A digital marketing strategy plays an important role in the progress of the any business.  These top digital marketing strategies provide businesses to easily reach and acquire their target customers.  Most of these strategies are cost effective, efficient, and scalable in terms of implementation and management than other means of marketing.  No business can run or survive in the market without the help of effective digital marketing strategy.

HERE ARE SOME OF THE MOST USEFUL DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES:

1. FACEBOOK MARKETING:

Around 2.83 billion people are actively using Facebook around the world. An average user spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook. It is one the most active social media site and has maximum number of monthly active users.

Despite having such a high volume of active users/spent only 45% of digital marketers think that their Facebook efforts are effective.

HOW TO START MARKETING ON FACEBOOK?

  • Create a Facebook page.
  • Promote your Facebook page and get likes and fans.
  • Cross-promote using your existing website, other social channels.
  • Build an audience by consistently posting organic content.
  • Generate leads by offering free resource, demo and consultation.
  • Track and measure results.

Scale your Facebook marketing using ads and target desired customers on various ad placements such as Facebook newsfeed, Instagram, WhatsApp and much more.

2. EMAIL MARKETING:

Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective and efficient digital marketing strategy. From small businesses to multi-national companies, everyone aims to build a strong email database because they realize the importance of direct communication via emails.

HERE ARE SOME PROVEN EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGIES:

Marketing automation for emails: Utilize marketing automation tools like Hubspot, Marketo or Mautic to build active lists, schedule and automate workflows for on-boarding and lead nurturing.

Slicing and dicing – Segment your audience based on interests, demographics, business goals and send personalized emails this has relevant and quality content.

Workflows – Most of marketing automation tools provide a way to configure drip campaigns. This helps to automatically qualify leads, move them through sales funnels, contact re-engagement and build strong one-to-one relationship.

Email A/B testing – A/B tests allow you to try different audiences, content formats, layouts and much more. You can make a note of best performing content/layout/audience and scale it further.

3. CONTENT MARKETING:

An effective content marketing strategy will help to grow traffic, boost conversions, increase brand awareness and build trust with your potential customers.

HERE ARE A FEW EFFECTIVE CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGIES:

Create a buyer persona: Content needs to resonate with your target audience. Buyer persons will let describe your ideal customers so that you can create content that solves your customer’s pain points, challenges and recommends solutions.

Focus on one or two publishing channels: There are countless number of social media platforms, publishing portals and networks. It is important to pick one or two platforms and stay focused rather than spreading too thin.

Content type: You can write a blog, record a video, audio or create a piece of content that has a combination of media elements. The key thing is to identify which type of content works well for what platform.

Content calendar: Scheduling and publishing should be an integral part of content workflow. It helps to stay organized, plan, adapt and improve content creation process.

4. SMS / WHATSAPP MARKETING:

I would like to combine SMS and WhatsApp marketing together for this tactic since the underlying principal remains the same. They both rely on communicating with potential customers directly via mobile phones.

HERE ARE SOME BEST PRACTICES FOR SMS / WHATSAPP MARKETING:

Create a WhatsApp group: By creating a distribution group and sharing messages in the group, you can reach an audience effectively and build engagement.

Use Media and Call-to-Action links: Weather it is promoting a webinar, products and services or campaign, using images and links is a great way to deliver your message and bring referral traffic to your destination.

Timing and Consent: While SMS/WhatsApp marketing is great to get your customers attention immediately, it is critical to be mindful about the timing of the messages and consent to send messages.

5. PAY PER CLICK MARKETING (PPC):

Pay per click is the method of bringing more customers to your site with the help of search engine advertising.

Search Engine Advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising(formerly know as Bing Ads) are major players and they allow advertisers to bid for an ad placement in a search engine.

SO WHY PPC ADVERTISING?

Running PPC ads through Google Ads and Microsoft advertising is extremely valuable because you can acquire massive amounts of traffic by bidding on the right keywords and get clicks to your ads.

PPC ADVERTISING TIPS:

  • Use ad extensions
  • Group keywords in groups and target relevant keywords
  • Create fully optimized landing page and increase page quality
  • Focus on improving ad quality score to win more ad auction

6. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO):

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is the process of acquiring traffic from “Organic” search engine results. The process includes increasing the quality, quality and authority of website traffic by improving the rankings.

WHAT SHOULD BE YOUR SEO STRATEGY?

