All entrepreneurs will agree that they want to stay ahead of their competitors and see their businesses expand. One way to do that is through digital marketing. How you promote your brand to your audience online can determine your company’s success, but with so many existing digital marketing strategies at your disposal, which one should you implement to gain an advantage over your competitors?
If you run a business, you probably need to adopt online marketing, regardless of your company’s size or target market. However, for some people, this is still a little bit confusing, which is understandable since the trends in digital marketing are consistently changing. When new technologies come, digital marketing strategies will also change along with it.
With that said, creating an effective digital marketing campaign is doable, but it can be challenging. Remember, your digital marketing strategies cover everything that shows how your business is set to achieve your marketing goals via online platforms.
Why do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy?
There’s no denying that the times ahead have changed. With more and more technological advancements, times are expected to change even more daily. This fact presents both challenges and advantages in the business. Challenges on how you’ll keep up with the developments and stay competitive, as well as advantages in the endless, unlimited number of possibilities for your business to perform better – for as long as the right digital marketing strategies are in place.
Almost everybody uses the internet daily, and most people now use search engines to find local businesses. Plus, e-commerce has taken over the role that the high streets once served. Even the word Google has now become a verb. If you haven’t already started marketing your business online, the bottom line is that now’s the time to get started.
However, many people don’t know where to start regarding their digital marketing. Should you focus your efforts on producing weekly blogs? Or is it better to advertise on social networks? Where does paid online marketing come into play?
In reality, you need to utilize a combination of techniques to grow your business by harnessing the power of the internet.
Related: 10 Unique Ways to Advertise Your Business and Stand Out
5 Stages of Planning a Digital Marketing Strategy
Generally, for each digital marketing strategy, you can use the following stages to plan your campaigns:
1. Set Up Goals
The first step in planning a digital marketing strategy is setting clear, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. These goals will guide your strategy and help you measure its success.
For example, if your company is an eCommerce business, you might set a goal to increase your website traffic by 20% over the next quarter using SEO and PPC campaigns.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
Understanding who your customers are is vital to any successful marketing strategy. This includes demographics, interests, online behavior, and the challenges that your product or service can solve.
For example, suppose your company sells a fitness app. In that case, you might identify your target audience as health-conscious millennials who frequently use mobile technology and are looking for convenient ways to stay fit.
Related: How To Reach Your Target Audience
3. Select the Right Digital Marketing Channels
Once you know your audience, you must determine where they spend their time online. This could include social media, search engines, blogs, and other platforms.
For example, suppose your company is a B2B company, and you know that your target audience frequently uses LinkedIn as a digital marketing strategy for networking. In that case, you might focus your efforts on LinkedIn ads and posts.
4. Create and Implement the Campaign
At this stage, you’ll create the content and ads for the chosen platforms, ensuring they align with your brand voice and appeal to your target audience.
For example, suppose your company is a travel agency offering eco-tours. In that case, you might use content marketing and create blog posts about sustainable travel, share images of nature on Instagram, and use targeted Facebook ads to reach potential customers interested in eco-friendly travel.
Related: How to Use Facebook for Business: Facebook Marketing Tips and Tricks
5. Monitor Performance and Adjust Your Strategy
Digital marketing requires constant monitoring and adjustment. Using tools like Google Analytics, you can track metrics related to your goals, such as website traffic, click-through rates, and conversion rates. Then, adjust your strategy based on the results.
For example, if you find that your Google Ads are not leading to satisfactory conversion rates, you might test different ad copy, target different keywords, or adjust its landing page design.
Related: Game-Changing Strategies to Catapult Your Business to Thrive
Digital Marketing Strategy vs. Tactics
We often use the terms marketing strategies and tactics with the same meaning. But, I would like to mention here that they are different clearly. Yes, you need both as a part of your digital marketing plan. Let’s see what is the difference between marketing strategy and tactics.
What is a Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan or approach designed to achieve a specific digital marketing goal. The big-picture plan outlines how your business will attract and retain customers. A well-defined digital marketing strategy considers factors such as your target audience, unique selling proposition (USP), market trends, and competitors.
Let’s say that your company sells eco-friendly home cleaning products. Your digital marketing strategy can focus on reaching environmentally conscious consumers as a target audience for which you create buyer personas. Buyer personas are detailed descriptions of persons who will be part of your target audience.
So, your strategy could include educating your audience about the benefits of using green products, positioning your products as the best eco-friendly choice, and leveraging partnerships with environmental organizations for credibility.
What are Digital Marketing Tactics?
Digital marketing tactics, on the other hand, are the specific actions you take to execute your digital marketing strategy. These are the concrete activities that will help you achieve your strategic objectives. Tactics can involve various digital marketing channels, such as social media, email marketing, content marketing, SEO, and paid advertising.
