Digital Marketing Strategy – Best Practices For Getting Started

A digital marketing strategy can be the difference between a business succeeding and failing. Simply having a presence online is no longer enough to stay ahead of your competition. With evolving algorithms, changing trends, and new platforms cropping up, it’s becoming increasingly important to ditch your reactive methodology for a proactive digital marketing strategy. An actionable marketing plan can give your organization an opportunity to identify goals and, more importantly, a roadmap to achieve them. Do you want to drive customer engagement, raise brand awareness, and generate more leads? Of course you do! Read on to learn how.

A Strategy For Your Digital Marketing Strategy

So, you want to create an effective digital marketing strategy that converts—wonderful! But where do you start? According to Hubspot, there are three parts of any strategy: 1) a diagnosis of your challenge, 2) a guiding policy for dealing with the challenge, and 3) a set of targeted actions that are necessary to accomplish the policy. We know it’s vague, but this can help you build a basic bare-bones outline for your digital marketing strategy. And if at any point throughout the development process you get overwhelmed, just revert back to this simple 3-step guide! Remember: The most important step is starting.

Start With The Basics Of Marketing

Once you’ve completed the conceptualization phase, it’s time to hit the ground marketing. Rather than kicking your digital marketing strategy off with complicated and intricate practices, it’s perfectly acceptable to get your footing with the marketing basics. According to Vendasta, there are six main principles:

Content Marketing

This often takes the form of website copywriting and blog posts meant to engage, entertain, and education.

Native Advertising

This type of content, also called advertorial, looks like editorial material, but is actually sponsored.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Advertisers put out online ads and pay each time a user clicks.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Here, marketers pay attention to special key words and phrases which gives their website and its contents a better chance of displaying as a top result in search engine queries.

Social Media Marketing

This is the practice of promoting products or services on social media platforms.

Email Marketing

Marketers take their products, services, and offers, put them together in an email, and drop them into potential or existing customers’ inboxes.

Scoot Over, Data Wants To Drive Your Marketing Plan

Smart Insights explains that a data-driven digital marketing strategy helps prioritize making improvements to deploying your marketing plan, technology, and data to increase leads and sales. In other words, data helps you learn about how your content has performed in the past which helps inform future decisions on how to best carry out your digital marketing strategy. Data can also help you conduct an audience analysis which will provide insights into your customers and potential clients’ gender, age, location, interests, and more. Armed with this knowledge, you can create more targeted marketing materials to pique their interests. For more information, check out this video on how to think like your audience.

Brand Your Digital Marketing Strategy Authentically

One major way to create a powerful marketing strategy is to show authenticity through deliberate branding. This practice helps build trust amongst your audience and will hopefully convert potential clients into loyal customers. Likely coming as no surprise, a study by Cohn and Wolfe revealed that Amazon is the #1 trusted brand amongst consumers. Take Amazon’s recent “Let It Shine” advertisement that depicts a young girl writing “Thank You” in chalk on her sidewalk for the face mask-wearing Amazon delivery person who is working to bring packages to customers through the pandemic. Though Amazon is a massive company with a huge influence all over the globe, they deliberately delivered their digital marketing strategy to feel relatable, positive, and empathetic. It also demonstrates how the company is emerging as a leader by continuing to work hard using safety precautions through the Covid-19 pandemic. And that is the power of using authentic branding to gain trust.

Get Started Today

Everyone knows businesses are existing more and more online. And while you’re embarking on your digital adventure, you may have noticed that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to navigate, especially if you haven’t developed a digital marketing strategy. But, heeding the aforementioned tips on how to get your marketing plan off the ground can help you increase audience engagement, raise brand awareness, and convert more leads. For even more information, check out this article on how to optimize your digital marketing budget and start a conversation with us today!