In today’s business environment, a strong digital marketing strategy is all but essential.Nearly all business owners understand the importance and value of digital marketing. However, a deep understanding of the nuances of a well-rounded, digital marketing strategy is most often left to specialists. This guide will point out the characteristics of an effective digital marketing strategy and highlight some key digital marketing tactics.
What Makes a Digital Marketing Strategy Effective?
The core function of an effective strategy is to build customer engagement and generate qualified leads with compelling content. To do this well, a marketing strategy must be flexible and well-targeted.
The digital age is one of rapid change. Operating a business in this environment requires a readiness to adapt to emerging trends and stay ahead of the curve. But there is no single formula for the most effective digital marketing strategy. Instead, the highest performing companies are those that embrace change and are willing to re-evaluate their strategy. And this may mean redefining goals or looking at data in a new way.
The scope of available digital marketing channels is broad and offers a variety of ways to best reach your customers. This is certainly an advantage, but it also amplifies the importance of understanding your audience. Therefore, a strong awareness of your target demographics should provide guidance to your digital marketing tactics.
You’ll need to know: what are they concerned with socially, politically, and culturally? This understanding will help you reach your audience using the best channels and better engage them with targeted content.
What Does Effective Digital Marketing Look Like?
So, an effective digital marketing strategy is one that adapts to change and is informed by a deep understanding of its audience. But what does it look like? What are the best digital marketing tactics and how do marketers use them?
An effective strategy is one best suited to the company’s product, audience, and goals. There are many to choose from. While it can be difficult to know the best approach to take, some are more popular than others.
Here are some of the top tactics used in effective marketing strategies in 2019.
Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Just about everyone is aware of or uses at least one of these forms of social media. But what exactly do they do in terms of effective marketing? In understanding why social media should fit into your digital marketing strategy, a definition may be helpful.
Social media are digital channels that allow users to interact with each other and share content and information. These channels encourage networking and building of communities through participation and engagement.
Social media is one of the most popular digital marketing channels, and it’s no wonder why. The number of social media users in the U.S. alone is enormous. The days of print, radio, and television are receding. They’re still relevant channels of information, but more people are choosing social media as their primary medium for interacting with information and each other.
To make sure social media is playing an impactful role in your digital marketing strategy, consider the following.
Well-defined, actionable goals
As with any plan you wish to implement, it’s important to have intelligent goals. What do you want to get out of your social media plan? Be specific and identify the steps you will take.
To increase brand awareness, it’s best to focus on creating content that emphasizes your company’s personality. Users respond to this type of content more than promotional material. And you can track brand awareness with metrics like number of followers or content views.
Hence to build a more loyal customer base, encourage users to post on your behalf. Content that elicits a response from social media users can lead to user-generated content. This is a fantastic way to promote brand loyalty.
Audience Research
How does your audience use social media?
Not all social media channels are created equal. For instance, the bulk of Instagram’s users are under the age of 30. Women constitute the majority of Pinterest users and Facebook and Youtube have higher-earning users than other sites.
Knowing what brand of social media your demographic uses and how they use it should dictate which social media you choose and the types of content you create.
Social Content
Content is in the center of social media marketing. It’s how you attract and engage with social media users and is vital in increasing brand awareness. However, users will unfollow a brand that is overly promotional, irrelevant, or doesn’t use the right kind of language.
Some of the best types of content are videos and user-generated content. Videos are among the most popular type of content across many platforms. Plus, social media users love user-generated content because of its authentic feel.
Video
Social media marketing is especially effective because of its content sharing. And this sharing can expose you to huge quantities of potential customers.
So, what is the most shareable digital marketing channel? Video. “Video is shared up to 1,200% more than links and text combined.” When done well, video content leads to higher engagement and better rapport with your audience. It’s one of the best digital channels for sharing your content on social media, so it’s important to understand the elements of a quality video. These include everything from subtitles, length, type, details, and sound.
What kind of video?
The best type of video to create should be a response to what you want to convey, whom you are addressing, and the platform you are using. Live videos, short looping videos and long-form narrative videos are all viable options.
Videos that connect with viewers and that they share the most are funny, inspirational or educational. Viewers are more likely to pass along these videos than ones pushing a hard sell.
Using videos effectively also means optimizing content for search engine rankings. Hence you should always include keywords in a video’s subtitles, title, description, and URL.
When done right, the resources spent carefully producing a well-targeted and scripted video will generate leads and have a positive impact on your bottom line.
