Having a digital marketing strategy has become compulsory as many brands has started their digital marketing journey.
Although more brands are adopting digital marketing, so many of them do not get many results because they didn’t create a strategy for their digital marketing.
Doing digital marketing without a plan won’t get your brand far.
In the course of this post, we will take you by the hand and guide you on the steps you need to follow to create a perfect strategy for your digital marketing efforts.
What is digital marketing?
Digital Marketing are all marketing activities done on the internet and other digital media. It’s a means of promoting your brand, engaging with your audience, and making sales without showing up physically.
It could be done through social media, website, blog, email, mobile App, etc.
Digital marketing could be done offline or online, more like a broader version of web marketing.
What’s so special about digital marketing and how will it affect your business?
The world is evolving and businesses need to adapt to the digital world. If your brand is not digitally present, it might go out of business soon.
There are so many benefits digital marketing will give you over traditional advertising.
The major benefits of digital marketing for your business include:
- It helps you focus your efforts on just your prospects
- Spend less and get more results
- You can compete with bigger brands even as a small brand
- You can measure your outcomes
- It is easy to switch methods
- You can engage your audience and hear their feedback
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy outlines how your business will achieve its goals. It’s the method your business has chosen to reach its customers online.
A digital marketing strategy could be a social media campaign, influencer marketing, email marketing, online PR, etc.
A digital marketing strategy can either be time-bound or ongoing. Since a strategy is a set of actions to take to achieve a particular aim, your digital marketing strategy can change from time to time as your goals change and your brand grows.
Why should you have a strategy for your digital marketing activities?
Having a strategy for your digital marketing will keep your marketing efforts more focused and easy to measure.
Whether it’s for a particular time or it continues for the long term, you have to plan well for you to get results.
The Various Strategies for Digital Marketing Include
1. Content marketing
Content Marketing is an all-encompassing digital marketing strategy that involves creating content for your business to attract, engage and delight your audience.
It could be a blog, an ebook, a case study, or even social media content.
The aim here is to nurture your audience and make them like your brand.
Depending on your goals, your content marketing efforts should be measurable. You can do this by setting KPIs (key performance indicators) that you can measure
2. Social media marketing
It’s done on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
Social media marketing is not all about posting on social media but it also involves running ads and promotions to reach your audience. You can use Instagram promotions, Facebook ads, or Twitter ads to reach your target audience.
The good thing about social media marketing is that you can position your brand right in the face of your audience and quickly get results from it.
Always consider social media marketing while creating a digital marketing plan for your business.
3. PPC (Search Engine Marketing)
This one involves paying for ads on a search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. to place your brand in front of potential customers. You can pay per click or impression.
Before you start any advertising campaign on search engines, you should understand your audience and know the best keyword to reach them. Also, consider your budget and bid within what you can afford.
Do your research and learn a lot about Google ads before you start your campaign.
4. Video marketing
Video marketing is a content marketing strategy that involves videos. You can educate, inform or sell to your audience using video.
Video marketing is fast trending and it has proven to work more than other content formats.
Learning and investing in the best video marketing strategies for your business is an effective digital marketing strategy.
5. Email marketing
This involves sending emails to your customers and email subscribers.
This is a good way to nurture your leads by sending them your product updates, flash sales, discounts, etc.
Email Marketing is an effective strategy for your digital marketing if your goal is to maintain a good relationship with your customers.
6. Instant messaging marketing
This involves sending messages directly to your customers either on an online platform like social media or offline as an SMS.
This digital marketing strategy can be used for announcing flash sales, new products, updates about product orders, etc.
This is the best strategy if you want to reach your customers instantly. You can also use this method to build a stronger relationship with your audience.
7. Affiliate marketing
This is when other people sell your product for a commission.
This strategy is best for B2C businesses as it is the fastest way to make sales. B2B brands can also adopt this method if it works for them.
Affiliate marketing becomes a digital marketing strategy when it is facilitated by affiliate marketing software like selar, pay-pal, etc.
To be successful at affiliate marketing, you have to learn a lot about how it works. Also, make sure you onboard the right people to be your affiliates.
8. Online PR
This can involve guest blogging on popular blogs, reaching out to media publications and journalists to share your brand’s story, engaging online reviews and reports about your brand, engaging comments on your social media pages and blogs, etc.
The whole idea of online PR is creating a reputable image for your brand in the minds of your audience.
This is a digital marketing strategy that involves careful planning and execution. It might take time and resources, but it’s going to be worth it in the end.
What’s the newest strategy for digital marketing?
9. Automation
Automation is quite new. It is creating a channel to make the work easier using automation software and tools.
