Digital Marketing Strategies – Trade Secrets

Have you ever wondered what makes you hooked on all these brands?

You think it’s their quality production or service?

Maybe!

But you are missing one major thing,

It is their digital marketing strategies that never allow you to get over their products and services, that makes you constantly desire for them.

Let’s look into details of digital marketing strategies, trends and techniques that are making businesses grow today at an accelerated rate.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy

A digital marketing strategy is a plan that helps your business fulfill its aim and objectives through meticulously selecting marketing channels such as paid, earned, and owned media.

The intricacy of your Digital Marketing strategy depends on the size of your business. If you have just started, it might be less complex, but as you grow and develop into a known brand, either its a firm or a company, you will have to amplify your digital marketing strategies.

Before getting to the point of how to develop a digital marketing strategy and what type of strategy to opt for Define your “Why?”

Why do you need a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Strategies always help you to take decisions more consciously and more confidently. Moreover, with strategies developed you can make things flow in a smooth motion.

Similarly, Digital Marketing Strategies help you in the following ways:

• helps you better understand Consumer behavior
• provides you with real time data and analytics.
• helps to increase your Return on Investment
• makes you survive in a competitive market, and grow your business to new heights.
• increases awareness regarding your brand
• helps increase your sales

Now as you are well aware of why you need a Digital Marketing Strategy, let’s move forward to how to build one

Steps to build a Digital Marketing Strategy

It is better not to jump directly to start doodling a strategy. In fact, it is advised to go through the following 4 phases while developing a digital marketing strategy:

1. Situation Analysis

First and foremost, define the baseline situation of your organization and its environment. This analysis allows you for the development of a strategic plan that is actually based on reality and therefore, minimizes the case of risk.

Start with defining the mission, vision and values of your organization. 

• Mission defines the chores of your organization. It generally answers the questions like Who are we? Where do we come from? Whom do we address? What is our field or operation? And what is my competitive edge?
• Vision illustrates the future goals of your organization, that are realistic and achievable, in a short and concise manner.
• Values are the principles that drive your organization’s culture, and that the organization must follow in all its actions.

Once you know your mission, vision, and values, its time to mark out your strengths, weaknesses, the threats you might face and opportunities you have (SWOT Analysis)

Do the same for your competitors, so you know your competitive edge.

Moreover, you must analyze your online presence and its position. This could be done using these few steps:

• Monitor your organization’s keywords, competition, and keywords. (You can use the following tools for this purpose: Mention, Google Alerts, Hootsuite)
• Web positioning assessment of the organization and its platform. (Google search or Alexa ranking)
• Social network evaluation, such as Presence, activity, influence, etc. (here you can use tools such as Klout, PeerIndex and Kreed).
• Competition benchmarking and main influencers in the sector, present in digital media.
•  Specific SWOT.

2. Goal Setting

Setting a goal is one of the most important steps of every marketing strategy.

Your goal setting must follow SMART criteria:

• Specific: simple and easy to understand. 
• Measurable: they can be measured through any kind of quantitative or qualitative unit.
• Assignable: they can be assigned and implemented by a member of the company. 
• Realistic: with accessible resources, goals can be achieved in a realistic framework.
• Time-related: they must have a time frame to achieve them.

Specifically talking about digital marketing, these goals must be flexible as to adjust to company and web evolution.

In digital marketing strategy, main and most usual types of these goals are:

• Scope goal
• Activity goal
• Conversion goal
• Loyalty goal

3. Planning a Strategy

In order to accomplish your planned goals, a specific strategy must be defined. This strategy materializes in activities that are the ways planned to achieve such goals.

An online marketing strategy is based on the model of a marketing funnel suggested by Strong, as a development of the AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action).

 The transformation of marketing in recent decades and the particularities of the digital world have allowed for a revision of this marketing model so that it captures the conversion strategy, as well as the loyalty strategy, key in the online world.

However, in the online world, loyalty and support for the brand can lead to change consumers into prescribers, thus increasing the scope of the organization’s action, which could lead to an expansion of its consumer base.

The three classification of paid, earned and owned media has been a constant in marketing over the decades.

In present times, their convergence is taking root in digital channels, rapidly moving from one type of media to another. Companies must know and combine the three types of media in order to ensure greater effectiveness in the building process of their own audiences.

Despite the increase in relevance of earned media, the three types must be used in a coordinated fashion to maximize the efficiency of a digital marketing strategy.

• Owned media – Corporate channels such as websites, social network profiles and mobile apps. Owned media offer avenues for most content distributed by the organization, and thus, they become the backbone of a digital strategy of a brand.
• Earned media – Content about the brand developed by external users, for free. Earned media is essentially online word of mouth: mentions, shares, reposts, reviews, recommendations, product reviews on specialized Webs or assessments on online shops or specific social platforms 
• Paid media – These are spaces or content that the brand had to pay for. They tend to be used to foster or increase the scope of the messages and initiatives of the brand in owned or earned media, as well as to improve their output. 

Each of these media offers their own advantages and scenarios; therefore, using them complementary can lead to accomplishing the set goals.