Mobile Marketing
How many times have you used your smartphone today? 91% of adults in the U.S. have a mobile phone within arms reach 24 hours a day. This staggering statistic paints a clear picture. To be effective, your digital marketing strategy must be ready for mobile.
A website that is optimized for desktops and smartphones alike is one that loads quickly and accurately.
Image-heavy websites can sometimes take longer to load on a mobile device, which can spell trouble. Loading delays of even one second are shown to have a negative impact on customer satisfaction and page views. It’s good practice to test load times on mobile devices and make sure they’ve caught up.
Tablets and devices with smaller screens often require websites with a specialized design to display pages accurately. So, it’s important to craft a website that is visually appealing, impactful and easy to digest on any device, including computers or smaller.
Get to the point
If you want to market to mobile-based customers, it’s also important to take in to account how people use their mobile devices. Most people use their mobile phones in short bursts, like on a coffee break, commuting, or while waiting for something. This means that a good mobile marketing strategy must be as concise and clear as possible. Getting your message across quickly in an easy to understand manner is key to reaching customers on mobile devices.
Another great way to optimize for mobile is to make things clickable. Contact details and calls to action should be accessible with a touch of the thumb. Your company’s address and contact details should be linked to a map app for the best mobile integration.
Buyer persona
Operating in the digital realm affords businesses some unique advantages. One of these is the availability of useful data. Data such as website behavior and download history can be key in helping you better understand your customers’ wants and needs. This information coupled with information from short surveys or interviews can help you create buyer personas.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. Segmenting your audience in this way helps you see your customers as real humans. Who are they? Why exactly are they interacting with your website or reading your e-mail? Having a deep understanding of your customers’ buyer personas will allow you to better serve them and increase conversions.
What kind of information should a buyer persona include?
A well-focused buyer persona will include the following two types of information.
Basic demographic information:
- Job
- Gender
- Age
- Communication preference
In-depth motivation information:
- Goals: What does the customer want or need?
- Challenges: What is keeping the customer from achieving their goals?
- Solutions: How can your company help the customer achieve their goals?
Once buyer personas are created, they can be used to inspire content creation, product development, and e-mail marketing campaigns.
E-Mail Marketing
Research shows that e-mail is the most preferred method among consumers for communicating with a business. Coming out ahead of social media and SMS, this digital channel is highly valuable. So to get the most out of an e-mail marketing strategy, it’s important to get some things right.
First, ask questions. Asking subscribers simple questions is an effective way to gather invaluable information that can be used to segment your audience and create buyer personas.
Then, personalize. The little things matter to the consumer. To foster customer loyalty and increase conversions, it’s important to create e-mails that are specific to your market segments.
Finally, make them short and memorable. E-mails that try to cover too much information are either quickly skimmed or passed over entirely. Content that is focused and concise is usually more impactful.
SEO
The cornerstone of any effective digital marketing strategy today is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is the process of driving more traffic to your website by increasing its visibility to users of search engines. It is invaluable in terms of its ability to increase brand awareness and generate leads.
Effective SEO takes the following into account:
Keywords
It’s important to research relevant keywords to include in your content. Google looks for keywords to help steer users toward the best possible search results. It’s best to focus on longtail keywords to rank higher, especially for highly competitive keyword topics.
Dwell time
This is the amount of time a website visitor spends on a page, and the longer the better. Pages with higher average dwell times rank higher on Google search results. The average dwell time of a top-10 Google result is 3 minutes and 10 seconds. So, crafting relevant and high-quality content is essential.
Click Through Rate (CTR)
How often do people click on your link? Pages with higher CTRs get ranked higher in Google search results. A page with a title and meta description that are optimized with keywords will generate more clicks. Another way to attract more clicks is to include numbers and emotional hooks in a page title.
A valuable source of information for improving search engine rankings is the data generated by traffic to your website. Tools like Google Analytics are great at monitoring website traffic. It provides in-depth details about the behavior of your website visitors. It’s also a brilliant opportunity to learn more about your target audience.
A Wise Investment
The most effective digital marketing strategy is one that is comprehensive. It takes into account emerging trends and engages a number of different channels. It uses available data to inform its marketing tactics and offer its product or service to a large targeted audience. In turn, a company will see increased brand awareness, more qualified leads and more customer engagement.
With consumers spending more and more of their time engaging with the digital world, there are few better things for a company to invest in.
Don’t have time to think through your digital marketing campaign? Let us take care of the details! Schedule a free business growth call here to find out how we can help your business’s marketing efforts.
