If you are running an online business, digital marketing is key to growing your business. It helps you increase your online visibility and develop a reliable and trustworthy brand identity and personality. But designing and implementing a digital marketing strategy becomes a very daunting task when one sees a market saturated with so many channels and tactics. This blog has been written to help you in this regard.
Everything that you need to run an effective strategy has been explained simply. Ready?
Let’s get started!
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan of online actions aimed at achieving business goals through various online channels. The channels could involve paid search, social media, long-form content, email, etc. A digital marketing team comprising content strategists, videographers, SEO specialists, copywriters, social media managers, and email marketers, among others, executes the plan of action under digital marketing strategy.
Digital marketing strategy, if implemented professionally and systematically, can help brands achieve many business objectives such as
- Outreach enhancement to a new audience;
- Strengthening and building relationships with existing customers;
- Lead generation;
- Increased traffic to the site;
- Improved brand authority in specific fields;
- Sale enhancement;
- Encouragement of repeat customers and brand advocacy;
- Provision of invaluable insights into customers’ behavior, preferences, and locations.
Why Should Businesses Choose Digital Marketing?
But if there are options for print marketing and direct sales, why a business should opt for digital marketing? The answer is simple. Digital marketing is
- Budget-friendly
- Trackable
- Time-effective
- Highly flexible and scalable
- Ideal for existing specific groups
- A sure-fire way for gaining a competitive edge in the market
And it helps businesses reach a global audience and provides them an opportunity to quickly gain feedback from customers and rectify the marketing campaign immediately.
Strategies For Successful Digital Marketing:
Now comes to the point, here are seven strategies that have proved extremely successful in securing marketing and business goals and objectives. We will discuss them one by one.
1-Content Marketing:
Content marketing is reaching, engaging, and contacting customers through content that is informative, relevant, and consistent. The content could be in different forms such as blog posts, eBooks, guides, videos, podcasts, infographics, webinars, and more.
The main objective of content marketing is to provide information to customers, entertain them, inspire them, and ultimately motivate them to visit your site and become customers.
How to Optimize Content Marketing?
But how you can optimize your content marketing strategy? You can undertake many steps in this regard. For instance:
- First, define your goal and audience. Your goal should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART).
- Second, choose the right content type and channel. The channel and type should be aligned with the behavior of customers. As earlier mentioned, common content types and channels are blog posts, eBooks, videos, podcasts, infographics, social media posts, email newsletters, etc.
- Third, plan your content calendar and publication schedule. You can Google Sheets, Trello, or CoSchedule for creating and managing your content calendar.
- Fourth, schedule and automate for distribution and promotion of content by tools such as Buffer, Hootsuite, or Mailchimp.
- Finally, deploy tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, or HubSpot to conduct content audits for measuring its performance and identifying gaps and opportunities.
2-Search Engine Optimization:
SEO is improvement in the website so that it can rank higher in search engine result pages through using keywords and phrases related to your business. SEO aims at increasing the traffic to your website which in return helps you improve conversion rates and boost sales.
How to Optimize SEO Marketing?
Here are some of the best practices which are recommended to make your website SEO friendly.
- Conduct keyword research to identify relevant words and phrases your target audience is using. You can deploy tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, or Ahrefs for finding relevant keywords and phrases.
- The second important activity is the optimization of the structure of your website. You should make sure that your website is intuitive and easy to navigate for both users and search engines. Clear hierarchies of pages, categories, subcategories, and internal links are key to optimizing the structure.
- The third step is optimizing the page titles and meta descriptions. You must write unique and compelling page titles and meta descriptions by incorporating keywords and key phrases. Make sure to avoid keyword stuffing.
- The fourth step is writing content for a website that is relevant, engaging, valuable, and informative for your target audience. The content should be made readable through bullet points, images, and videos and optimized for SERPs by adding targeted keywords.
- The fifth step is the optimization of images to make them appealing and attractive. The images must be optimized by file compression and using alt text having targeted keywords.
- And finally, optimize the speed of your website. You can use different measures in this regard such as fast web hosting, caching enabling, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTM files.
3- Social Media Marketing:
Social media marketing is the use of one or a combination of social media platforms for connecting the audience. SMM involves creating and sharing content that is a suitable platform and resonates with the followers for effectively building brand awareness and increasing conversions.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are social media platforms that are featured in social media marketing campaigns.
How to Optimize Social Media Marketing:
You can optimize social media marketing by many measures.
- Define your target audience based on demographics, behavior, and location. And identify your business objectives whether lead generation, brand awareness, or driving traffic.
- Choose the right platform which aligns best with your target audience. The platform should also reflect your brand’s voice and tone.
- Select the right tactics that reflect your goals and budget. There are multiple social media tactics such as organic posts, paid ads, live events, influencer marketing, user-generated content, and more. Choose that best serves your purpose.
- Plan your social media content creation and distribution. You can use various tools such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite for the effective creation and management of content calendars.
- Optimize the social media posts and profiles by using relevant keywords, compelling descriptions, eye-catching visuals, attention-calling headlines, Call-to-Actions, and more.
- Engage your audience regularly. This is two-way communication and marketing mean. Stay engaged with your target audience by responding to their comments, messages, and mentions.
- Amplify the reach and visibility of your social media marketing content through paid advertising, guest hosting, influencer marketing, and other means.
- And finally measure the performance of social media campaigns through Google Analytics or Sprout Social and other tools. You can analyze various metrics such as likes, engagement, reach, impressions, clicks, and conversions to measure tangible business outcomes.
