October 27, 2020
Good quality sells itself, right? Wrong! We all must be familiar with lesser-known brands, creators, services which deliver excellent quality. A good quality service ensures the loyalty of the customer, but attracting a customer among thousands of competitors is a bigger challenge. There are several factors one needs to understand before creating a digital marketing strategy. However, with all the buzz over words like SEO, SEM, Social Media, PPC, Email Marketing, Chatbot etc., which Digital marketing strategy you should choose will decide the fate of your online marketing plans and this blog is our attempt to answer this all-important question. So, buckle up and read on!
In today’s world, launching a new product and marketing is just as important as the product itself. People have a worldwide reach. The competition to have your company exposed to the public is fierce. The product should get exposed to the people who realize the need for it. Digital marketing, in simple words, is marketing to those people who are your target audience and will respond positively to your product pitch leading to better awareness, followed by leads and then eventually progress to sales. Let us delve into the basics of digital marketing strategy implementation and practice.
Before taking up any Digital Marketing strategy, one should check for the below parameters which can affect directly or indirectly your brand reach……you need to
Knowing the psyche of your consumers can help you create demand in a new target population. Your digital marketing strategy is directly affected by your capital investment in it. In the initial stages of business growth, you must understand the type and quality of returns expected. The image may appear underwhelming in the beginning, but it helps you develop a realistic set of goals. These goals are well-researched and ultimately benefit your digital marketing implementation process.
Comparing yourself with your competitors may also seem discouraging, but it is crucial to understand where you stand. Knowing your competitors also provides insight into where your marketing strategy could improve and helps in understanding how to create a digital marketing strategy to be on par with them.
Identifying and mapping a customer journey through a ‘funnel’ from the stage where a company goes from being a stranger to the customer to the end of the funnel where the customer becomes a loyal advocate for the brand / company.
A Marketing or Sales Funnel starts with the wider side of the funnel also called as TOFU (top of funnel) or Awareness stage funnel and is targeted to your prospective audience whom you would want to reach out to increase your company brand or product awareness.
The middle funnel (MOFU) also known as the ‘consideration’ stage funnel, is where you would want your target audience filtered down from the top funnel and are now willing to consider your product or service. Ideally in the stage of the funnel – the digital marketing campaigns should convince a prospect that your solution can potentially solve a problem for him or answer his questions. Content such as educational content such as ‘ebooks’, checklists, downloadable guides would be ideal.
Bottom Funnel (BOFU), this is the stage where your targeted audiences are ready to take the decision, they want to call you business or they want to visit your store to make a purchase. Promote your offers to your leads as part of your lead nurturing process of emails, middle of the funnel landing pages, and by direct outreach from your sales team. The strategy is more a direct approach aimed at qualified leads that can include Free Consultations, Product Demo and Assessments, Free Trial, Special Discounts and Promotions, etc.
Now that you have a fair sense of what Marketing funnels are all about and which digital marketing strategy is useful at each stage, we will go further and briefly explore each of these strategies.
One of the basic marketing strategies is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It means to make your content visible on different search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Your products or services content or related articles may be well-researched, written and optimized, but search engines require more than that. Churning out quality content in the digital marketing world is concerned with the optimization of keywords. The algorithm of the biggest search engine Google considers more than 200 parameters to rank your website on google first page and first position.
SEO is considered more of a long-term digital marketing strategy and if you need to know how long it would take for SEO to show results – then it does take anywhere between 6-12 months to show results.
Read more: How to choose the right SEO Consultant Company for your business? Complete Guide
Even though you don’t have to pay Google to rank your website organically in the search results, does not mean that Search Engine Optimization campaigns are cheaper than paid advertising. In-Depth and comprehensive SEO campaigns cost a lot of money because of the skilled manpower involved, expensive SEO software and not to mention the content generation efforts that all go into the making of a successful SEO campaign.
The Top 11 important SEO metrics listed can be considered as important to be measured for ROI calculation on your SEO efforts..
If you are a local business and depend on Walk-in customers or direct phone calls, then optimizing Google maps to get your business name to rank in search results for keywords relevant to your business or services should be your No.1 Priority.
Check out How-to-Optimize Google My Business Listing? (BONUS) Free Checklist for Download
A quicker way to get recognized is PPC (pay per click) marketing. If you are looking for a faster way to promote brand awareness and also short-term product sales promotion; PPC campaigns can be highly-effective. Although useful to jump-start your online marketing campaigns, Google PPC ad campaigns also prove useful for your long term SEO efforts as it provides some actionable insights on what keyword phrases work well for customer acquisition.
Like any other marketing channel, setting goals and measuring them is also important when it comes to PPC campaigns. Tracking and measuring the metrics daily helps you to understand whether you’ve achieved your goals or not, optimizing better performing assets and observing the response form the targeted audience. Learn more about the most common campaign goals that can help to measure PPC success
Based on the type of product or services, the type of PPC channel you can choose. You have many options like Facebook Ads, Google Search and Display Ads, LinkedIn Lead Generation Ads, Quora Ads, Amazon Ads among other advertising platforms. Choosing the right platform is essential. Here’re some of the top PPC platforms to help you choose according to your business growth objectives
Facebook has kept up with other social media platforms as far as digital marketing goes. It provides an instant reach based on interests. Facebook already has a large pool of users and comes with an opportunity to attract a lot of traffic on your page, but it is also more competitive.