You can automate your email newsletters, social media post scheduling, lead nurturing workflows, campaign tracking, reporting, etc.
If you want to get things done faster, you should consider automating some of your digital marketing strategies.
10. Voice search optimization
Optimizing your website for voice search is the next big thing in digital marketing. As technology is advancing, more people are adopting the voice search feature to search on Google. Optimizing your content and website would place your brand right in front of your audience.
Voice search optimization is an advanced SEO technique that you should learn and apply in your business.
What is the best strategy for digital marketing to choose?
The best strategy for digital marketing depends on your business goals and the nature of your business.
Bear in mind that a B2B business will have a different digital marketing strategy from a B2C business. This is because the two business models are not the same.
A B2C brand can make sales without having to meet the customers. They don’t need to schedule a meeting with their customers before they convert. Most of their digital marketing strategies are focused on making sales right away.
B2B brands deal directly with businesses and because of that, there must be contact with their clients or customers before they can convert. This causes them to focus more on lead generation in their digital marketing.
Social media marketing and affiliate marketing will work more for B2C brands while email marketing, Online PR, and content marketing will work more for B2B.
This is not to say a brand shouldn’t explore other options because of its nature, but it is best to know the one that works more for your business model and adopt that as your main strategy. You can always do others on the side.
Steps in choosing a strategy for digital marketing
1. Understand your brand and what you represent
You can do better with your brand if you understand who you are. What’s the nature of your business? What niche are you in? What is the current condition of your niche? Who are you targeting? What identity do you want to create in the minds of your audience?. These should guide you in creating an identity for your brand.
For example, at Socialander, we understand that we’re a B2B business who’s focusing on giving brands the best digital marketing services.
Because of that, we adopted the content marketing strategy. Because of that, we invest in writing quality blogs for our audience to answer their questions and provide solutions to their challenges with digital marketing.
We even encourage our audience to schedule a free strategy session with us to understand their problems better before we offer our solutions.
This approach works for us because we understand who we are and we know how best to reach our customers.
The first thing is to understand who you are and then tailor your digital marketing strategies to suit your identity.
2. Understand your audience
The next step is to understand your audience and what makes them tick.
You can do this through proper research on your audience, understanding what their needs are and how you would help them.
Understanding your audience entails creating a buyer persona where you learn your customer’s demographics and psychographics; Location, age, income, job title, goals, hobbies, interests, priorities, etc.
You should also check the best digital marketing strategy they’re willing to respond to.
3. Evaluate what you’ve been doing and identify the gap
If you’re a new business, you can skip this step. But if you’ve been in business, this is a crucial step for you.
What strategies have you applied before? Your achievement? What needs to be improved? What needs to be added? What needs to be removed?. Answering these questions will give you a clear insight into what you should do next.
Also, you can do competitor research where you study your competitors and find out what they are doing. You can take advantage of what they are not doing to create a strategy for your digital marketing.
4. Create a plan
From all of the steps above, you should already know where your business should go.
When you have chosen the best strategy for your business, create a plan on how to go about it.
A plan should contain all your findings and actionable steps to take.
It should contain the following:
- The identity your brand wants to create
- A detailed analysis of your audience
- How to improve on your already existing strategy
- What to add to your strategy
- The major strategy you’re adopting
- How to execute this strategy
5. Set your goals
This might come before after the planning.
Your goal could be
- To increase sales
- Audience development
- Brand awareness
- Establishing thought leadership
- Increasing customer loyalty etc.
You can have more than one goal for your business. The main thing is to know what you want to achieve.
Having a particular goal in mind will keep you more focused and your digital marketing efforts more streamlined.
6. Consider your budget
This is very important. Any strategy you settle at will require resources to implement.
Your budget can determine the digital marketing strategy you choose.
Don’t neglect the part of the budget. Let your budget guide you in your plan. You can improve on your strategy as your budget increases.
7. Test your strategy(A/B testing)
Testing your strategy before you launch will give you a heads up on whether it would work or not.
You can use an A/B testing method to know what appeals to your audience.
8. Launch your strategy
The result from your testing will determine how you launch. You can launch straight away or you can improve on your strategy before you launch.
9. Track your results
This is where you track your results and check what works and what should be removed.
Benefits of choosing the best strategy for your digital marketing
Ultimately, a good digital marketing strategy will do the following for your brand:
- Make you more sales
- Generate more traffic to your page
- Establish you as a thought leader in your niche and
- Give your brand awareness a boost
Over to you
Are you ready to take your digital marketing strategies to the next level?
At Socialander, we help your brand with effective digital marketing strategies that will take your brand to a greater height.
Check out our services and book a strategy call with us to get your brand started.
