How to Create a Digital Marketing Business Strategy

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Consumers and businesses are mostly always online. And you want to be able to reach them and observe their behavior where they spend the most time. Therefore, going digital is a must for every business who wants to succeed. So, how are you supposed to create, tune, and maintain a worthy digital marketing strategy?

🚀Read: Omnichannel Guide for Digitally Advanced Brands🚀

Marketing is in a weird state right now. Trends come and go at a rapid pace. Marketers even believe that marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the previous 50 years. Everyone is now in a state of total confusion. What is the best strategy, is this even worth the time, or even risk? But which ones are the most essential?

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a series of actions that are required to achieve your goals using online marketing. For example, your goal might be to generate 25% more leads via your website this year than you drove last year. Therefore, you are taking the required actions to achieve this goal.

Depending on the scale of your business, your digital marketing strategy might involve multiple goals. This can be difficult to manage but more experienced companies can handle this very well.

Here is a list of seven digital marketing strategies that marketers can adapt to help their businesses grow.

1. Email Marketing

Despite the predictions that marketers throw at email marketing and its fall, they are still around and delivering an impressive ROI of 122% according to the studies. Who would not like that kind of ROI? And the best thing about email marketing is that it doesn’t cost a thing to run an email campaign.

Though email marketing is highly effective, not everyone is able to experience the true power of email marketing. Email marketing is a great tool for generating more leads than through any other marketing method. Since you can combine it with other media, it’s also one of the most integrated marketing methods. Therefore, email marketing is a great help to shorten your sales cycles.

Read: How To Write A Good Newsletter

Picture 1. Email marketing

2. Search Engine Optimization

You have built a website with an awesome design, with cool pics and everything, and you think visitors will come. Right? Not quite. There are probably hundreds of websites in your industry alone. How can your website come up on the top when potential customers search for a relevant topic to your business?

This is where search engine optimization, known as SEO, plays an important role. Search engine optimization is a must for every website. If your website ranks high in search results when your potential customers search for the keywords related to your products or services, it leaves an impression that you are a reputable company. Who will trust to someone who is at the bottom? Therefore, SEO can be a great option for your digital marketing strategy.

3. Search Engine Marketing

SEM is a marketing strategy of using search engine advertising to bring visitors to your website. PPC (pay-per-click) is the most common method to generate leads.

Advantages that can PPC advertising bring is that you can reach your customers at the right time with the right ad, you only pay when an interested customer clicks on your ad, and you can control how much you want to spend.

Even when you have control over your budget it’s great if you have someone experienced that can help you in this field.

4. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a highly effective tool to grow your brand. The trend of influencer marketing is growing at a fast pace. A study shows that 84% of marketers expected to launch at least one influencer marketing campaign in the next 12 months.

Main reasons why you should adopt influencer marketing is that most customers have become immune to traditional marketing channels and word-of-mouth aspect of influencers builds trust for your brand. Customer will engage with your brand more because of the authenticity of influencers.

Reach out to influencers and ask them if they’d be willing to promote your brand. Some may offer to do it in exchange for free products. However, most are going to demand a fee. If you are just starting a business, you might not be able to reach to big influencers. If so, you should reach micro-influencers.

They are a lot of cheaper and sometimes they can be more effective in building trust, and engagement rates can be a lot higher than of those with million followers. Also, it is not complicated to track ROI of influencer marketing.

5. Content Marketing

Why is content marketing so effective?

Content marketing revolves around the creation, publication, and distribution of content to a target audience.

When you tweak your content strategy to follow the different stages of your buyer’s journey, you create useful content that your target audience will love to read since it will offer the solution to their problems.

This eventually builds trust and increases conversion rates, increase visibility for your brand and boost awareness. As a bonus, content marketing works brilliantly with your SEO efforts.

Content marketing is a big part of attracting a targeted audience. What’s essential about content marketing is that you need to make your content valuable, relevant, and consistent to make it worth the time of those consuming it.

Picture 2. Content Marketing – a big part of attracting a targeted audience

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing can be confused with influencer marketing. It too relies on the influence of people to bring in sales. In affiliate marketing, you can sit back and relax as others do your marketing for you. That’s a rather simplified version of explaining things. It’s predicted that affiliate marketing spending will reach $6.82 billion in 2020.

You recruit affiliates for your brand to draw in leads for you. Every time an affiliate partner brings a new customer or a lead it gets a commission. This commission is entirely up to you to decide, but the bigger commission is more of affiliates will join into your program. Each affiliate gets its own affiliate link, so you can know to whom you should pay the commission.

7. Remarketing

Another critical aspect to digital marketing is going after potential users again with marketing content if they didn’t respond to your site’s banner ads the first time. This works by tracking these visitors through cookies and creating new ads on related sites.

Ultimately, remarketing helps you stay more engaged with prospects, aids in brand awareness, and increases conversions. You can also gain the customers of your competitors, helping pay back any investment you place in creating new ads. The importance of remarketing is that it reminds your customers about you and make the conversion you are waiting for.

Read about the best remarketing examples in Paldesk article: Behavioral Marketing Strategy – How to Get People Clicking

Digital Marketing Strategy: 4 Steps to Thrive

Build your ideal customer personas

For any marketing strategy, you need to know who you’re marketing to. Any digital marketing strategy must be built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them.

Buyer personas represent your ideal customer and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your target audience. To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience. Or you can imagine your perfect customer by defining your own.

When you start to define personas you mostly start with demographic information like location, age, income, etc. Then if you want to build a deeper persona you start with other qualitative information like what are their goals, what will they get with your product or service, etc. Then, what challenges they face, what are problems they need to solve. They are all people, so what hobbies they do and what are their interests.

Take this information and create one or more rounded personas and ensure they’re at the core of your digital marketing strategy.

Identify your goals and tools you’ll need

You should always tie your marketing goals back to the fundamental goals of your business. But, whatever your main goal is, you need to know how to measure it, and more importantly, be able to measure it.

How you measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy will be different for each business and dependent on your goals. These metrics will help you adjust your strategy in the future. Therefore, you will also need the right tools to support your digital marketing strategy.

Picture 3. Metrics help you adjust your strategy

Evaluate your existing digital assets

When considering your existing digital assets to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy, it’s helpful to first look at the bigger picture to avoid getting overwhelmed. Digital assets can be your owned media like your website, social media accounts, blogs, images, etc.

Overall, things you have complete control over. Then you have earned media. Mentions, positive reviews, and any other content other people share about you. So, it’s any exposure you earn from other people. Paid media is as its name says, any source you spend on money to catch the attention of your buyers. This includes Google AdWords campaigns, paid social media posts.

Get familiar with all your assets, so you can have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media. Then you can start to think about what to keep and what to toss.

Audit and plan your media

At the heart of digital marketing strategy is your owned media, which pretty much always takes the form of content. Content can help you to convert website visitors into leads and customers. Therefore, whatever your goal is, you must use owned content to form your digital marketing strategy.

Evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from. Then, choose those from which you benefit the most and make them a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Evaluate your paid media across each platform like Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Figure out what’s likely to help you achieve your current goals.

If you’ve been spending a lot of money on one platform and you haven’t seen the results you like, maybe it’s time to redefine your approach and focus on another platform that seems to get you better results.

Digital Marketing Strategy Success

Building a successful digital marketing strategy is quite a challenge in the business world of today. However, by choosing the right digital marketing strategies, you can stand out from the crowd. So, take your time to see which one from above will work for you best, and try them to combine. Experimenting is a process where you will find out the true path to your digital success.