Following the previous example, as an eco-friendly cleaning product company, you might implement several tactics to execute their strategy:
- Social Media: Regularly post tips for eco-friendly living and information about your products’ environmental benefits on Instagram and Facebook.
- Content Marketing: Create a series of blog posts on your website about the harmful effects of traditional cleaning products and the advantages of switching to green alternatives.
- Email Marketing: Send a monthly newsletter featuring customer testimonials, new product releases, and special promotions.
- Partnerships: Collaborate with environmental organizations to host local clean-up events and promote their products.
So, while a marketing strategy provides a long-term vision and direction, marketing tactics are the practical steps to bring that vision to life. Both are essential components of a successful marketing plan.
Types of Digital Marketing Strategies
When we talk about online marketing strategies, general there are three types:
1. Owned Digital Marketing Strategy
Owned digital marketing refers to all the digital assets that your company possesses and has complete control over them. This can be your company’s website, blog, social media profiles, email newsletters, etc. So, you have full control over your message and its delivery.
Let’s say you are a tech company and use content marketing by regularly publishing blog posts on your website about industry trends, how-to guides, and thought leadership pieces. You may also share these posts on your social media channels and email marketing newsletters.
So, your blog, social media networks, and email newsletter, where you share your blog posts, are part of your owned digital marketing.
2. Earned Digital Marketing Strategy
Earned digital marketing is online word-of-mouth like customer reviews, shares, mentions, or any other content about your brand that’s created and published by someone else. The advantage of an earned media campaign is its authenticity, as content created by third parties, especially people who use your products and services, tends to be viewed as more trustworthy.
For example, you encourage your customers to post photos of your products and services on Instagram with a specific hashtag. When other users see these posts, they will perceive the brand positively because the content is user-generated and authentic. So, this will be your earned media advertising.
3. Paid Digital Marketing Strategy
Paid digital marketing involves paid advertising to promote your brand on digital platforms. This could include pay-per-click advertising, display ads, sponsored posts, or influencer partnerships. The main benefit of paid marketing is that it can provide immediate visibility and help you reach a broader audience.
Let’s say your business offers a food delivery service, and you might run a PPC campaign on Google Ads targeting keywords related to “food delivery” in specific locations. Also, you can pay an influencer to promote your service on Instagram and, in such a way, reach a large and engaged audience.
17 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies
1. Search Engine Optimization – SEO
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization. The first of the top tips for an effective digital marketing strategy is to make sure that your website is search engine optimized, so it’s important that you benefit from top SEO principles.
You can’t overlook it if you want your online efforts to be successful. You can’t just build a website and expect people to visit it. So, you must refine your content and pay attention to the technical details behind your website’s design. You need this to ensure it’s viewed favorably by search engines and potential customers. Unfortunately, remaining on top of the latest SEO developments is a job in itself. If you’d prefer to concentrate on what you do best, you should hire an SEO expert to optimize your website to maximize lead generation.
There are many ways to achieve this, but the most crucial of them is incorporating the right keywords. After finding the proper keyword, spread these keywords effectively all over your website and even on your content. Doing so will help your campaigns become more effective.
When you aren’t sure how to go about SEO, it pays to take in SEO consulting services from the experts. This can give you a good head-start to avoid some of the common pitfalls when starting out with SEO.
The good news is that plenty of excellent SEO agencies can boost your brand awareness. They can increase traffic to your website, ensure you appeal to paying customers, and grow your business significantly. So, don’t think you have to enter the world of online marketing alone.
2. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices
Another very effective digital marketing strategy today is to optimize your website for mobile users. This is because mobile internet users spend more time searching for businesses online.
With so many smartphones getting even more advanced and upgraded, this makes a lot of sense. People are spending their idle time on their mobile phones. Thus, the need for you to touch on this market by optimizing your website for mobile devices, you’ll be able to capture these users and drive more sales to your business than ever before. You need to implement mobile optimization into your overall website design and development efforts.
Above anything else with mobile optimization, one of the most important aspects to meet is ensuring that your navigation isn’t hard to follow. Make sure that your text is more readable, even on smaller screens. Avoid using large texts because your visitor may take a long time to read. Your images should also be optimized.
Take special notice of the page loading speed so that you don’t lose customers who normally wouldn’t want to wait too long for their website to load.
3. Incorporate Voice Search Optimization
Another important digital marketing strategy you must use today is voice search optimization.
Voice search optimization refers to the process of optimizing your website and content to improve its visibility in voice search results. With the increasing popularity of voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, and Apple’s Siri, more and more people are using their voices to search the internet.
According to Statista, it’s estimated that in 2024, there will be more than 8 billion digital voice assistants in use worldwide, up from 3.25 billion in 2019. This growing trend makes voice search optimization a critical part of any digital marketing strategy.
