If you want people to buy into your home security system, you’re going to need to get your name in front of potential customers. Thankfully, it’s easier than proving intent in a burglary case—provided you understand how digital marketing channels work and the right strategies to employ. For those of you who might not be up to speed on all the tips and tricks, read on for some important info on how you can start making progress with your digital goals.
It All Starts With Your Plan
So, why even bother spending time on digital marketing at all? It’s where the eyeballs are at, of course, but you won’t be able to reach them consistently if you don’t have a plan in place for tackling the myriad touchpoints in which you could potentially be interacting with customers online. In short, you should think of your digital marketing strategy as a roadmap/action plan.
All too often, companies jump head-first into the digital space without direction, with purpose, and without strategic goals. The predictable result is that they end up floundering—failing to allocate resources in the right way and playing catch up when it comes to meeting their potential customers where they are. To put it more succinctly: without a digital marketing strategy in place you are doomed to failure. Conversely, a good strategy will:
- Help you understand the market. In the course of researching for your plan, you’ll learn more about the true demand for your goods/services, where such demand exists in both physical and online spaces, and the behavior profiles of potential customers—all info that will allow you to better target your efforts and make sales.
- Allow you to establish a clear value proposition. In a world where competition is rife, you’ve got to stand out from the pack. Your digital strategy gives you the chance to put it all into clear terms—which you can then relay to your desired customer base when explaining why they should choose you over the other guys.
- Grant you insight into your customer base. Piggybacking off the above point, your digital strategy planning will force you to engage with feedback and customer sentiment, which will give you data on how you can improve in their eyes.
- Steer you clear of time sinks. Without a plan, you’re more likely to “reinvent the wheel,” again, and again, and again. Conversely, knowing where you are, where you need to be, and the best route to get there will keep you from retreading ground in desperate attempts to get ahead of the curve.
- Avoid hyper-compartmentalization. Without a digital marketing plan, you run the risk of segregating those efforts from the rest of your marketing endeavors. The most likely outcome in that scenario is scattered marketing that is working at cross-purposes, hamstringing your efforts to persuade potential customers to your banner.
Speaking more on that last point, your digital strategy absolutely should fold into your overall marketing strategy. It’s necessary to help you gain a complete picture about where your digital marketing plans fit within your organization, identify potential conflicts between your digital and traditional marketing, and start directing different resources to the most appropriate channels.
The next questions on your list should be around how to get all this done. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that fits every potential business, there are some high-level steps that work for most, according to CEO of Boot Camp Digital, Krista Neher:
- Explore the landscape and analyze your results. This is how you determine the starting point for your strategies, what avenues you’ll take for future progress, how you rank against your competitors, and what your customers are thinking at present.
- Map out your strategy. This is where you write down, in great detail, your goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics. Remember that goals are your highest-level achievements, strategies are what you use to approach your goals, objectives are the “measurable numbers” that link to your goal, and tactics are used to fill objectives.
- Define your target audience. As a business, you can’t be all things to all people. What you can do, however, is figure out who your ideal customers are, start developing buyer personas around these groups, and commence with precise targeting of your message.
- Build your content strategy. Refer back to your objectives, then create a roadmap around your content. There should be main topics you’re referring to frequently, and smaller topics that feed into the overall message and drive the point of your marketing efforts home. Search across social media for new ideas and areas to target.
- Choose your channels and tactics. Just as with your audience, your business won’t be able to market in every location online. This is where you narrow down to the few places your core audience congregates, and start developing plans to meet them there.
- Set key performance indicators and benchmarks. If you don’t analyze the numbers, you won’t know where you’re falling short or how to adjust. Make sure you set the parameters for success ahead of time, then monitor your KPIs so you know where you stand and how you’ll need to shift course to meet your objectives, goals, etc.
- Execute with best practices. The world is a constantly-changing place, and this applies to digital marketing as well. You’ll need to periodically examine how you are doing things to ensure you’re using the best methods available.
- Analyze and adjust. As we alluded to earlier, you have to know when and how to pivot in order to achieve success. Start with your plan, yes, but upon analysis and reflection, be prepared to switch things up so you can keep getting the results you want.
Be sure to put some of these general strategies into use when devising your digital marketing strategy, and, in addition, ask yourself some tough questions regarding your organization:
- What has worked in the past?
- Is it still working now?
- What hasn’t worked in the past?
- What has been holding you back?
- Did you have any key accomplishments in the last year?
