Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

There are so many digital marketing strategies, and sometimes it can be overwhelming when you’re trying to decide which one to prioritize. Marketers looking for the ultimate digital marketing strategy need to have a clear understanding of their business, product, and demographics before choosing a digital marketing strategy that will be effective for their needs.

When it comes to your digital marketing campaigns, you don’t want to waste your time by choosing the wrong one, and you need to stay on top of your lead generation activities as well.

Here’s a comprehensive how-to guide that can help you drive customer engagement, raise brand awareness, and generate leads in 2021 and beyond.

• SEO

There isn’t anything more important to digital marketing than SEO, something that might still mystify you in its ongoing complexity. While it’s true Google’s algorithms can still become confusing, you can better grasp how it works when you work more with the concept.

It’s always better to have an expert to manage SEO for you if you want to truly succeed. While you can learn some basics, you’ll want someone who’s worked in it a while to fully help you realize the best strategies.

One recent strategy involves new HTTPS requirements already impacting SEO results. If you’re used to using HTTP pages, Google now suggests you to switch to a HTTPS format. The reasoning behind this is many contact forms using HTTP pages aren’t deemed secure enough.

What matters more than the type of marketing you are doing is whether or not your all-around approach is well-matched with your brand and message. To that end, the following are some considerations for creating an effective campaign in the context of your business.

• Stay Nimble

Here’s the thing about digital marketing: it’s a bit of a trial and error process. So while you absolutely want to make a plan, you also have to be flexible with:

• Shifting SEO patterns
• Upcoming trends
• Your content calendar and timeline
• One or two social channels only (the ones that perform best)
• Which KPIs to focus on
• When to get progress reports, where you can discuss and regroup

A successful strategy will always need some tweaking and as such needs careful and continual monitoring and adjusting. If you’re working alone or in a small company, don’t be afraid to hire outside consultants to help you dig through your metrics and redefine goals if something doesn’t seem to be working the way it was planned.

• Focus on the End Result

In marketing and product development, there is often so much emphasis placed on the product and the “numbers” surrounding it (profits) that sometimes people lose sight of the need that the product fulfils.

What truly matters is who you are marketing to, and why. You need to understand their pain points in order to get what they’re ultimately doing with your product. In other words, when you demonstrate the post-buying moments, they’ll then remember why they need it in the first place.

• Use Content for Lead Generation

There are many ways of generating leads, but one tried and tested method is by providing valuable written content and distributing it appropriately. When you tie your blogs and articles to a specific offer via a landing page, you boost your conversion potential. According to Entrepreneur, bloggers are 13 times more likely to have a positive ROI, and companies have the same type of results.

Search Engine Marketing

If you’re new to search engine marketing, you’ll usually see it abbreviated as SEM. It’s a form of Internet marketing where you increase your SERPs through paid advertising methods.

You’ll want an expert to help you in this field as well, especially one who’s worked with Google Ads and search/display ads. In the case of Google Ads, you’ll want to educate yourself first on how the process works.

What you’ll appreciate the most is Google makes its Google Ads easy to use through their attention to customization. They let you choose whether you want graphic display ads, YouTube video ads, text-based search ads, or in-app mobile ads. All of these are going to depend on your business style and the targeted customers you need to reach.

Google makes it even easier with localized ad capability, plus superior metrics to track how well your ads work.

Don’t forget about other paid ad opportunities, especially Facebook Ads. The latter gives you ample opportunity to customize to multiple ad formats.

• Go Live and Use Audio

When you take the lead on organizing and hosting in-person events, including live webinars that can also be distributed to valued contacts later or used as a special offer, you’re establishing authority and connectivity in the field. And the best part is that these events don’t even have to be formal. If you know that a few peers in your field are in the same city as you, you can plan a meetup night to connect.

Anything that you record in high-quality or that you do to facilitate education and connection will stick in people’s minds.

•  Local Search Marketing

You’re seeing a lot more attention on local search marketing in the last few years. It’ll continue being important far into the coming decade as local businesses realize the value of being found by local consumers.

