What Are the Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies?
Marketers looking to create the ultimate digital marketing strategy need to have a clear understanding of their business, product, and demographics before choosing one that will be effective for their needs. In our research, ‘The Marketing Evolution: Leadership, Transformation, Skills, Challenges & the Future’ we found that 53% of senior marketers are spending significantly more on digital marketing channels while many report a lack of talent to compete in a demanding customer environment - which increases the need for a well planned strategy to guide activities. This is is becoming ever-more evident with the growth of AI in digital marketing. Here’s a comprehensive guide to help you boost customer engagement, raise brand awareness, and generate leads to drive business growth.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for using channels to grow your visibility online. It should look at factors such as your target audience, strengths and weaknesses, and competitors. To create an effective strategy you should use data across the business to inform and speculate. This will help you establish which marketing channels to use or test, your target audience, and how to communicate your message or brand. Note: A strategy is different from tactics as these are the actions you take to implement your strategy.
4 Tips for Creating an Effective Digital Strategy
There are a few key elements to consider in creating a digital marketing strategy.
1. Understand your customer
No digital marketing strategy will be effective if you don't have a clear understanding of who buys your product, why they buy it, and where they buy it. Use data and demographics to create a robust profile of your audience and inform your tactics by following these steps:
- Define the channels that fit your key demographics
- Speak your customer’s language
- Understand their pain points and how to switch on emotions
- Create buyer personas to help customize content and predict buying patterns
- Be culturally aware
- Consider partnerships such as with influencers
- Focus on action-oriented experiences and results rather than the product
- Use automation tools for segmentation and targeting
2. Audit & Assess
To create an effective strategy, it’s important to know the digital marketing channels and assets you currently use and have. Therefore you should conduct a full channel and content audit and include everything on a spreadsheet to get a full picture of your marketing activities (across owned, paid, and earned media). You should then link each piece to your organizational goals. So if your key goal is to drive revenue, look at each channel and asset (you may just want to look at the top performers if you have a lot of content) and map it to revenue. Doing this will help you understand what is currently driving revenue and what isn’t. You can then double down on what’s successful and look to explore new content pieces or channels for any further impact.
3. Focus on the End Result
In marketing and product development, there can be so much emphasis on the product and the ‘numbers’ around it (i.e. revenue) that sometimes people lose sight of the need that the product fulfills. What truly matters is who you are marketing to, and why. You need to understand their pain points to get what people are doing with your product or service. In other words, when you demonstrate the post-buying moments, they will remember why they need it in the first place.
4. Review and Refine
When you develop your strategy, it's essential to include key performance indicators (KPIs) that fit with crucial business goals. You need to have a plan in place to understand your goals and objectives and then monitor the metrics to get insights about the KPIs that matter.
What are the Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies?
The digital marketing strategies you use will depend on the needs and goals of your business: for example, to grow leads or build brand awareness. Keep in mind that any strategy you use should align with your brand and message. Let’s look at a few digital strategies that are proven to get results and help you build online visibility and generate leads.
Content Marketing
There are many ways of generating leads, but one tried and tested method is by providing valuable content and using digital channels to promote it. This is what’s known as content marketing. For example, you can tie an Instagram post to a specific offer using a landing page, thereby boosting your conversion potential. This could be as simple as promoting an ebook that is relevant to your audience but making it gated so you gather a visitor’s details. There are a lot of content types that you can use so don’t just stick to one. Along with blogs, create videos, put some energy into creating a valuable ebook, or look at hosting a webinar with in-house staff or experts to drive leads and engagement.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is an effective way to reach and influence 4.6 billion people across the globe. Plus depending on the network, social media has such reach you can target specific age groups and locations. While you can simply use social media to promote your brand, product or service, it can also be instrumental in developing a community. This allows you to have meaningful engagement with prospects or customers and create brand advocates that will promote your brand without being asked. Social media marketing covers a highly varied landscape that is constantly changing, and each channel requires its own strategy and metrics. Make sure you keep social listening as part of your overall strategy to help you understand and engage with your audience.
SEO
make your brand, product or service more visible online. The goal of SEO is to optimize your content - whether that’s a homepage, landing page or blog - so it gets found easily by existing and prospective customers. It not only helps to drive traffic but improves user experience and can help to boost your authority. There are a few key elements of SEO to tap into user intent that you should consider: Keywords Backlinks Links Meta descriptions Images The key is to use SEO to target the people searching online that are most likely to be interested in your brand.
Paid Advertising
While organic marketing can go a long way to helping drive traffic and generate leads, using a paid channel can help you to be targeted and reach new audiences. Many channels offer paid advertising such as social media networks, search engines like Google through Google Ads along with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. The beauty of most platforms is that you can fix a budget and see the results easily. This means that any size business can reap the benefits and you can test imagery, content and CTAs to see what resonates with your audience. You can also gather data from your paid marketing campaigns to inform your marketing activities. For example, let’s say you created a Facebook ad promoting a podcast that drives tons of traffic. Consider repurposing the content to create a blog or downloadable checklist as the topic obviously has an interest to your audience.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing can help you gain reach in a targeted audience or niche and drive campaign performance. The key is to partner with an influencer that aligns with your brand and has an audience that will be interested in your product or service. Bear in mind it’s not just about the number of followers when choosing an influencer, it’s about how they engage with their audience and the topics they promote and are passionate about. You can collaborate with an influencer in several ways: Promote an event Gifting or sending a sample for them to try Giveaway Social channel takeover Use them as a host Challenge them Commission unique content
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