- What enabled those accomplishments?
- Have you had any major setbacks in the last year?
- What was the cause of those setbacks?
- What are your marketing goals for next year? The next five?
- Who is your primary competition? How do you stack up?
- What does your target audience look like?
- Can you reach your target audience through current channels?
- Will your target audience be shifting?
- What is your vision moving forward?
Now that we understand the broad strokes of developing that digital marketing strategy, let’s drill into some of the specifics that are going to apply when you’re trying to execute from the perspective of a home security company or security system provider…
Specific Strategies for Success?
If you’re in the business of providing private security or offering home security systems to private companies, then you face some unique challenges when it comes to marketing. Chief among them is connecting with your target audience and delivering a clear message that your products/services are A) necessary, and B) superior to your competitors.
After all, it’s a crowded marketplace, and if your messaging is coming off too strong, it has the potential to put some prospects aback. So how can you, as a security company, circumvent these issues and speak to the potential concerns of customers without botching your message and giving your rivals an advantage? Diligent market research is the first part of the answer.
You must understand what it is that your customers need, how they are searching for solutions (products and services), and how they’re making decisions about what they should spend their money on. You’ve got to do some consumer research, but you’ll need to perform it from the perspective of your customer, and not that of an experienced security company.
One place to begin is by looking up reviews, by customers, of your own (and other security companies’) products and services. It is here that you can start to discern the patterns in your target audience’s frame of mind. What are they happy with? What are they unhappy with? What features would they like to see in new products? What are their attitudes about popular practices within your industry? What are they willing to spend their money on? These questions (and others) will help you gain a clearer view of pain points and possible solutions.
Your research will also extend to your competitors, because you’ll need to understand their strengths and weaknesses if you’re going to attempt to outmaneuver them in digital spaces. You should, naturally, review their website, social channels, and associated materials to get an idea of their marketing approaches, products/services, etc. Don’t just stop there, though, because a deeper analysis will reveal much more about how they operate.
If you can, have your employees secret shop in your competitors’ stores or call their support lines posing as customers. You can learn quite a great deal about how they treat customers just by inserting yourself into the experience. By coupling this with online analysis, you’ll be able to see where they are targeting customers and start keeping pace.
Once you have this info in your back pocket, you can identify the unique hook your company will need to stand apart, and start broadcasting it through your digital messaging. Maybe there’s a highly-requested customer service feature that nobody else is offering, or a specific piece of technology that isn’t being included with home security systems (but you’re now aware of and ready to capitalize on). Whatever the case, it’s what you’ll need to get across through your digital marketing efforts, and there are a few tactics you’ll want to focus on…
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is such a fundamental part of doing business online, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention it up front here. If you aren’t checking the SEO trends and adjusting your online presentation to match, you’re probably missing out on tons of valuable traffic for your website.
In short, proper SEO can help boost your website rankings when it comes to search results. If you know the keywords and phrases people are searching for when they are trying to research home security solutions, you can help ensure that your site shows up first. Be sure to target long-tail keywords that are specific to your area of focus, rather than try to “shotgun” every available term that might be tangentially related to your business.
It’s not all about keywords, however, as you’ll also need to optimize your site for viewing on different devices. More than half of most individuals’ time online is done on a mobile device. If your site doesn’t provide a smooth experience on such platforms, customers are likely to abandon you as a potential option, and tell their friends to do the same.
Social Media
It goes without saying that your business should be accessible on social media. What many businesses forget, however, is the “accessible” part of the equation. All too often, you’ll see home security companies establish a social presence, only to forgo customer interaction, fall behind their competition, and leave their momentum to die on the vine.
Don’t be like that. If you’re going to take your brand onto social channels (which you should), then you need to follow through by legitimately connecting with your target audience, and providing the sorts of interactions that turn prospective customers into repeat ones.
Email Marketing
Think of this as a modern evolution to those old direct mail campaigns. That’s not to say that email marketing should completely supplant your physical mail strategy (and indeed, the two can coexist with the right planning). Rather, you should be including email as part of your overall strategy and you need to think about what sort of digital content is going to get the best ROI on all those messages you’re sending out. Remember, be enticing!
Wrapping Up
Digital marketing is a tall order for any company, and for home security businesses, you’ve got your work cut out for you. That doesn’t mean this feat is impossible, however, and if you follow some of these tips and stay on your toes, you too can start adapting to the digital waters and bringing in prospects from the wide variety of channels that exist online.