Combining numerous PPC strategies for Facebook marketing is the key to overcome this adversity. Experimenting new ad placements (like in Facebook stories, Instagram stories also), combining content marketing with FB ads and setting a marketing funnel leads to successful Facebook marketing. Both B2C and B2B businesses benefit from it, although there is higher risk of irrelevant leads for b2b businesses. These are some of the most common types of businesses that advertise on facebook for better reach and sales:
It is the most popular form of PPC advertising as Google is the most popular search engine globally. It is equally challenging for PPC campaign managers to see immediate success Advertisement parameters such as Cost Per Click (CPC) and Ad / Keyword Quality score play a crucial role in order to appear at the top of Paid ad listings. It is similar to auctions. The highest bids, combined with accurate keyword relevance, leads to successful PPC advertising on GoogleAds.
If you have any B2C products or services, there’s a huge scope of reaching a vast population with minimal budgets by targeting the audience. With ‘remarketing strategies’’ you can ensure your ads are shown only to those people who visited specific pages of your website. Retargeting can be done with a combination of Text or Display (Banner) that can help in prompting them to make a purchase. Choosing the right placements of your Text and display ads helps you to reach a better quality audience.
Learn more about Remarketing with Google Text and Display Ads
Especially for B2B, the PPC strategy on LinkedIn can be effectively implemented with the help of LinkedIn lead generation ads. You have an additional advantage on LinkedIn is targeting particular industry people and particular job roles. Lead Gen Forms come pre-filled with accurate LinkedIn profile data. So the chances of irrelevant leads is very less.
However, content marketing on LinkedIn with native Ads can get disturbed by the changing algorithm of LinkedIn. Running native ads across desktop and mobile to build an audience that’s ready to do business with you. It switches between promoting videos and written content. It is necessary to have varied forms of content to complement the algorithm at all times. LinkedIn ads are considered to be expensive as compared to paid advertising on Google or Facebook. But when it comes to relevance and accuracy of target audiences – it is bang-on!
The main ingredient of a successful digital marketing strategy on social media is networking. The Most common goal for any business with social media marketing is to reach more people, increase brand awareness & conversions, and the benefits of social media are also the same. There are some campaigns like boost post or post engagements, to maintain your company’s reputation, and the latest trend is Influencer Marketing. The relevance and demand of a product are heavily affected by what influencers say about it. On social media, you might have to collaborate with co-brands instead of competing with them to ensure mutual benefit.
Hashtags are the keywords for social media platforms. As your brand grows, you can create your unique hashtag. The bottom line is to get mentioned by co-brands and influencers as much as possible. You can also join groups and contests for additional exposure.
If you want to know if your social media marketing is working, then you have some important metrics to pay attention to are engagement, impressions and reach, share of voice, referrals and conversions and response rate and time. All these metrics combined will give you a 360º view of your social media performance. If you have time constraints, lower budgets or sales targets, you’ll add more nuanced metrics to make them more relevant to your business goals.
You may have to look after these important KPIs of Social Media Marketing that measure your social media performance:
It is the central aspect of your digital marketing strategy. Written and visual media is what catches the attention of your audience. Your content is responsible for convincing people that they need your product. Making generalized content with appropriate keywords and an effective SEO strategy is a stepping stone to business growth. Using the wrong keywords, misleading information and too many external links to other content sources may increase bounce rate on your website. This will often lead to your content being less likely to appear, leading to stagnancy or even negative growth.
Hiring a digital marketing executive to work within your team “inhouse” or to outsource the marketing is the first hurdle you will need to overcome. To start with both, have their pros and cons which will be a topic that we will cover later however, the thumb rule would be to say that if you need tight control over things and have a bigger marketing budget; then in-house team is for you. If you are on a shoe-string budget and testing waters to see if Digital marketing works for your product or not; then outsourcing this activity is your answer!
In between choosing between an in-house team or an external agency; a middle path that can be considered – is to hire a Digital Marketing Consultant who takes on the role of a virtual Digital Marketing Officer and brings in his experience and skills to help guide, monitor and hold teams accountable to the end results. Digital marketing consultants have detailed knowledge about different niches and Industry trends. Your team may have an in-depth understanding of your product or company, but the digital marketing consultant knows how to make it grow. Possessing the information of other companies which may be fit for collaboration, a digital marketing expert consultation is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy especially for startups.
Many agencies claim to provide the best digital marketing consultancy services. However, their work heavily depends on their knowledge about your organization and its objectives. The initial step in choosing a digital marketing consultant is checking their expertise, experience and interest in your niche.
Having a work experience of all the above strategies is among the basic requirements of a digital marketing consultant. Look for their credentials, client retention and reviews. Draw comparison between the services you demand and they offer. A digital marketing consultant should provide insight into reaching your targeted audience. They function as an extension of your digital marketing team and may also lead them.
Download a HD PDF format of our Free Digital Marketing Funnel Infographic to build out the stages of your business internal marketing and sales funnel. This downloadable infographic makes it quick and easy to map out the activities you will need to implement and the metrics to be tracked from each funnel stage.
The likelihood of a digital marketing strategy’s progress depends on your content, the keywords in it and the people promoting it. The initial growth may disappoint you, but turning the audience into loyal customers requires familiarity and persistence. Along with all the strategies mentioned, the way you advertise your services and products also matters. Keywords and PPC marketing will only help you get noticed among a thousand other competitors. Ads must strike an emotional chord with the viewers.
Digital marketing is one of the best ways to reach your potential audience and get new customers to generate more leads and sales to your business. Our Digital Marketing Services save businesses more time and help them generate more results. We are pros at Website building , Search Engine Optimization , Social Media Marketing and Google Paid advertising services.
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