Digital marketing has become the new norm for businesses. The advent and evolution of social media, accessibility of the internet on handheld devices, and the convenience of online shopping are just some factors that have triggered a dramatic shift in consumer behaviors. This trend has enabled companies to understand that marketing products and services on digital channels is the future.
Since the start of 2023, 63% of businesses have decided to increase digital marketing budgets considerably. From 2020 to 2021, this growth in spending was 14%, which shows a drastic change over the past two years owing to changed market dynamics. No matter which form of digital marketing a business chooses, statistics show significant returns on these investments.
For instance, pay-per-click can bring back $2 for every dollar spent. As for email marketing, businesses can make as much as $36 for every dollar spent. Also, content marketing and SEO is the technique that, according to most marketers, brings the highest return. It is no surprise that 72% of all marketing budgets these days are dedicated to digital platforms.
However, digital marketing only delivers such impressive returns when your business has a solid strategy in place. A plan with precise and clear objectives mitigates the wastage of resources, draws significant attention to your offerings, and eventually generates more revenue streams. So, how can your business devise a killer digital marketing strategy? Here are a few tips that can help:
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Research the market and analyze your present strategies
The first step towards developing an effective strategy is identifying what was wrong with the last one. You can perform a free audit of various digital marketing elements like SEO. This simple step provides your marketing team with a starting point along with the knowledge of what’s missing, how your strategy fares with respect to various competitors, and also how well you understand the market.
You can begin by assessing your digital marketing performance over the past year. Pull up the metrics and analytics to determine what went wrong and worked in your favor. At the same time, also analyze the digital presence of your competitors across various media. You can get access to tools that perform this research for you. Lastly, understand your customers, their behaviors, the demographics, size, and interests that they have.
Together, this research provides the ideal framework for a solid digital marketing strategy going forward.
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Conceive an outline for your strategy
Now that you have your foundations, you can start outlining what you want to accomplish and how best to do it. An effective strategic blueprint that many businesses use these days is GSOT or goal, strategies, objectives, and tactics, similar to a SWOT analysis.
Start by setting certain goals and ensure they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For instance, do you want to give your products and services more exposure on the way to building a brand, or do you want the business to generate more revenue?
Next comes strategies, the methods through which you will eventually achieve your goals. The various stages of the marketing funnel can help you identify the strategy you want to choose. It can be awareness, interest, desire, or action.
While the terms may be used interchangeably, objectives are different from goals. In fact, objectives define a measurable quantity for each goal, like generating 20% more leads than last year or generating 5% more engagement than your last post.
Lastly, the tactics align with certain objectives to define the path going to be taken to achieve them. For instance, your objective of getting 5% more engagement may be achieved by using an exciting backlink or an incentive for people to buy your product or service, like a discount.
With a strong strategy that acknowledges these parameters, your business can allocate resources in an optimal manner to drive relevant results.
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Clearly define the target audience for your brand
Digital marketing allows you to target extremely fine sets of people. To truly understand your ideal consumer, develop customer personas for them. The more clearly you define who you want to reach, the greater your chances of bringing them to your business. And while going outside the target market has benefits in certain cases, you need to focus on the group that controls the buying power.
For instance, Shell sells packaged automotive lubricants, a product only an adult would buy. However, during the 2010 decade, the brand used to sell certain toys with its products to make the younger generation insist their parents on buying the oil just so the kids get something to play with. It was a genius marketing strategy that went beyond the dedicated target market, but the main focus remained on influencing them indirectly.
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Have a strong content marketing plan
Content marketing is the most effective arm of digital advertising by far. With a robust SEO strategy and a definitive content marketing plan, you can make a significant difference in the reach your business generates on various online platforms.
Here are some ways to get great inspiration for content:
- Start by going back to the customer and competition analysis that helps you set the basis for developing a solid plan
- Go online and look for the topics and questions that users are most interested in
- Do the same for social media platforms as well like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook to search for relevant hashtags that are trending on these platforms
Together, these insights provide the foundations for the content you should create. This data also shows you various other parameters you should take care of, like where you should post the content (social media, blogs, websites), the type of content you should develop (posts, videos, infographics), and the audience that you want to target.
Conclusion
Mastering a digital marketing strategy is imperative because it has become the basis of modern advertising. Since most customer journeys begin on the internet these days, businesses are increasing their investments in digital platforms so that they can generate the best results for their own revenue. However, deriving the most optimal results is all about having an effective strategy that can target the right people through the appropriate mediums and the most opportune moments.