A seasoned Marketing Strategist, Oluwabukola Shobowale has offered insights on digital marketing execution to maximise available opportunities to understand the desires and habits of the target audience.
Shobowale spoke at a lecture organised by the University of Lagos Mass Communication Alumni Association (UMCAA) on Saturday, September 30, 2023, titled “Digital Marketing Execution”.
According to her, before embarking on any digital marketing endeavour, it is crucial to gain a clear understanding of one’s business mission and positioning.
While stressing the need for branding, Shobowale noted that the brand’s positioning statement, which may be an internal document plays a pivotal role in driving digital marketing strategy, adding that it aligns teams, guides hiring decisions, informs product development, and communicates the unique value and worth of the brand to the world.
According to her, different strategies can be employed, each with its own merits and considerations. In brand positioning, she said the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of the brand should be evaluated from time to time as the market evolves. This helps to build one’s brand and also helps to stay relevant in the market space.
The facilitator said selecting the right brand positioning strategy depends on various factors, including market dynamics, consumer preferences, and the brand’s uniqueness. Regardless of the chosen strategy, consistency is key across all touchpoints to ensure a coherent and compelling brand message.
Similarly, she said, the brand is the painkiller (solution) to someone’s pain (problem), and to effectively engage with targetthe audience, there is the need to identify where the audience spends their time online. This involves finding relevant Facebook Groups, YouTube channels, and other websites or forums.
Shobowale noted that the website serves as an online home base, offering control over one’s story, personality, and content with various tools including Wix, WordPress, Canva, and GoDaddy available help build an effective website.
She reiterated that when creating a website, adopting a conversion funnel mindset, and starting with clear goals to guide the design and content choices is key.
Email marketing remains a potent tool in digital marketing. Implementing email sequences, including confirmation, user onboarding, and cart abandonment recovery emails, can help nurture leads and drive conversions. Personalisation, timing, A/B testing of subject lines, and evergreen content are crucial elements of effective email campaigns.
While she stressed the importance of understanding and applying the Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) framework in copywriting, she also underscored the significance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as another critical component of digital marketing.
Meta descriptions, page titles, headers, sub-headlines with relevant keywords, and anchor text linking to other relevant articles should be optimised for better search engine rankings. Mobile optimisation is paramount in today’s mobile-centric world, and tools like Yoast SEO can assist with WordPress sites, she emphasised.
AI tools like Chat GPT, according to her, can aid in content creation, SEO keyword research, creating buyer personas, article writing, and more, providing accurate prompts.
She added that by following these guidelines and staying attuned to the ever-evolving digital landscape, maintaining personal branding through regular review and re-strategising, businesses can thrive in the digital age.
Success in personal/business branding does not happen overnight. It takes time and effort. Besides, digital skills will aid one’s efforts at personal branding and digital marketing. It requires intentionality, consistency, consciousness and authenticity.
The Dean of UMCAA Masterclass, Dr Kehinde Oyesomi said that the Masterclass session is held every second and last Saturday of the month to enrich and expand the knowledge base of members and the generality of the society in both academic and industrial spheres and outside the communication spectrum.
