Are you looking for marketing strategies to grow your business, streamline your marketing, and generate more leads or online sales?
Every year, businesses are still spending hundreds of millions of dollars on traditional marketing tactics such as out-of-home and radio and television. However, in this digitally advanced society, it has been proven that those marketing tactics are now less effective than they were 10 years ago.
With over 5 billion people using the internet daily, your buyers are online too. Moving beyond traditional marketing, a strong digital marketing strategy is needed to expand your reach, build your brand and drive business performance.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing, also known as online marketing, is the act of selling and delivering services online. It is a set of marketing strategies used to promote businesses on the internet.
It can be said that no business can survive without an online digital presence. The power of the internet is constantly changing the way businesses interact with customers, communicate with employees, and offer products and services. For businesses to compete effectively, their marketing strategies must be updated constantly to meet the evolving needs of customers.
How to develop an effective digital marketing platform?
If you want your business to grow fast and reach new heights in a short period of time, digital marketing is the optimal choice. Many people have already stepped into the digital world after realizing its significance, but for those who are new and want to know its potential, I’ll show you how you can boost your sales using digital marketing.
Here are 9 steps to create an effective and successful digital marketing strategy:
Step 1: Know your buyer
Understanding buyers’ behaviours and personas is a critical preliminary step for any business.
A great way to get in-depth knowledge about your target audience is through research. Qualitative and quantitative research, customer reviews and data analytics are a strong starting point for understanding customer needs and wants.
In addition, take into consideration things like market influence, the likelihood of repeat purchases, and expected profit margin.
Once you know more about the habits of your buyers, you can begin to write target-specific content for your digital sales funnel.
Step 2: Build a Digital Presence
An imperative step: give your business a positive online presence. Create a professional website for your business and use search engine marketing and optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing(SEM) along with social media to maximize your reach. Give your business an online presence to establish a credible brand image and consequently drive demand for your products and services.
Your company’s online reputation impacts the ability to sell. Not being found by search engines, having a poorly designed site and weak customer reviews are a constant threat to businesses’ reputations. Before purchasing any product, customers will look at your website and social media pages to ensure your brand is credible and maintains a good reputation. They will search for feedback from your previous customers and what they like and don’t like about your brand. Public satisfaction does affect the success of a business.
Step 3: Engage with Social Media
Investing money in paid promotions is a quick way to gain popularity on the internet. You might have seen the sponsored ads streaming on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. Depending on your business goals, these social media platforms can drive brand awareness, leads and sales for your business.
On average, consumers spend more than 2 hours on social media daily. 80% of top business CEOs, executives and entrepreneurs believe that using social media will elevate their business at a fast speed and generate more website traffic. A social media strategy can be a blend of organic posting as well as paid advertising. Both require rich and relevant content.
Deciding which platform to invest in needs to be based on your brand, marketing strategy and target audience. With that in mind, having a content calendar, key KPIs and personalized content based on your target audience will boost engagement, and web traffic and assist in meeting your business goals as well as communication goals.
Step 4: Search Engine
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) defines your position on the web search result page. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online and the type of content or solutions they are seeking. Optimizing your SEO rating is crucial if you want to drive organic traffic to your website. It is an unpaid version of marketing that helps your business stretch its roots to the farthest areas of the internet.
You can drive users by analyzing the keywords they are using in their search. Remember that most users rely on the first page of search results to get information. If your website is not ranking on the first page it won’t hit the good traffic that is necessary for generating results.
Step 5: Launch Pay Per Click
There is a level of skill required to build and optimize campaigns that generate a positive ROI. Like many marketing campaigns, it can be expensive if not done right.
PPC is the foremost internet marketing strategy in which advertisers pay for each click to your advertisements using an online, real-time, bidding platform. It is the fastest, most controllable and traceable way to get traffic to your website.
There are some trusted PPC platforms such as Google AdWords and Bing Ads, which can assist you to operate PPC ads professionally.
Google Ads is the most popular platform for running ads. It is widely used by advertisers because of the power of Google’s search engine and display network. Another key strength is Google’s variety of targeting and campaign types, including but not limited to remarketing, shopping, search, display, and video.
Step 6: Embrace Email Marketing
Among the MarTech tools readily available, email marketing is the oldest and most popular used by marketers. It is not only limited to formal communication but is widely used because of its low cost to deploy and its ability to personalize and automate communications and track engagement through marketing automation platforms.
However, email marketing has restrictions and its use is regulated to keep the channel a viable option for communication. With electronic communication regulations in Canada, you can’t email someone a marketing newsletter or sales offer unless they provide prior consent. In the United States, you don’t need prior consent. In both cases, the contact must be able to unsubscribe from the emails at any time.
The significance of emails resides in their ability to be sent out in real-time, based on triggers that come from potential buyers or leads.
Here are a few examples of trigger emails based on the actions of your target market:
- A potential buyer who abandons an online shopping cart can receive an email notification to complete their transaction.
- Reminders can be sent to a potential buyer’s inbox that a subscription to a service is up for renewal.
- A follow-up communication email goes out when a potential buyer completes a contact us form or downloads content.
Timely and relevant communication is the foundation of a good digital marketing strategy and email marketing enables a marketer to deliver on that promise.
Step 7: Create Great Content
Content holds the real power of attracting customers to your brand. Content can be in any form: pictures, graphics, videos, interviews, testimonials, whitepaper, blogs and so much more. Depending on the source and presentation it can give your business more credibility, followers, buyers, referrals and increase website traffic. Creating content can be challenging. Knowing your buyer’s informational needs and doing an audit of your current content is useful for developing a roadmap for building content that your audience will be interested in reading, interacting with, and sharing.
Keeping updated with the current trends, tips and solutions ensures you don’t miss any important information and keeps your audience engaged. Where, how and what content is consumed needs to be based on your target audience.
Step 8: Analyze Insights
What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get improved upon. With digital marketing, almost every interaction can be tracked. With social media, the likes, shares, clicks, email the open rates, bounce rates, websites, traffic, page views and new visitors, pay-per-click impressions, and cost per click, to name a few.
There are many subscription-based campaign management and tracking tools. Of these Google Analytics does what many of those tools do, for free. Google Analytics has a powerful ability to track metrics including website visitors, sales and lead conversions by source. It also tracks channels or campaigns that attribute to a desired action or goal. All of this makes Google Analytics an invaluable tool.
With the depth of the analytic insights available, it is easier than ever to improve your marketing and sales efforts.
Step 9: Leverage CRM platforms
It is easy to maximize your marketing efforts using MarTech CRM platforms in today’s technologically advanced society. A customer management (CRM) platform provides an organized method businesses use to manage customer data and streamline their sales process. These platforms gather and store customer information, allowing marketers to better predict clients’ desires and subsequent purchasing decisions.
Especially important for marketers having a strong CRM platform allows a company to build a strong marketing strategy, and nurture the leads that subsequently create a positive relationship with customers.
360 Integral Marketing can help you develop a roadmap for your business to excel based on the competitive landscape, your unique value proposition, the strength of your brand and the best pathway for acquiring and increasing your sales. Contact us for a 15-minute introductory call to determine the best digital marketing strategies to grow your business.
