An effective digital marketing strategy needs a variety of tools to ensure a brand is visible online. These tools should leverage paid and non-paid strategies to establish an online presence. According to some research, over 80 million American adults said they are frequently online.
To reach this online audience, a marketer needs a solid strategy. Unfortunately, many brand owners still don’t fully understand what digital marketing strategies are. This article breaks down some components of digital marketing.
What’s A Digital Marketing Strategy?
It’s an action plan that a marketer lays down to achieve his online marketing goals. A digital marketing strategy outlines a marketer’s aims, how to accomplish the goals, and the expected outcomes. Digital marketing strategies are in the form of campaigns. For instance, a brand owner may partner with influencers to run a social media campaign to drive leads to his site.
The Importance Of A Digital Marketing Strategy
Having a digital marketing strategy is vital to achieving a company’s goals. Without a smart and competitive strategy for a brand, a brand owner may not make sales. A strategy is like a map that outlines how to achieve marketing goals. It enables a marketer to outline an actionable plan to follow in generating leads and making sales.
How A Marketer Can Create His Digital Marketing Strategy
Here are steps that brand owners can follow to create their digital marketing strategies.
Defining A Brand
In this step, a marketer evaluates his business and makes it known to his potential online audience. He needs to think about his brand’s voice, unique selling point, and value proposition.
Building Buyer Personas
Once a brand owner has known what he wants to sell, the next thing he needs to think about is his buyer persona. He needs to know the motivations and demographics that can drive his potential buyer to choose his products and services.
Creating Goals
With a buyer in mind, a marketer needs to develop specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based goals of reaching his customers. His brand’s long and short-term goals can guide him in creating S.M.A.R.T plans.
Selecting Digital Marketing Strategies
A brand owner needs to select the best techniques to give him the best value for his business.
Setting A Budget
A realistic marketing budget is essential to achieve marketing goals. A marketer can do some simple research to get the average marketing budget for most businesses and use it to formulate his budget.
Campaign Launching
After laying out a plan, a marketer needs to launch his marketing campaign across various channels. The channels should have appropriate tracking methods to monitor and measure the strategies’ progress. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help to track the strategies’ R.O.I.
Digital Marketing Strategies For Businesses
Companies can use several marketing strategies to generate leads and increase sales. Here are some of them.
Content Marketing
Content marketing focuses on feeding consumers with engaging, high-quality, and original content. Such content includes blog posts, infographics, and videos that provide value to readers. The content shouldn’t be salesy, but educational and informational.
Every piece of content needs to have target keywords. If a person owns a business that sells shoes, he could write an article that targets the keyword “best shoes for sports.” When using keywords, a marketer needs to be careful not to overstuff them in his content as that may make reading boring and tedious. He needs to know how to insert the keywords naturally to blend with the rest of the content.
The type of format a marketer chooses for his content doesn’t matter as long as it’s beneficial and relevant to his audience. The content created should also make readers eager to share it with their friends, coworkers, families, and other people in their social networks.
SEO
This is the most popular digital marketing strategy that’s in use. Through it, brand owners can make their websites rank highly for phrases and keywords related to their businesses. The higher a brand ranks for keywords, the higher it will rank in search engines, making more people get acquainted with the company.
SEO aims to direct more people to a particular website that has products and services to sell. If a site ranks highly, more consumers are likely to find it. Using SEO keywords can help a marketer target the right audience. With pandemic currently occurring in many parts of the world, there are also various digital marketing strategies that marketers should consider.
P.P.C. (Pay-Per-Click) Advertising
P.P.C. is a cost-effective and powerful advertising tool that relies on an auction-based system of advertising. Through P.P.C., a marketer can bid on keywords that he wants his ads to show up for. These ads appear above the search results, and if a user clicks on them, the marketer pays for the click. P.P.C. uses transactional keywords and can be placed on social media sites, chat apps, and other platforms.
P.P.C. aims to reach internet searchers with transactional queries that can convince them to buy products and services. The clicks on a P.P.C. ad can be used to direct potential customers to a company’s landing page where they’ll find a call-to-action to sign up for a newsletter or buy a product. Many businesses that are just starting can use P.P.C. to propel their websites to the top of search results.
Email Marketing
Brand owners can use email marketing to retain existing customers and gain new ones. Through emails, marketers can build brand awareness, encourage repeat purchases, and keep their businesses on people’s minds.
To build a useful email listing, one needs to provide his users with helpful information, or else no one would subscribe. Developing and refining marketing campaigns can also help to grow an email marketing audience. One of the advantages of using this strategy is that it can help marketers segment their audience and customize email campaigns. That enables them to create campaigns for users’ specific tastes and preferences.
Final Word
Digital marketing is one of the best tools that a marketer can use to reach a new audience and achieve his business goals. It offers many strategies ranging from social media to video to email that brand owners can use to get their unique goals. Digital marketing is the way to follow to increase sales, loyalty, awareness, and revenue.