What is the best digital marketing strategy for my business? Read this blog to find out!
It’s easy to get lost in the sea of marketing strategies promoted on the web in 2020. We’re here to help you sift through the rubble and focus on the 5 key digital marketing strategies you need to know: content marketing, email marketing, organic SEO, PPC advertising, and automation. Let’s get into it!
Content Marketing
Content marketing can take many forms, but primarily involves the creation and sharing of content. Nowadays, this entails producing mostly digital content. Content marketing is not meant to explicitly market a brand, but rather encourage interest in the company’s products or services.
Content is the most important piece of your digital marketing strategy. First, you need to define the why. Why are you creating the content, who is it targeted at, and in what ways does your strategy differ from competitors’? Once you have a plan, you can start to map out which types of content would be most effective to market for your business and industry.
Here are some simple tips you can follow to keep content marketing on track:
Write meaningful content. Content should always have a purpose. Each blog or article should have a defined goal, whether it is informing the audience on a certain topic, encouraging sign-ups for a webinar or podcast, or leading the customer to purchase a product.
Get customer feedback. The best way to tweak a content strategy is by asking your own audience what they think. There are plenty of tools (like Typeform) that make it easy to send surveys and collect data.
Measure consumption metrics. You can’t improve your content strategy without knowing the impact it’s having on the audience. Why did one blog get 250% more hits than another? What time do people tend to visit your site? Which keywords are new leads coming in from? This is all valuable information you can mine using tools like Google Analytics.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a marketing practice that involves sending targeted emails to customers and prospects. There are many platforms available for marketing teams of all sizes, like Salesforce, HubSpot Marketing Hub, or MailChimp. Email marketing is an important way to maintain contact with existing customers, and build loyalty with new prospects.
Let’s look at a few tips and tricks to help enhance your email marketing strategy:
Write opt-in forms that convert. Effective opt-in forms have a clear, enticing headline, attractive visuals, and a simple design with a clear call to action at the bottom.
Choose a service that allows for A/B testing. A/B testing is the process of sending two nearly identical emails—with only slight differences between them—to two separate groups. The differences are small: you might change the headline, or the colour of the text, or the call-to-action phrase. You then analyze the data to see which email was most effective, with the end goal of improving your strategy.
Send personal emails by segmenting lists. The beauty of email lists is that they are entirely your own. Segmentation is the process of creating new lists depending on certain factors like age, location, buying patterns, or time zone. Segmentation helps marketers send more targeted emails with higher conversion rates. For more insights on email marketing, check out our article 15 Email Marketing Best Practices.
Organic SEO
Organic search engine optimization is the practice of improving a website’s position in search engines through organic or unpaid means. When a search term is typed into a search engine, that search engine crawls multiple websites on the web to find the most relevant content for the user. Organic SEO helps a website become more visible in search engines, and increases the likelihood of attracting new, more relevant leads.
Here are a few ways you can improve your organic SEO strategy:
Blog often. Blogging is the number one way to drive traffic to a website. It allows you to go into more depth about topics on the website, which when done well, can convert new customers in a flash. Text should be divided into short, digestible paragraphs, peppered with keywords relevant to the topic, and have clear H1s and H2s.
Start with long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are generally made up of three or more words, and are a great way to start ranking in search engines. By using longer tail keywords with less web traffic, you are more likely to convert the customers who do come in on that keyword, because you are providing the exact information they need.
Ensure your website is accessible. A big factor search engines like Google take into account when crawling a site is accessibility. Is the font legible? Is the colour contrast between font and background colour stark enough for those with limited visibility? Are call-to-action buttons obvious and easy to click? It’s important to ensure your website is accessible by all. To learn more about how Google crawls your site, check out their article on How Search Organizes Information.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising is the method of promoting a website through paid initiatives, which involves paying a small fee each time someone clicks on an ad. Whereas organic SEO represents “earned” traffic, PPC advertising is bought. Unlike SEO, which takes time, PPC can boost a website in search engines overnight, depending on your marketing budget.
If you’re thinking of launching a PPC campaign, here are a few tips to keep in mind:
Pick locations wisely. If you’re just starting out, you’re likely marketing the business to a smaller location radius. Google Adwords allows users to push ads to specific locations in specific languages. Take this into consideration when building the strategy. Think about how you might like to grow this strategy long-term.
Rotate ads. Google Adwords allows users to rotate their ads based on a few factors, including conversions or clicks. You can also choose between even and indefinite rotation.
Enable and use ad extensions. Ad extensions allow users to add more information to ads, like addresses, phone numbers, links to a contact page, and more. This feature is completely free, and we highly recommend it.
Automation
When it comes to marketing, the beauty of living in 2020 is that most of our initiatives can be automated to save time and cut costs. Automation allows one to manage multiple campaigns across multiple time zones to different target audiences. It allows marketers to deploy drip campaigns, which are automated and personalized email trails that are launched once a prospect fulfills a certain action, like completing a form or downloading a PDF on the site.
Automation is a relatively new technology. Here are a few tips to help you succeed at it:
Build your list – don’t buy it. Bought lists are riddled with old, irrelevant emails and contacts who don’t actually want to hear from you or care what your business does. An organically built list will have a much lower bounce rate than a list sold to you by someone else.
Produce personalized content. Because automation makes marketers’ lives so much easier, one often falls into the trap of producing fast, impersonal content – quantity over quality. To help keep content personal, consider using informal language, assigning a real person as the sender, and addressing the contact by their first name.
Set up a points system. Most automation platforms allow users to assign points to prospects according to their actions. If someone fills out a contact form, for example, they might receive +20 points. When a contact reaches 100 points, they might be considered a “new lead” and worthy of a call from the sales team.
There are infinite ways to market a business online. We hope these 5 strategies have given you a better idea as to the work it takes, and a few tips and tricks for success. Check out other articles on our blog to learn more about each marketing strategy.