4- Email Marketing:
Email marketing strategy is the use of email to nurture leads, build brand loyalty, and promote products and services to the targeted audience. In this digital marketing strategy, email addresses of website visitors and customers are collected, then they are segmented into different email lists based upon the preferences and behaviors of customers, and finally personalized messages, often containing incentives, are sent through emails.
How to Make Email Marketing Effective:
You can undertake multiple measures to make email marketing effective. For examples:
- Build a quality email list of only those subscribers who are genuinely interested in your brands. You can use Opt-in forms, lead magnets, and incentives for encouraging sign-up.
- Personalize emails based on the preferences, behaviors, and past interactions of subscribers.
- Select email types and tactics that best serve your marketing objectives. Some common types of emails are newsletters, promotional emails, transactional emails, welcome emails, and re-engagement emails. Similarly, segmentation, automation, personalization, and A/B testing are tactics you can deploy depending on objectives.
- Make compelling, attention-grabbing, and enticing subject lines because these are responsible for conversion rates to a greater degree.
- Provide content that is relevant, informative, and invaluable for your subscribers.
- Every email must have a clear and compelling Call-to-Action (CTA). CTA should be compelling enough to generate desired results.
- Optimize marketing emails for mobile devices as well. For this, use mobile responsive email design, concise content, and use images very rarely to make optimized email content responsive to smartphones and tablets.
- And finally, monitor deliverability and compliance to ensure that your emails are reaching the intended recipients’ inboxes. You can have various options for that end such as double opt-in, and sending emails from a reputable domain.
And more importantly, clean your email list regularly to remove inactive or bouncing email addresses.
5-Video Marketing:
It is trending these days. You can create an entertaining content suitable for YouTube and TikTok. But it should not be expensive. Video marketing is a great strategy to increase the reach of your company, boost the revenue and expand the operation. Just like Email and Content Marketing, video marketing also demands informative, invaluable, and engaging content.
How to Optimize Video Marketing Strategy:
- Define audience and goals. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). The target audience should be selected based on their needs, challenges, behaviors, and preferences.
- Choose video types and platforms which are suited to your budget and audience. Common video types are explainer videos, testimonial videos, product videos, and more. similarly, platforms include Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
- Create high-quality video content optimized for each platform and suitable for your goals. You can catchy titles, descriptions, thumbnails, tags, captions, and call-to-actions (CTA) to enhance the reach of your video content.
- Produce and edit videos professionally and appealingly. You can use proper lighting, sound, camera angles, transitions, and effects to improve video quality. Similarly, you can also use background music, voice-over, and sound effect to further add an emotional touch to the video marketing content.
6-Voice Search Optimization Marketing:
It is a process of optimizing your website and content for voice search queries. The main objective of Voice Search Optimization is to enable your website to earn featured snipped or zero spots in Google results.
VSO marketing is rapidly gaining popularity as there are an ever-growing number of voice assistants such as Siri and Amazon Echo which are using featured snipped to respond to voice research queries.
How to make VSO Marketing Effective:
- Focus on conversational keywords. Use long-tail keywords and phrases that match how people speak in your content.
- Optimize featured snippets by structuring your content in a way to make it easy for search engines to extract information. In this regard, bullet points, short paragraphs, and headings are generally recommended for the optimization of featured snippets.
- Optimize for local search by including location-specific keywords in content and metadata. Make sure that your business information is accurate and updated on online directories and local listings.
- FAQ-style content is important for Voice Search Optimization. Add a dedicated section on each page of your website that addresses the commonly-asked questions related to your industry or niche.
7-Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising:
PPC is the auction-based paid form of marketing strategy. The advertisers bid for keywords that they want to use for their ads. When a user uses that keyword, the ad triggers and appears on the top of the results.
The main objective of PPC advertisement is to reach those searchers who want to buy products and services. When they click on the ad, they arrive on the landing page, where a Call-to-Action (CTA) attempts to motivate them to perform desired tasks such as purchasing goods, signing up for email newsletters, or other actions.
How to Optimize PPC Marketing:
PPC can be a very costly affair if you don’t put in place effective measures to optimize your PPC marketing efforts. Here are some tips which deserve your attention.
- Find keywords that have high search volumes, low competition, and high commercial intent. You can use Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, or Ahrefs for searching such keywords.
- Write compelling ad copy that reflects users’ intent and should include clear call-to-actions (CTA) and your unique value proposition. You can add keywords to further increase relevancy and appeal. Grammarly and Hemingway are apps that can be deployed for writing compelling and readable ad copy.
- Optimize your landing pages for ensuring a seamless and satisfying user experience. You can use videos, testimonials, and images for optimizing the landing pages and improving conversions. Unbounce or Instapage are tools for creating and optimizing your landing pages.
- Track and measure the performance of your PPC campaign. You can use tools such as e Google Analytics or HubSpot for measuring metrics such as impressions, clicks, cost-per-click (CPC), click-through-rate (CTR), conversion rates, cost-per-acquisition, and more.
Final Thoughts:
Putting in place an effective digital marketing strategy is vital for online businesses to succeed. In this age of fierce competition, business managers have to navigate the complex digital marketing world. So, if you are looking for an effective marketing strategy, you must ensure that the company you are hiring is following the above-mentioned tactics. And if you want to run an in-house marketing campaign, make sure to adhere to these industry-best practices.