Getting started with a successful digital marketing strategy
When you’re getting started with digital marketing or a successful digital marketing strategy, there are a lot of moving parts to consider — from the right social networks for your business to networking with other marketers in your field, creating and posting engaging content on multiple channels, and keeping up with ever-changing algorithms. It’s hard to know where to start. To make matters worse, wasting time and resources on the wrong marketing tactics can be a costly mistake for startups. To help you get the most out of your online efforts while staying within your budget, we’ve outlined five tips that will help you build a successful digital marketing strategy.
1. Know your business goals
Any business needs to have goals that are both big-picture and actionable and it’s important to know both. If you’re promising exceptional results, your campaign plan has to talk about getting them done. Will Critchlow is the founder of the London digital marketing agency Distilled. Want to keep up with what he’s doing next? Follow him on Google+ or Twitter.
Online marketing became a hot buzzword in the last few years, and deservedly so, as digital marketing becomes more prevalent. According to the PWC 2018 Global Internet Advertising Spend Study, B2B online marketing is expected to reach $175 billion in 2018 while PPC accounts for $78 billion. And it’s expected mobile marketing will surpass desktop marketing by the year 2019. Overall, this means there’s a lot more potential revenue available to marketers for their efforts. But how can we optimize things in hopes of directing more of that investment towards digital marketing efforts and a successful digital marketing strategy?
Every business needs goals: There are three key areas that all businesses need to put their time, resources, and energy towards website optimization, social media marketing, and customer acquisition. Website optimization ensures that your website is crawlable and optimized for search engines. Use SEO tools such as MozBar, SEO Spider, or Google Search Console to identify SEO issues and prioritize the parts of your website that need the most attention to ensure potential customers (or those new to your industry) can get the most out of your website.
Ensure that all of your actions are logged and tracked so that you can identify important actions and areas for improvement while carrying out a successful digital marketing strategy. Social media marketing cross-promotes your business and your brand in various online communities, social platforms, and networks as a means of increasing your online brand recognition and maintaining audience engagement.
2. Create a content strategy specific to your business goals
In order to create a great content strategy, you’ll need to map out your business goals and determine which goals your content can help you achieve a successful digital marketing strategy. Start with your overall business goals and then break those down into goals for your content. Once you know your goals, you’ll be able to determine what content you need to create to help you achieve those goals.
Before you begin sharing content with the world or building a presence on social media, it’s important to make sure you were clear on why you’re making the content in the first place. What are your digital marketing goals for the year? Who are your top five or 10 content initiatives that helped you achieve that mission this year? Once you have the goals, it’s time to break them down into smaller, actionable steps. What can you do this month? The week of the week? Today only? Next week? This week? What can you do today?
To create a successful campaign or a successful digital marketing strategy, it’s important to first understand where your business is headed. For example, if you want to increase the frequency of your website visitors, this can be achieved by giving yourself more user focus groups. To ensure your content is future-proof, ensure your content goals are still relevant, whether you’re expanding your content audience or meeting new goals.
These are four steps you can take to ensure your content is engaging for your target audience: Participants. Make sure you assign your content participants’ identities clearly so readers know what they’ll be seeing from each post. BuzzSumo uses a simple three-part metric to determine the relevance of content. What’s the headline you can immediately recognize and what’s the subhead that aligns with the rest of the content?
Key takeaway: increase your messaging by supporting or breaking through key messages with the subheadline in the first part of your post. Humour is usually a quick way to get your readers’ attention.
However, for most purposes, don’t rely on humour to get your point across — think strategically.
3. Use social media to reach and engage with customers
Social media is a great way to interact with your customers and potential customers. It can be an effective way to reach out to your audience and spread your message. It’s also a great way to get feedback on the products and services you offer and the value they provide. The challenge with social media, however, is that there are so many social media platforms — as many as there are people in your audience!
Consider this: From Instagram to Pinterest, there are a billion social media networks. What can you do with one million followers? One month’s worth of activity?! That’s why we recommend focusing on specific mediums whenever possible for a successful digital marketing strategy. One of the best ways to do so is by choosing the right social media channels for your business. As Mark Schaefer of Benchmark wrote on our blog recently, “The challenge is that once someone knows about you, it typically isn’t a fast track to closing the deal and converting customers.”
