We are living in a digital era where everything changes rapidly, including marketing strategies. Creating your digital marketing strategy plays a pivotal role in achieving your desired goals. Why? Because outdated methods do not work anymore. The time when we relied on generalized data is long gone.
If you yearn for steady and long-term growth, you need to develop an up-to-date digital marketing strategy to promote it. It may sound super-complicated, but it is far from impossible. Once you get a grasp on it and commit to it, success will follow.Â
Without further ado, let’s discover the realm of digital marketing and the steps you need to take to create a digital marketing strategy that will launch your business to the stars and keep it there!
Support Rocks of Digital Marketing
When you first dive into the realm of digital marketing, you can see its vastness. Knowing its support rocks is crucial for developing an efficient digital marketing strategy for your business. Best strategies combine several elements to optimally increase the growth of your business and carry out your aims. Now, let’s check out the seven main categories of digital marketing!Â
Websites
Website is one of the most important assets you can have to advance your business. Why? – you may ask. Because a website is a virtual place where you can display everything your company is about, what it offers and how your potential customers can get what they need from your services. Design it in a way that will let your customers reach you easily. Make sure you use HTTPS and make your website speed fast.
Not just that, it is a space where you can promote your business, reach new customers and keep the old ones. Powerful content on your website, whether it is educational or entertaining, can bring you massive rewards! Now, it is up to you to pick out which suits you and your business best.Â
Another thing you should do is make your website mobile-friendly. Nowadays, many people use smartphones over computers, so make sure to optimize your page to deliver a quality experience for those who come to your site using mobile phones. Advancing your page speed and site design to suit smartphones are just some of the SEO practices that you can implement. Keep in mind the email templates and mobile responsive design as well.
SEO
Here comes the magical SEO! SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means refining your website to become search engine friendly and get organic traffic. You can do this by running keyword research that is relevant to the topic of your page and using quality backlinks and interlinks.Â
Do not forget the quantity either! Pages with more backlinks rank high on Google. Also, using page titles and heading tags to outline the content is crucial if you want your page to thrive.
Social media marketing
Social media builds relationships with potential customers and engages them. These actions can significantly boost sales.Â
If we talk about organic marketing, posting captivating content regularly is a proven way of attracting people to your product.
Another way is to pay for actions and clicks. Paid promotion on social media works by targeting precise audiences by interest, demographics, income, and more. This way, you can reach anyone.Â
Native advertising
Native advertising stands for the ads that do not look like ads. It complements the function, feel and look of the media where it pops up. This non-disruptive feature makes it a popular choice for marketing as they do not look obtrusive.Â
Another great thing about it, that many love, is that it doesn’t fool anybody. It is clear that it is an ad, but it still has a notable effect on purchase actions, as it blends seamlessly into the content. You can usually encounter them in social media feeds and on websites as suggested content.Â
PPC
PPC or pay-per-click is a type of online marketing where advertisers pay a fee when someone clicks on their ads. This way, you buy visits to your website. PPC can be a good investment because it does not cost a lot, although it can bring lucrative profits. If you pay $2 for a click and manage to sell a product for $175, it is a pretty gain.Â
Display ads
Display ads are paid ads that combine audio\video and creative visual formats. This combo affects people significantly and encourages them to take action as it vividly conveys a message. Most of these ads work on a PPC basis.
Email marketing
Email marketing supports businesses in retaining customers. It works by distributing relevant and useful content on a regular basis. Here, it is crucial to have an organized mailing list.
Build Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Now that we know the basics of digital marketing, let’s move on to the steps to create a digital marketing strategy that will elevate your business!
1. Learn about your audience
Understanding your audience plays a vital part in constructing an efficient digital marketing strategy. How to understand your audience? The answer is by researching them. Once you define your market, start visualizing your ideal customer. Think about location, gender, age, and income. Using these data points will help you scale your audience down and create a buyer persona.
The next thing you will want is to discover the most sought-after blogs similar to yours and shops where they purchase related goods. Keeping an eye on this information will significantly help you in creating compelling content and outreach. Â
2. Define your marketing goals
Once you create a buyer persona, go for defining the goals that you wish to achieve with a digital marketing strategy. It is not enough to fixate on qualitative goals as they are too abstract for measuring. However, they are good for a start.
Let’s assume your goal is to increase conversions on your website. This goal may be too vague to be measured. Nevertheless, if you go further and create exact goals that are easy to calculate, you will see tangible results. You can redefine your goal like this, for instance – increase the conversions by 15 percent in three months.Â
3. Deliver powerful content
Creating powerful content for your website is a crucial element of digital marketing strategy. The rewards you can get if you deliver quality content regularly are massive!Â
Think about what kind of content suits your website and audience best. Generally, there are two options – educational and fun content. It is up to you. The key here is to be consistent with what you choose because this is how you build trust with your audience.
Creating compelling content can bring your website more traffic, position against other businesses alike, strengthen social media presence, and rank keywords. If the visitors find your blog useful, your website will be discovered effortlessly through the search engines.
4. Trace your progress
Now that you optimized your website, got to know your audience, paid for few ads, and engaged them with powerful content, it is time to trace your progress! Observe how your current strategy is working. Does it bring you the desired effect? If the answer is yes, you nailed it! If the answer is not really, do not worry. You can always turn to professionals, or if you are on a budget, learn from your mistakes and nail it next time.Â
Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal. – Earl Nightingale
Author
Bruce Webb is a digital marketing specialist and freelance blogger. He is devoted to exploring digital marketing trends, new technologies and sharing knowledge across the web. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for DigitalStrategyOne.