For decades, marketers had one strategy in mind: reach a wide audience with paid ads. In a digital arena, this strategy simply just won’t cut it.
Technologies evolve. So do the worldview and desires of customers.
Short-term, profit-maximising strategies shouldn’t be the only thing businesses should focus on anymore. Instead, businesses should increase the time and resources spent on understanding customers’ behaviour and where they spend their time online.
2020 proved that a strong marketing strategy is critical to safeguarding the future health of your business. But we know how overwhelming it can be to navigate this ever-changing digital landscape when you’re growing a business.
We’ve put together a list of strategies to help you strengthen your digital presence and grow your business in an online marketplace. To make it simple, we’ve broken it up into three categories:
What Makes a Good Strategy?
First things first, let’s outline the three key elements required to build a good strategy (HubSpot, 2018):
- A thorough diagnosis that defines a challenge
- A clear guiding policy for dealing with the challenge
- A set of practical, coherent actions to accomplish the policy
Keep this list handy. If you’re lost or start to feel overwhelmed about your marketing strategy, let these three steps guide you and keep you focused on achieving your business goals.
Digital Marketing Strategy: The What, Why and How
A digital marketing strategy is a blueprint that helps businesses build an online presence through various channels including social media, websites, blogs, paid ads, and organic search to reach and engage with customers.
A good digital marketing strategy enables you to increase brand awareness, foster relationships with customers, and attract prospects in the right place and at the right time.
What’s awesome about digital marketing is that you can tweak your efforts and make incremental changes in the process to make them more effective over time.
Running a digital marketing campaign without a strategy is like trying to hit a moving target. For your digital marketing efforts to be successful, you need to plan your strategy before doing anything else. You need to:
- Define your prospective customers
- Identify your goals
- Determine what digital marketing tools you’ll need
- Watch your competition
- Review the channels you’re currently investing in and evaluate existing assets
- Audit existing owned, earned, and paid media campaigns
- Monitor, track and measure progress
Now, let’s look at a couple of digital marketing strategies that will help propel your business forward in an online marketplace.
Grow Brand
1. Let’s Get Social
There are 3.6 billion people using social media worldwide, with users spending an average of 147 minutes per day (Statista, 2022).
Looking at these impressive numbers, it’s safe to say that social media is a popular online activity. And if you’re not using social media for your business, you might be missing out on opportunities.
Social media platforms are constantly adding and updating new features to keep users engaged. They also continue to introduce new tools to make it possible for businesses to create more seamless shopping experiences.
For example, Instagram Shopping allows businesses to create a digital storefront where users can browse products. This feature enables users to easily shop a brand’s photos and videos throughout Instagram and lets them check out directly in-app. It’s a no-brainer – setting up storefronts on social media is a must for e-commerce brands.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn now favour quality over quantity. They foster authentic connections, meaningful conversations and community. With that in mind, use social media platforms in creative and meaningful ways to share images and videos that resonate with your audience rather than just initiate a one-way interaction.
Want to learn more? Visit our Social Media Marketing service page
2. Create Immersive Experiences With Video
Video popularity online is on the rise. It’s dominating all major social media platforms and is driving a significant amount of growth for businesses today.
Tried and true, a digital marketing campaign is more effective when a video is used. Using the right approach, video marketing can improve brand perception, increase engagement and boost conversion rates.
The trends we’re currently seeing with Instagram and TikTok suggest that you don’t need to invest a lot of time and money to create effective video content. This, of course, depends on your industry and your goals. In most instances, as long as your video content is well-executed, delivers value and is personalised to your target audience, it should create a ripple effect.
What’s great about videos is that they can serve different purposes across multiple channels. This not only cuts down production costs but also improves ROI.
For example, a 3-minute product video that illustrates features and benefits can be cut down to a bite-sized length for an Instagram ad. It can be posted on YouTube to increase brand awareness and attract new leads. The video can be uploaded to your website to improve SEO. You get the drift – video content is very versatile.
Video is increasingly becoming the most important medium to tell a brand’s story. Ready to tell yours? From writing scripts to editing footage, we can produce video content that will help drive your next digital marketing campaign. Check out our Video Marketing service page to learn more
Grow Traffic
3. Don’t Overlook Email Marketing
Email generates a whopping 4200% ROI (HubSpot, 2022), making it one of the most effective ways to attract and retain customers. And with over 4 billion daily users, it’s safe to say that email is here to stay.
Whether it’s through a monthly newsletter or a drip campaign, email marketing allows you to deepen your connections with customers by providing them with relevant and valuable content.
Not only can email marketing help you build a clearer brand and convey your business value to customers, but it can also be a powerful profit-building tool if done right.
When building an email marketing strategy, keep in mind that each customer is unique. So should the emails you send them.
There are tools available today that can optimise and automate personalised, targeted email touchpoints for you. This makes it even simpler to deliver your message to the right people, at exactly the right time.
Read our blog article on the importance of Email Marketing to learn more about the different types of email and best practices to get you started.