Starting out with Facebook has been a popular option for many startups looking to grow their audience, build community, engage with their audience organically and also a medium for a successful digital marketing strategy. But Facebook is getting more and more complicated as its algorithm evolves, and as an app for businesses that people need to sign into. In some cases, it can also mean investing in platforms that sell products or services you don’t offer yourself.
Good news: There are a hundred ways to grow your social media audience, and you can customize your options to meet whatever is most important to you: What is the business you’re marketing your business? What is your brand message? How does your community feel about the traditional marketing channels?
Enter niche social networks. In general, niche social networks have a higher rate of organic reach than all the other social networks. Newer niche social networks that are still growing rapidly include Friendfeed, Instagram, Snapchat, and Snapchat Discover — and if your business is willing to invest, an advertising platform can be used to continue engaging with customers outside Facebook as well.
4. Be active in the right communities and groups for your business
If you want to build a loyal audience or community, it’s important to be active in the right communities and groups for your business. An active community will be more likely to share your content, they will be more likely to trust you and your products, and they will be more likely to become loyal customers.
Connect with like-minded people. It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned marketer or someone just getting into digital marketing. Join forums, join groups, read blogs, and connect with like-minded people in your field. By forming real-life connections, you can easily find people in your field that are navigating their own digital marketing journey, and you can help drive each other that much faster for a successful digital marketing strategy.
Share your own stories. So many of us get wrapped up in the success of our cold outreach and forget that there are thousands of other entrepreneurs and digital marketers out there doing the same thing. Have you ever been part of an email blast campaign for a new product, only to receive an email asking you to review it? Do you remember how you felt when a competitor cold-emailed you? When your inbox starts to stagnate, you can only take so much good content before you start feeling frustrated and frustrated. Now is the time to share your own stories. There are people reading this article right now.
I encourage you to share the stories of your successes and failures. Maybe you can even share a few of your mistakes in the process. When people read your story and see what worked and what didn’t work, they’ll be more likely to continue experiencing that same success and include it as a successful digital marketing strategy.
Don’t ignore content networks. We’ve already covered finding your different social networks, but successful digital marketers know that content teams produce great content across multiple networks which is included in a successful digital marketing strategy. At the core of their strategy, these marketers work to continually produce engaging content that attracts links, shares, and links. It’s up to you to do the same.
5. Use the right promotion methods for each channel
Conclusion: While there’s no one-size-fits-all marketing plan, we’ve outlined five tips that can help you create a strategy that will work specifically for your small business needs and goals.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all marketing plan, we’ve outlined five tips that can help you create a successful digital marketing strategy that will work specifically for your small business needs and goals.
1. Identify your target customer and find out where they hang out.
2. Create a content calendar that you can stick to on a daily or weekly basis.
3. Use one overarching objective for your content, and one overarching objective for your social media strategy.
4. Integrate all platforms into one marketing profile page, and set up RSS feeds that automatically update your profile with the latest content from all your platforms.
5. Schedule your social media and website content in advance, so you can ensure you have dedicated time to create and post content during non-peak hours.
Whether you choose LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, there are platforms that will fit your brand. Any one of these will bring your industry members and other business leaders together in a space that’s based on an interest or lifestyle.
There are other successful digital marketing strategy options as well, but we’re focusing on these three platforms because they’re common in the content marketing arena, and they have plenty of users in your space. Within these social networks, your key objectives should be to expand the reach and engagement of your business’s existing audience, especially if you’re in an industry or corner of the world that isn’t well represented on any of these platforms. This aim is what we’re working to achieve in this article.
Expanding the reach of your Facebook or LinkedIn page is a relatively straightforward task, but saying that expanding the reach of your Twitter presence is simple. While not easy, it’s entirely doable, and there are a few simple ways to add others in your niche to your list.
When you join one of these social media networks, you’ll notice that many of them have a column called “Connections,” which indicates how many other people have used the platform to connect. In addition to this, many companies have accounts through which you can inquire about opportunities or schedule coffee dates and build your own successful digital marketing strategy tips.