All of them contribute to the development of a digital marketing strategy, although each brand must analyze what media is more appropriate for them and on which the return on investment is higher.

4. Action and Control

The development of each strategy requires time planning to program implementation.

In this sense, an essential part of any digital marketing strategy is the scheduling of tasks and timing for each of them.

For instance, if you own a branding campaign where a Facebook profile and newsletters are exclusively used – the content of each of the actions (publication, sending the newsletter) can be briefly mentioned in the schedule.

Likewise, for online marketing strategies linked to traditional marketing, offline actions have to be included in the schedule whenever they are interdependent on online tasks.

In the action phase, the cost of different actions planned must also be considered.

 In this estimate, both technical and operational costs related to the implementation and monitoring of the online strategy are to be clearly included, especially those related to websites or online shops.

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How to use Digital Marketing Strategies effectively

Following are the ways to effectively implement digital marketing strategies:

1. Identify your target audience 

 You must specify in detail who you want to target with your campaigns.

What does identifying your audience mean? Specifying in detail the characteristics of people that might be potentially interested in your offerings.

In your audience identification, you should include things like:

• The countries/areas your potential customers live in
• Their age group
• Gender
• Educational background
• Marital status
• Family status
• Occupation
• Their interests

 to know about your audience as much as you can!

2. Understand user needs and search intent

Once you know the profile of your target customer, the next step is to use different techniques and try to understand their needs and how they express this when searching for information using a search engine or a social network.

3. Create a Content Marketing Library

The next strategic step you need to make is to create a library of content assets. You know your audience and their needs, now it’s time to create various types of assets to use in your campaigns.

A digital asset can be a blog post, infographic, image, video, podcast, cover image, logo, and anything else you can publish on your website or social networks.

4. Start with SEO as soon as possible

A strategic decision to make that can positively impact your digital marketing efforts is to start with SEO as early as possible.

SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies but it has a caveat. It takes time to work.

Unlike other digital marketing strategies, when you start an SEO campaign, it may take 4 to 6 months to generate any results.

But it is a better strategy to allocate a portion of your marketing budget from the very beginning on SEO related tasks, as you can not build a successful marketing campaign without it.

 In parallel, you can start working on your paid campaigns and other channels.

5. Explore paid advertising channels

A common mistake made by digital marketers is to blindly allocate all their budget on one channel because it’s the trend without testing or considering all of the available channels they can use.

Here is a list of the most popular advertising platforms you can use to reach your target audience:

Facebook Ads – ideal for all kinds of businesses. Works better for B2C. The best platform to raise brand awareness.

Instagram Ads – suitable if you want to reach a younger audience.

Twitter Ads – Business oriented. Great for informing your community of updates.

Linked Ads – Strictly for business-related advertising. Use it to reach decision-makers.

Google Ads – The most reliable platform to get targeted traffic to your website through paid search ads.

Google Display Ads – Use it for retargeting purposes and to reach your audience in the various Google products (YouTube, Gmail) and thousands of websites that participate in Google AdSense.

Bing Ads – Not as powerful as Google but a good alternative to get more search traffic to your website.

6. Use email marketing segmentation and automation

 You need to give incentives to users to sign up for your email list and then send them personalized emails that will help them make the final decision, which is to convert by buying your products or services.

An important element to make this work is segmentation and automation.

With email segmentation, you segment your list into groups of people that share the same interests and send them customized content.

7. Take advantage of new traffic sources

A complete digital marketing strategy should not only take into account the traditional online marketing channels but should also cater to new digital marketing strategies that rise to the surface.

To be more precise, there are a number of new channels that you can explore like:

• Google Discover Ads
• Tik-Tok
• Google Shopping Search
• Google Keen
• Optimizing your content for Google rich snippets
• Google Keen

Now let’s get to know how digital marketing strategies help to increase return on investment (roi)

Digital Marketing Strategies and Return on Investment (roi)

Digital marketing ROI is the measure of the profit or loss that you generate on your digital marketing campaigns.

Based on the amount of money you have invested.

In other words, this measurement tells you whether you’re getting your money’s worth from your marketing campaigns.

If you have a positive return on investment, it means that your campaigns are bringing in more money than you are spending on them.

 if you don’t measure the ROI of your campaigns, you won’t know for sure if you’re wasting money or spending your digital marketing budget wisely.

Measuring digital marketing ROI is also important from an improvement standpoint.

Once you can identify which areas are not performing as well as you hoped.

You can work on analyzing these aspects of your campaigns and taking actionable steps toward improvement.

Conclusion of Digital Marketing Strategies

In the current context, no company, regardless of its size, can live with its back to the Internet.

 If you do not have enough resources to have an active presence adapted to the digital world, at least you need to have a strategy to monitor and know what is being said about your company on the Web.

For this purpose, you need to go through some of the above mentioned techniques to attract users and the right audiences, to create attractive and interesting content so that customers remain loyal to your organizations and brands.

You must give and receive value, and your most important asset is in your real essence and audience, regardless of the channels used for this relationship.