It’s a digital world. Your company’s presence and visibility online, as well as its interaction with prospective buyers, will determine whether your brand does well or falls behind competitors. So how do you know what digital marketing you need to succeed?
How Does A Digital Marketing Strategy Fit Into A Marketing Plan?
When selling a product or service, the first thing you need to do is to define your goals and objectives and describe the customers that will help you reach them. Your audience is called your target market, and often you will have several, depending on your product or service and the kind of people that would benefit from it. Then, you will either engage a marketing agency to help you or will develop a marketing plan yourself. As part of that plan, you will outline how and what you plan to communicate to each audience.
Because digital channels are used frequently by almost everyone, you should include digital strategies as a way to reach your target markets. We will outline the different digital marketing techniques here to help you be more informed about your options.
What Are Some Common Digital Marketing Strategies?
Some very popular digital marketing strategies for 2022 include SEO (search engine optimization), Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC), social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and digital advertising.
Your digital marketing plan might intend to drive leads through a content marketing strategy, like offering white papers, infographics, how-to videos or others resources; drive engagement and consideration through social media marketing and partnerships with influencers; or just get the word out and build awareness through a combination of online marketing tactics like SEO, PPC and digital advertising.
Without creating an online marketing plan with a full understanding of digital marketing tools, you won’t be able to reach your target audience at the right time in their customer journey, or meet them where they are in the sales funnel.
How Would Each Of These Digital Strategies Be Used?
In today’s world, SEO is king
SEO is among the most effective digital marketing tactics and one that may be one of the most essential. Search engine optimization is the process of improving your brand’s website so it ranks among the top results on a search engine results page when prospective customers perform a search for a keyword or phrase that it pertinent to the product or service you offer. The more keywords you rank for, the higher you rank, the more visible your brand will be and the more familiar your target audiences will be with your website.
In fact, 80% of consumers do their product or service research online, less than 10% of searchers go as far as the second page of search results, and more than 30% of searchers click on the first result. If they don’t see you, they can’t buy from you. That’s how important ranking at the top of search engines’ results is to your success.
If you need a digital marketing agency to help you attract customers with SEO, reach out to J.O. by clicking here. We have helped many clients manage and excel at SEO.
How would I use Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
PPC is also referred to as SEM (search engine marketing) because it includes paying for media. The objective here is for your website to show up in the paid ads section at the top of a search engine results page. For organizations with the budget to spend, this digital marketing tactic replaces or supplements SEO. Google, Bing, YouTube and Amazon search engines feature their paid clients at the top of their pages, always identified as an ad or sponsored result. The trick here is to make sure your website contains the content and keyword terms you are buying ads for; otherwise, the search engines will penalize you by not showing your ads.
An important difference between PPC advertising and digital display advertising is that you don’t pay for someone being shown your ad; you are only charged if someone clicks on your ad. In the process, you can actually build some brand recognition even among those in your target audience that do not click through to your website.
The marketing professionals at J.O. have, over the years, helped many clients increase brand awareness, drive traffic, generate leads and find potential customers through PPC marketing activities. If you’s like to leverage our expertise, contact us here.
How do you master social media marketing?
Given the popularity of social media platforms, many digital marketers have flocked to paid ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This digital strategy relies on social media posts to engage the target market. Unfortunately, social media has a lot of competition for it, and the reason people are on social media is to interact with people and brands that they think offer them something they want: connection, interaction, attention, entertainment or information. If your brand’s social media presence doesn’t fulfill one or more of these, your target customers will not consider it valuable content and you won’t build an online following or engagement with your content. To be successful, your social channels should be set up for and contain content valued by your target audiences.
Social marketing campaigns should also recognize that most potential customers are interacting with their social media accounts on their mobile phones and adjust their digital techniques to account for that. Video marketing is hot, so you should use as much video as you can–but keep it short and watch-worthy!
J.O. is well versed in social media and can help you master your social media presence for high relevance and engagement. Contact us here for a free consultation.
Email marketing, done right, is a cost effective choice
An organization that wants to gain new customers and keep current customers might use this digital marketing strategy to build awareness, keep your company visible and promote brand loyalty. Because email is relatively easy to execute and often concentrates on customers or potential customers who have opted in to your database, so it can be quite cost effective. In fact, more than 80% of companies use email marketing as part of their digital marketing strategy.
It’s key. however, to always offer something of value so you keep your subscribers opted-in to receive your emails. A smart way to do this is to segment your email lists, A/B test your messaging, and always work to refine your campaigns.
Email campaigns keep your brand top-of-mind, so even if the recipient is not looking to buy right now, they may buy your brand when they are ready to purchase.
How could I use content marketing?
A digital marketing strategy that utilizes content marketing focuses on connecting with the audience online via content such as infographics, blog posts, and video–again, providing value to users, but being more informational in nature. this digital strategy is tied to SEO in that it focuses on optimizing your website’s content to target specific keywords that, when searched, can drive searchers to your website.
Content Marketing can connect with audiences at all stages of the purchasing funnel, and by doing so, has been reported to generate up to 54% more leads than traditional marketing. It is a long-term and ongoing strategy, so while on the surface it costs much less than traditional advertising, it requires significant manpower to generate and update content.
Digital advertising is still a force
The oldest of “new media,” digital advertising includes online audio and video, banner ads, native ads, and social media ads. Ads are “served” to people while they are online, in past years based on their online behavior data available derived by cookies–small pieces of code added to a users browser as they visit different websites. While theoretically cookies could not identify a person, data has become so advanced, privacy concerns have pressured Google to abandon the use of cookies by the second half of 2023. in the meantime, other ways to target potential audiences are being developed.
Display advertising shows up on a website next to content being consumed by the target audience. A marketer can choose to do a programmatic media buy, in which ad space is auctioned in real time; native advertising, served within content that the user is highly engaged with; or any of various other delivery mechanisms such as online radio, connected television or retargeting users who have been on your website and left without purchasing.
The Bottom Line
Digital Marketing Is A Must In Today’s Marketplace.
To Know What Your Company Needs, You Need To Know:
Your Goals
Your Target audience(s)
How they go about their journey to purchasing
The strengths and limitations of each digital strategy across that journey
What Combination Of Strategies Give Your Brand The Best Chance Of Success, And
Where To Find The Digital Expertise To Help You Obtain Your Objectives
Please contact J.O. if you are ready to put digital strategies to work for you.