Voice search queries tend to be more conversational and longer than text searches. Therefore, it’s essential to understand how your audience speaks about your products, services, or topics related to your business.
As voice search queries are more conversational, they often include more long-tail keywords – longer and more specific keyword phrases. Incorporating these into your content can increase your chances of ranking higher in voice search results.
But remember that many voice searches are local in nature, such as “Where’s the nearest coffee shop?” If you have a physical location, ensure your website has up-to-date and accurate information about your location, opening hours, and contact details.
Voice assistants prefer content that is easy to read and understand. Using headers, bullet points, and short sentences can make your content more digestible for them.
4. Keep Your Website Clean and Easy to Browse
A clean and easy-to-browse website is another digital marketing strategy you must incorporate. Once you’ve already got your website, it’s necessary for you to keep it clean and clutter-free. That way, you don’t confuse your website visitors or give them an eyesore on your site.
You have to start with making your graphics relevant to the audience that’ll be visiting your site. Don’t overcrowd your background or the main image with unnecessary elements. Also, keep the fonts that you use as big as possible. The font size and color should be appropriate according to the overall theme of the website as well as the target audience.
5. Create video ads
If you’ve worked with a digital marketing agency, you’re probably aware of the many benefits of video marketing. According to digital marketing experts, online videos are more likely to provide higher ROI if they appear on your prospective customers’ news feeds.
In addition, millions of people spend hours every day on social media, and creating video ads on these platforms can change the course of your marketing campaign. Moreover, it’s a cost-effective approach compared to advertising on television. Therefore, you don’t need to worry about spending big with this marketing approach.
Related: Making Your Mark on Online Marketing: Six Proven Methods to Amplify Your Skills
6. Put A Weight of Effort on Content Marketing Strategy
Content creation is one great earned media strategy and one of the most important aspects of creating an audience for your product or service.
With the number of articles that are produced all over the World Wide Web, it can be challenging to stand out. However, there are ways to ensure readers discover your content with this digital marketing strategy.
Regarding content marketing and writing articles, people tend only to read what interests them. So, you’ve got to ensure that you’ll hit the sweet spot of your target audience. This is the only way to get them to stay and continue patronizing your website above others.
For your website to be noticed by everyone, your content marketing strategy must ensure that you create original and informative content.
Lastly, the title of your article is very important. A reader should immediately know that your content is worth reading. However, this doesn’t mean that you should overdo it with the title of your articles. You should craft a title that describes your content well but doesn’t make it sound like a sales pitch.
You can also partner with an SEO company with dedicated professionals to write eye-catching headlines and develop a comprehensive online marketing strategy, including blogging as an earned media strategy, paid advertising, and much more.
7. Keep Your Content Fresh
Another important tip for an effective digital marketing strategy is to keep things fresh. Instead of summarizing the same old website content, try to create new content for your website. That way, you stay relevant in today’s competitive times.
People love to learn new things, and your website can become a great source of information if you put a lot of thought into it. Hence, give people plenty of information about your products and services, especially on how they can be useful in one’s life.
8. Interactive Content Marketing
Content continues to be the king of digital marketing strategy and will continue to benefit companies if used wisely.
Digital marketers suggest that interactive content marketing can make your marketing campaign stand out and get a massive response from your target audience. You can make the most of 360-degree videos, shoppable posts, polls, and quizzes to know what your audience wants. Accordingly, you can develop products or services that meet your customers’ demands.
9. Use Video Marketing Strategy
Apart from just posting images, switch things up a bit once in a while by posting videos as a part of your video marketing strategy. When you post this type of content, give your viewers something to get excited about.
Don’t offer purely text all the time, as this can get boring and very routine. Video marketing is a good way to capture people’s attention simply because they’re catchy and interesting.
Your viewers can watch them even on the go, such as waiting for the train during their morning commute. This gives your marketing campaigns a better impact and recall in the minds of your followers and target customers. If this is the case, you know that you’re winning in your digital marketing strategy.
10. Have A Strong Presence on Social Media Platforms
Social media marketing is an important part of your digital marketing strategy and should be integrated into all of your online activities.
Since social media sites are rapidly growing more popular, this is truly an avenue for you not to miss out on; you could be missing out on a wide population of followers if you don’t use this platform to your advantage.
Using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram to engage with potential customers and share information about your company and your products and services will help you increase your business’s exposure. This is why many of the best digital marketing strategies focus on integrating social media marketing into their content creation efforts.
Social media can be an incredible tool to use for the success of your business. It’s rapidly becoming one of the most commonly used tools by people online. With all the benefits of social media marketing, it’s no wonder it’s widely used.