4.Reach More People with Paid Search
Organic digital marketing fuels long-term impact. But sometimes, it simply isn’t enough. When you need traffic fast, paid search ads will deliver profound results much faster than organic marketing can.
To put it simply, paid search advertising is a form of digital marketing where you pay for your products or services to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google, for example. The higher your bid is for a particular search term paired with how relevant the ad is to a user, the more likely your ad will appear on their search results.
If you want to target high-intent prospects, pay-per-click (PPC) ads are the way to go. A strong PPC strategy enables you to cherry-pick your prospects wherever they may be in their customer journey.
This allows you to show prospective customers ads they want to see. And when you show an ad with a relevant message to the right people at the right time, it is more likely to get clicked.
To make sure that your efforts don’t go to waste, thorough research must be conducted. Reduce your ad spend and maximise ROI by tapping into consumer data and leveraging high-intent keywords to drive high-quality traffic to your website, increase conversion rate, and grow revenue.
Make every cent count with full-funnel pay-per-click services with our team of experts. To learn more, visit our Paid Search service page
5. Tell Your Story With Content Marketing
Simply put, content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content through social media, blogs, podcasts, and brochures among many others.
People are attracted to great content that tells a story. As long it’s relevant to them. That’s why quality content marketing is such an effective tool for building an engaged audience. But what exactly is ‘quality content’?
Quality content is content that is authentic, relevant, engaging, and optimised for search engines. More importantly, it’s tailored to your target audience. Before you can start producing content, you need to first and foremost understand your audience.
A great way to do this is by creating buyer personas. Having this information on hand is vital to creating content that is more likely to deliver the most value.
It’s important to remember that people who are not ready to purchase today are unlikely to change their minds because they engaged with a single piece of content from your brand. For content marketing to deliver results, you need to produce quality content consistently over time.
Ready to take a deeper dive into content marketing? Visit our Content Marketing services page
6. Keep Investing In SEO
Old but gold, SEO or search engine optimisation, is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance, clarity and structure of web pages to rank at the top of organic search results.
Most online users discover and access content through organic search. If your web page is not optimised for SEO, it will be buried deep in the search engine results pages. And if your web page doesn’t appear on the first page, there’s a very high chance users won’t find it. You lose visibility, potential leads and conversions.
There are several ways to optimise your website for search. These include reviewing and improving the speed of your site, implementing designs that include attractive and interactive elements, displaying calls-to-action higher up on the page, publishing long-form content, and ranking for multiple semantic keywords.
And don’t forget to optimise your website for searches on mobile! Run your website through Google’s mobile-friendly test. Review the results and identify what needs to change.
We’re here to help you improve your online authority and outrank your competitors with SEO. Check out our SEO services page to learn more
Grow Conversion
7. Work Smarter With CRO
It’s probably safe to assume that the goal of your business website is to increase revenue. To achieve that goal, you need visitors to engage with your website and guide their decisions efficiently. How? That’s where CRO comes in.
Conversion rate optimisation or CRO is a strategy designed to increase the number of visitors who take a desired action on a web page or an app. A desired action can include clicking on a link, adding a product to the shopping cart, signing up for a service or filling out a form.
If you want to attract and keep qualified traffic, you need to work smarter, not harder with an optimised conversion process. Get the most out of users you already have by learning what makes them convert. Then, leverage this data to help you turn visitors into paying customers.
CRO involves a lot of tweaking, testing and measuring. Don’t have the resources? That’s where we can help. To learn more, visit our CRO services page.
8. Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your prospects with the end goal of earning their business when they’re ready.
A strong lead nurturing strategy will help you create long-lasting relationships with your customers built on trust and loyalty.
Every step of the customer’s journey should be included in your lead nurturing process to get the most out of your digital campaign. When developing this process, you should aim to push the users to the right path depending on their intent.
For example, users that download an e-book might not be ready to make a purchase yet. But to stay top of mind and build more trust over a period of time, you can send them a series of emails with the goal to educate, inform, engage and convert.
Utilise a customer relationship management (CRM) tool such as Email Automation, HubSpot and Pardot to help you manage your company’s relationships and interactions with customers. These tools will drive revenue much more quickly and allow you to pivot into new revenue areas by taking messages more efficiently to an existing pool of contacts.
Interested in learning more? Check out our Lead Nurturing services page
9. Automate Your Efforts
Succeed in today’s competitive digital space by utilitising a marketing automation platform to run significant parts of your business.
Assess automation platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud and HubSpot against your goals. Choose the right platform for your business and commit to it.
Customers in today’s digital landscape now expect experiences that are personalised to them. Anything generic will be left unnoticed. A highly tailored approach to audience segmentation can only be achieved at scale with automation.
Are you ready to explore the world of digital marketing further? Talk to our team of experts about your needs, challenges and goals. To learn more about how we can help, visit our Digital Services Page.
a strategy that will fuel your digital growth.
