“You are surrounded online!” Your customers might not be happy to hear that. However, if they think it over a little bit, they will find they are truly embraced by various digital marketing stuff anytime they are online. Right, businessmen can’t miss any chance to do marketing, especially when customers spent that much time online and Internet is like a huge customer database. However, how much of your customers’ time and attraction is taken away by you?Are you sure you are competitive enough to win the digital marketing war? Okay, you probably say yes since you might devote a lot on display bars or sponsored posts. Unfortunately, I have to say you are missing most parts of digital marketing if so. Digital marketing is absolutely not only digitization of traditional marketing. It’s about online listening, content management, SEO, customer-brand interaction and other series of stuff. You need to synthetically exert digital marketing tools to surround your customers and tempt them to make a move.Just surround them! Don’t even let them take a breath! Let’s set  an interesting scenario to see what you can do for a customer’s one day.

Assume that you’re running a small bicycle business. John, a 20-year-old college guy,who is crazy about biking, is your perfect potential customer.He wakes up in the morning  and the first thing he does  is  clicking his Facebook app to get some fresh news  just like most young people do every morning. Are you sure he’s gonna see your sponsored post?Have you done an accurate targeting based on your customers’ demographics, interests or behaviors so that no one is missed and no money wastes? Let’s assume he saw your post! Great! However, will he click through it and make a purchase? Are your images and texts attractive enough? Is your website design user-friendly so that he could finish check-out immediately? Besides, no matter he will do a purchase or not, don’t miss recording his profile data and behaviors data in your website.

Maybe he doesn’t finish check-out and leave the page. It doesn’t matter.He opens his Email box. It’s your another chance! You’ve sent emails to him every week and hope he could read them. Will he? First, were your emails squashed in his inbox or thrown  into clutter or spam? Have you done A/B test to make sure your emails’ subjects, contents or call-to-action standing out from numerous commercial emails? Besides, do you have email tracking system to tell the unread rate, lead rate, and email owners’ profile.?The fact is that he hasn’t read your email for a long while. Neither will he do this morning. He gets up and goes to school, leaving your email unread.

What is he doing during class? That might be a very boring lecture and he is  browsing a website about “10 truth you need to know on bicycles” He thinks it’s very interesting but it’s actually an ad. Are you the sponsor of this native ad? Are you a good storyteller so that your customers may never recognize your ad an ad? He then notices several ads on different bicycle brands  pops  up and one of them is yours .Will he surprisingly find that it’s the same product he reviewed in your website this morning ? Have you connected customer behaviors’ data with ads to provide exactly what they were looking for? Have you noticed display ads or streams which has nothing to do with customers’ data are already out of date?

Luckily, he seems to be very interested to your bicycle but still wants to get more information in Google. He then types “ bicycle+cheap+fashion” in google search box. Are you confident that your website will be shown on top when he clicks search button? Have you done a good search engine optimization so that every keyword related to your product will bring users to your website? Besides, could your website remain those users for a while or make them disappointed?

Let’s assume that he clicks through your twitter link! Awesome! He finds your latest tweet  is about a brand campaign, where your followers are encouraging to create slogans for your products. You’ve got hundreds of slogans and posted them on your Twitter. That attracts him a lot and he makes a review on it. Social media campaign is the best method for  user-generated-content , but it could run into the opposite way  if you don’t control it well. Besides, you need good metrics to tell it’s useful or not. As for John’s review, could you response quickly to this review? How do you usually deal with customers’ reviews especially complaint? Have you noticed customers’ reviews are the best indicator of market?

John’s class is over, but he hasn’t decided whether he’s going to buy your bicycle.He plans to further look at bicycle products in Amazon and do a comparison this night. Is Amazon your online distributor? Do you own a shop on Amazon or let Amazon sell your products for you? Do you know the difference and which one is more profitable for you?

He is laying on the bed now, browsing the bicycle products on Amazon by phone. He might be unconscious but he has been surrounded by you for the whole day. Will he do a purchase? I’m sure he will,  if you did a good digital marketing like  what I said above!