To get started with local search marketing, you can again utilize more gifts from Google. Through Google My Business, you’ll be able to have your listing turn up the second someone does a Google search based on the user’s keywords. This includes your business appearing on Google Maps.

Google makes it easy to update your listing as well so nothing becomes out of date.

• Don’t forget about how important online reviews are, as well as your social reputation. You’ll want to inspire customers to write positive reviews on places like Yelp. On social media, starting conversations and posting targeted content helps you utilize inbound marketing. Inbound techniques attract customers to you rather than you seeking them.

​​According to research, some 4.78 billion people worldwide will be connected to mobile phones as of 2020. And Convince & Convert claims that 40% of shoppers consult at least one social or search channel as they shop and that 4 out of 5 shoppers use their smartphones as part of their regular consuming habits.

If you think about it, this is truly becoming the norm. Whether you’re looking up reviews for a popular video game, checking restaurant ratings on Yelp or simply seeing if your local store has the right item in stock, you’re using mobile a lot for basic consumer needs.

With that in mind, here are a few ways you can ensure that your mobile marketing strategy stays on track:

• Optimize your website for both desktops and smartphones
• Use clickable phone numbers, addresses, and CTAs (calls to action)
• Make sure your contact details are connected to a map app
• Ensure a quickly loading website
• Always review ads for social media or other types of mobile-friendly platforms.

• Content Marketing

As a connective string to inbound marketing above, 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.

In today’s time, you need to focus on creating content that can solve pain points and stay evergreen. Using shortcuts or black hat SEO tactics just to move to the top of search engines won’t work thanks to Google’s all-seeing eye.

So always keep “content is king”, as many like to put it. To make content marketing work well, you need to focus on mobile content, native advertising, influencer marketing, and marketing automation.

Think seriously about mobile content because smartphones are already making up 50% of all global devices. This is going to affect digital advertising, and how influencers promote your brand.

Automation tools send content to prospects on their mobile devices at just the right times.

• Remarketing

Another critical aspect of digital marketing is going after prospects 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.

Why have a digital marketing strategy?

Undoubtedly Creating  a digital marketing strategy is critical. Without Internet marketing strategies, your business doesn’t have a map for achieving its goals. You know what you want to accomplish, but you don’t know how. That often leads to the launch of a digital marketing campaign that fails to drive any results.

If you want to invest in digital marketing, you need to invest in a digital marketing plan.

Curious about how to create a digital marketing strategy?

Follow these eight steps:

1. Define your brand: Outline or use your brand guidelines to define your brand and how it’ll come through in your online campaigns. Think about your unique selling points (USPs), brand voice, and value proposition.
2. Build your buyer personas: Determine who your business wants to reach with custom buyer personas. Think about user demographics, as well as the motivations that drive people to choose your company, products, and services.
3. Create your S.M.A.R.T. goals: Use: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals -also known as S.M.A.R.T. goals to guide your strategy. Think about your organization’s short- and long-term goals for growth.
4. Choose your digital marketing strategies: Pick the best strategies for your business. Focus on the techniques that offer the most value for your business and industry, versus trendy strategies.
5. Set your digital marketing budget: Research digital marketing pricing to build a realistic budget for your business. For reference, major businesses spend $2500 to $12,000 per month on online marketing.
6. Brainstorm your strategy: Guide your strategy to success by planning your strategy. If you’re advertising, determine your ad spend. If you’re publishing content, build your content calendar.
7. Launch your campaigns: Following your planning, launch your campaigns across channels. Ensure all your channels feature the appropriate tracking information. Your website, for example, should feature your Google Analytics tracking code.
8. Track your results: Monitor and measure the performance of your strategies by tracking their performance. Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search to Console, and Google Ads to make your ROI better.

With these eight steps, your company is ready to launch your digital marketing strategy online. 

Final Thoughts

Follow these steps, and you will be off to a good start in digital marketing for the rest of the year. Expect these to stay relatively the same well into 2022 as well.

Don’t be afraid to work with digital marketing consultants -especially in SEO so you don’t make mistakes after weeks or months of hard work especially when you are close to get on the mark of your Digital Marketing Strategy Objective.