Three Existing Resources to Consider in Your Digital Marketing Efforts

All businesses are trying to save time and money, and do more with less.

And with a little bit of creativity and digging around, you can enhance your digital marketing even within these confines. We would put our money on the fact that you have plenty of resources and content to use starting today. Here are three ways your customer base, content, and employees can make your digital marketing efforts more effective.

Nurture Previous and Existing Customers

Clients who have done business with you in the past often aren’t aware of your breadth of capability or newer products, services, and solutions. Having only had experiences with what they purchased in the past, they can be an important prospect to reconsider. Don’t forget to nurture your previous and existing customers the same way you would a prospective customer, looking for opportunities to upsell and cross-sell solutions that meet their emerging needs. The acquisition cost of a customer that already knows and trusts you is much lower than a new prospect that needs to be proven. Leadership updates, newsletters, drip campaigns, and social media are effective, affordable ways to stay in front of them and keep them current. And, if you haven’t already, take time to check in on inactive, and lapsed clients to see how they’re doing and ask what’s keeping them up at night. Oftentimes, they will offer valuable insights that can help you craft more relevant marketing messages or even innovate new solutions. In addition, and if you feel comfortable, ask them for a testimonial to use on social media, your website, or a digital case study. They will remember you took the time to solicit their input, they will feel valued and they will be up-to-date on the value you provide. 

Repurpose Content

Think about how much time it takes your organization to write new content, review it, and get legal to give its blessing. You likely already have tons of approved content that can be repurposed online and in many different forms. Anything you write, publish or present is something that can be reformatted for digital storytelling. You can convert printed materials, presentations, interviews, technical papers or thought leadership pieces into blogs, social media posts, videos, or even micro-learning platforms and webinars. For example, we had a client ask us to train them on the business value of adhering to brand standards. The resulting response can now be turned into a blog post and LinkedIn article to educate many. Brochures and product documentation can transform into online forms that speed up customer service and provide better accuracy. Rather than starting from scratch, use what you’ve got as the foundation for your digital content marketing strategy and interactive experiences.

Train your Team

Involve your team in the digital marketing process! Basic social media guidelines can encourage your entire organization to become social promoters of your brand, and this makes everyone a potential lead generator. You should share links to blogs and social media posts to everyone in your organization, and train and encourage them to share and repost them online. For example, each week, our internal marketing coordinator sends a digest of our company’s posts for our employees to read and share. Even if you don’t want each person in your organization to be a social promoter, they can still be a great storytelling resource. An internal story generation and collection process can provide you with starting places for vignettes to share with the public. At a minimum, it’s easy to host a roundtable discussion with people from the organization to brainstorm customer-relevant topics – and then find the subject matter expert to interview for content. Finally, executives can, and should, be trained on ways they can use LinkedIn to produce thought leadership pieces that put your organization at the forefront.

Whether you’re new to digital marketing or have been in the game for some time, these existing resources can make your effort a bit easier, faster, and more effective than building from scratch. It can be daunting to think of where to focus or what new stories you need to tell, but you already have so many opportunities to generate content or business with what you have. With this abundance mindset, you’ll stay apprised of the opportunities within your organization to capitalize on and share your story in digital spaces.