Remember, social media marketing is a great way to drive traffic and generate interest in your website. It’s an extremely effective way to reach customers in a personalized way, which builds trust and credibility. This is the first and most important benefit of social networking.
Social media allows you to connect with your consumers more personally, which builds customer loyalty. While it can seem overwhelming, the importance of its use can never be overstated, and it’s a highly cost-effective way to market your business.
11. Influencer marketing strategy
Influencer marketing today has become one of the best digital marketing strategies that will quickly bring results.
If you don’t know how to get started with social media, you might want to reach out to influencers (people with lots of followers) to spread awareness about your business.
12. Posting social media stories
Social media stories have become an extremely popular digital marketing strategy because they give you the opportunity to post enticing offers and important announcements within a limited time.
These stories get deleted automatically after 24 hours. Announcing a limited-period offer can create a FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) effect on your audience. You can instruct them to swipe up the story to learn more about the request and redirect them to your website through the “swipe up” feature to increase the chances of converting the visit into a sale.
13. Venture Into Email Marketing
Email marketing is the online version of what SMS marketing used to be. As its name implies, this digital marketing strategy requires you to market your brand by utilizing the email addresses of your subscribers.
The best way to start building a list of subscribers for your email marketing campaigns is to enable a pop-up form on your website. You can use this form so website visitors can enter their email addresses. That way, they can be updated and notified about new products, promotions, and other recent activities in your business.
The key focus in content marketing is to give your subscribers up-to-date information and excellent content in your email marketing campaign. Otherwise, they won’t even bother reading your email. Worse, your followers might unsubscribe, and your email marketing efforts will not achieve the desired results.
14. Focusing on insight-driven marketing
Many customers prefer buying trending products, so it makes sense that you invest in insight-driven marketing to increase your sales volume. So, this digital marketing strategy is important for your success.
First, you need to show the potential customers what’s trending and the products available under that umbrella from your brand. Apart from providing trends of similar products, you can offer statistics regarding the popularity of the products.
For example, suppose you sell mobile phones. In that case, you can share details about how many units of a particular model are already sold to attract potential customers into buying the same product.
So, don’t hesitate to include insight-driven marketing in your digital marketing strategy.
15. Using AI to provide personalized recommendations
Recommending products based on the recent search results of your target audience can give you an edge over your competitors.
This strategy requires artificial intelligence and machine learning. It needs to study your audience’s search results on Google and e-commerce websites and then provide recommendations on social media sites.
Competition in the modern era is more about how innovative you are with your digital marketing strategy and techniques. If executed properly, even the most straightforward strategy can work for your business and leave your competitors behind.
16. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Another important digital marketing strategy you can use is PPC advertisement.
Before you start with PPC advertising, defining what you want to achieve is crucial. Is it to increase website traffic, generate leads, boost sales, or improve brand awareness?
Next, you must understand your target audience if you want to succeed with this marketing campaign. You need to know their demographics, interests, online behavior, and what problem your product or service can solve for them.
You can use several PPC advertising platforms, including Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The right platform for you depends on where your target audience spends most of their time online.
When we talk about PPC advertising, keywords are crucial. Users type these words and phrases into search engines when looking for a product or service, and by bidding on relevant keywords, you can ensure your ads appear in front of the right people.
Several tools, such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest, can help you find the best keywords for your campaign.
Remember that your ads need to be high-quality and relevant to attract clicks. They should include a strong headline, a compelling call to action, and a clear message about the benefits of your product or service.
When someone clicks on your ad, they should be taken to a landing page that matches the ad’s promise. The landing page should be easy to navigate, have a clear call to action, and provide the information the visitor wants.
PPC advertising requires constant monitoring and adjustment. You should regularly check the performance of your ads and keywords and adjust this digital marketing strategy, such as changing your ad copy, adjusting your bids, or trying different keywords.
17. Strive to Have Strong Engagement with Customers
In today’s digital age, digital presence is not enough for you to be competitive. Once you have established a strong digital presence, you’ll have to take one step further from it. This involves establishing a strong presence with your target customers and then understanding the customer journeys from when they first come across your site until a deal is closed.
Begin with creating content that inspires interaction and conversation on your page. Offer them value to get your customers to talk to you and inspire a conversation with you.
Remember that the more you’re talked about, the more popular you become in the digital world. This can set you in the right direction of obtaining a higher market share than that of your competitors.
Conclusion
With more competition in business nowadays, the key tip for survival is always to seek new ways to advertise your business. New tactics and strategies emerge daily, so you must be on top of your game. Make sure you implement the older, tried-and-tested strategies, but also keep an open mind for emerging ones.
Establishing sound digital marketing strategies is crucial to your success. Remember, it’s all about making your customer’s experience enjoyable. They’ll wholeheartedly spread the word about your products and services if they’re happy.
