While we have slowly begun to come to the realization that traditional, above-the-line and below-the-line communications have ceased to work for us, we may not quite have understood the digital marketing game as well as we should have.  Taking your spend on press ads and billboards, and transferring it to your digital marketing budget unfortunately will not suffice. You may possibly be flooding an already overcrowded social media playing field with content that will not even be glossed over by your viewers. With the right strategies in hand however, you may be able to reduce your overall communications spend in the long run.

Let’s take a look at a few things to get you started on being armed and ready for the battlegrounds that social media, digital and mobile marketing have become today:

1. Social media doesn’t begin and end with the giants; i.e. Facebook is merely one of the social media platforms available to you. The point is that you need to begin by clearly identifying who your audience is so that you can follow their digital consumption patterns and create custom designed solutions for them, irrespective of what social media they are using. In some cases, creating an app that engages with your audience may be far better than a Twitter post.

2. You need to remember that it’s not just about getting people to come to you – you need to make them want to respond to a call to action. Ask yourself, how many of your Facebook fans actually share your content or have purchased your product? How many visitors are you bringing into your website and how many of those visits become conversions? What about your digital content is actually making them want to do something about it?

3. Another key is integration. You can’t have unrelated content simultaneously deployed on multiple digital or text marketing channels. Make your communications correspond with your current activities – if you are having a hot dog sale, for instance, use different digital media to bring out and enhance this fact – share photos of the food as it is made, run blog posts about consumer experiences, run live podcasts of your sales with quick interviews of people who’ve just tasted your food.

4. You don’t have the option of debating if you need to make your content accessible on multiple devices. People live life on the go and as a result consume their media on mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets. Make every piece of content you release accessible to anyone.

5. Don’t get caught up in technology trends – not all of them will work for you. You need to look into behaviour and consumption trends in relation to your brand offering and then look for the ideal platform to deploy. Don’t follow trends, become a trendsetter yourself.