Start with Keyword Research: This process includes using free or paid keyword research tools such as SEMRush, Ahref, Ubersuggest etc and analyze which keywords are best in terms of traffic volume, competitive score and efficiency.

By choosing high volume, low competitive keywords, you can create a well optimized content and publish it on your website. One great way to get content and keyword ideas is to analyze the first page search results for your target keyword and go through the contents of your competitors.

FOCUS ON ON-PAGE SEO:

Writing better content than your competitors is not enough. Start building internal links by adding hyperlinks from high-authority pages to pages that need authority.

Include readable anchor text, keyword rich URLs, headings, sub-headings, meta title, meta description, ALT text for images, formatting and semantic keywords.

TECHNICAL SEO:

Make sure to optimize your website by reducing page load time, compressing images, user-friendly navigation, elements, content, graphics, color-scheme and mobile responsive layout.

LINK BUILDING:

Getting more inbound links from other relevant and high authority website is critical to improving your domain authority and website ranking. Start by sending emails to bloggers, influencers and authors in your industry and request for backlinks.

Offer them something relevant before simply asking them to link to your content.

7. GOOGLE MY BUSINESS:

Local SEO means Google My Business. That is how people consider Google My Business to improve their local presence and increase rankings.

Google My Business helps you claim and verify your local business. It improve the chances of showing up your business information in Google maps, local finder, knowledge graph and local pack.

Claiming and verifying your business should be your first step and once done, you can update business information, monitor reviews, analytics and posts.

8. RETARGETING ADS:

You saw a great shoe on Amazon, then left your computer to go get a coffee and BAM!!! An ad on your Facebook with that exact same shoe offering 25% off. That is re-targeting ad on your device.

HERE ARE SOME BEST RE-TARGETING AD STRATEGIES FOR YOUR BUSINESS:

Pixel-based retargeting: Everytime you see an ad on Facebook after visiting certain website is because Facebook installed a Pixel on your device for retargeting. Pixel page retargeting works well when target website visitors and bring back potential customers to your products and offers.

Engagement retargeting: On social media platforms, you can build custom audience based on how to interact with your content, videos, pages, accounts, comments etc. You can retarget these audience via ads and drive traffic to your blogs/websites for conversions.

Custom Audience retargeting: Most business maintain CRM database of potential and existing customers. You can upload this database to Facebook, Linkedin or Google ads and retarget them to bring them down the sales funnel and increase conversions.

CONCLUSION:

Any small, medium or large business without a digital strategy are directionless since they won’t have a clear strategic goals for what they want to achieve using digital marketing.

By having a well defined digital marketing strategy businesses are able to reach their target audience more effectively, capture leads using cost-effective digital campaigns, track conversions across various online channels and analyze performance better than any other offline marketing channel.

Below are some frequently asked questions about Digital Marketing Strategies:

What is the 80/20 rule of digital marketing?

The 80/20 rule also know is Pareto principal for digital marketing is invest 20% of your time in creating new content and 80% in promoting that piece of content on various digital channels.

What should be my digital marketing strategy for my startup?

Email, SEO, Re-targetting and PPC should be the key areas in terms of digital marketing strategy for startup.

Is predictive marketing the future of digital marketing?

Predictive marketing includes usage of data to make smarter decisions. Since digital marketing involves KPIs, analytics, conversion tracking and data management, Predictive analytics should be a part of digital marketing.

How to develop digital marketing strategy?

The process of developing digital marketing strategy should include analyzing your existing customers, creating an idea customer profile, segmenting audience based on business categories, selecting the right digital channel, promoting your brand using social and paid ads and measuring the performance.

What are low cost digital marketing strategies?

E-mail marketing, retargeting ads, social selling, blogging to improve website SEO are referral marketing are some of the low cost digital marketing strategies.

What are the best inbound marketing strategies?

Inbound marketing strategy includes four key steps – Attract, convert, close and delight.

Attract:
Attract visitors by creating value with blogging.
Use social media to drive traffic and promote the content.
Improve website ranking using SEO and get discovered online.
Create retargeting ads to drive back visitors and make them take action.

Convert:
Convert visitors using landing pages.
Use opt-in forms to accept form submissions.

Close:
Utilize marketing automation tool to nurture leads.
Use CRM tools to track leads

Delight:
Provide exceptional customer service
Create engaging experience.
Reward loyal customers.
Utilize survey and feedback tools to improve products and services.