and references from such happy customers and get repeat business and new customers from them.

We will be happy to do an audit of your digital assets and talk about how we can make Digital Marketing work for you.

MangoLeap is a results-obsessed agency making Digital Marketing accountable — to acquire new customers, convert prospects better, and retain happy customers. We make a difference to our clients because we have uniquely combined Strategy, Digital Marketing, Analytics, and Customer CRM into one potent toolkit that has proven to generate business results. We are so confident in the power of Accountable Digital Marketing that we structure our fee based on results we help generate for our clients.