Building a business from the ground up involves hard work and dedication, but you know that since you’re here reading this article. Whether you’ve already got your company up and running or you’re just starting, you need to let the world know that you exist. You need to sit down with your team and work out a digital marketing strategy. Anyone can promote their business through digital marketing no matter what your budget, all you need is a computer and a stable internet connection. The sea of digital marketing is vast, and if you’re not careful you’ll find yourself being dragged down by the undertow, along with your business ambitions. Fortunately, if you command your digital marketing strategy with some finesse, you’ll be able to weather the storm. Carry on reading to find out how to survive.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Starting with the basics, digital marketing quite simply represents any form of marketing carried out digitally, typically appearing on computers, phones, and tablets. Digital content includes social media posts, blogs, videos, and emails. Based on the fact that the majority of people have access to digital screens, it makes sense to place your energy on an effective marketing strategy.
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Defining Your Marketing Audience
Before you start throwing out digital content, you need to come up with the details of your dream customer persona. Once you’ve got your target audience nailed, your content will flow much easier because it will be geared towards the same demographic. Your marketing team will need to search through all of the data to find existing customer trends. If you’re just starting you could carry out interviews with prospective buyers. After you’ve been through all of the data collecting, your customer persona will answer the following:
- Age Bracket.
- Income.
- Location.
- What they need from your business.
- How they research products online.
- Their favorite social media.
- Their favorite style of customer support.
Once you’ve decided on these details, you will be able to make content and release it in a format that appeals to your demographic.
Blog With Regular Updates
Potential buyers need to be taken through your products and services by informative and engaging content. Creating a blog and posting to it regularly will do help you accomplish that. To keep a tight content schedule, you should work up a calendar to outline when new content will be posted. By having an informative blog that posts regularly, you are more likely to rank in the top pages for more searches.
The art of blogging runs deeper than simply smashing out the content at random intervals. You need to create concise posts that provide solutions for your audience. Engage with other businesses by guest posting and generating more links to your site, which will improve your website’s SEO.
Search Engine Optimization
The more your website appears in your potential customers’ searches, the more traffic your website will see, and the more new business you’ll get. This is achieved through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is the process of increasing your website’s visibility. The process can appear fairly complicated, but once you get your head around it, you’ll be plain sailing.
Firstly, you need to do some keyword research. Finding out what keywords people use to search for similar websites will allow you to implement them into your copy. When you REsearch keywords, you will be given a range of data surrounding how many times it is searched and what rank it has. If your chosen keyword is flooded, you need to get inside your dream customer’s head and compile an extensive list.
To be successful you need to know about the different types of keywords. The most results-driven type is the long tail, derived from Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail. These keywords tend to be longer and more specific, which suggests that the user has finished their general browsing. These are the searches you want to rank top for.
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Invest In Email Marketing
Getting across to your audience on a personal level is best achieved through email. However, you should attempt to target this method at people who specifically subscribe. Sending random emails typically means they go straight into the spam box, with the increase of quality spam filters. By sending emails out to your subscribers, you can address them by name – making recipients 26% more likely to open them.
For your startup business, this option might not be the most viable given such low viewership. However, if you can afford it, you should opt for a client that offers automated emails. That way, you can input the information you need and let the AI take care of the rest. On average, email marketing offers a Return of Investment (ROI) of $44 per $1 spent.
Social Media Strategy
When you consider that there are roughly 4.2 billion social media users worldwide, it makes sense that you will want to factor a detailed social media strategy into your overall plan. There are so many different social media sites that you can’t possibly dominate every single one of them. To get the best results you need to decide on a few relevant ones, this is why nailing your dream customer at the start is important.
Your social media team will be responsible for creating regular engaging content, using tantalizing imagery to entice potential new customers. Further, they will create the voice for your business by interacting and responding to users. If the budget stretches, you should consider investing in paid advertisements to net a wider audience.
The only reason to leave social media out of your marketing strategy is if you want to fail. You don’t need to pay to use social media and you’re more likely to reach your target audience, given the majority of people live on their various devices.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
“Hang on, my customer service isn’t digital marketing content!”
If you’re sat there having the same internal monologue with yourself, you’d be correct. However, as we just discussed, there are 4.2 billion users on social media that share their opinions everywhere. If your company offers bad customer service everyone will know, and you’ll find it difficult to reel in new buyers. On the flip side, if your customer service is top of the range, you will find yourself being shared across the web for the right reasons. There is significant evidence that demonstrates that the better the customer service, the more customers will spend.
Your budget may be stretched if you’re a small startup company. However, you should try and implement as many customer service avenues as possible. You should be aiming to man the phones, install live chat features, respond promptly on social media, email, and include an FAQ on your website. The more methods of contact your customers have the more satisfied they will be.
Implement Digital Marketing Analytics
Now that you’ve nailed your digital marketing strategy you can start implementing the plan. However, the work doesn’t stop there because the world changes, people change, and your plan might need some tweaking. This is where digital marketing analytics play an important part in business marketing.
You need to work out a method of testing whether your marketing strategy achieved its goal. Most likely, you aimed to increase brand awareness, gain new customers, build an audience, and interact with your audience. Compiling data on everything sounds like an enormous task, and it would be if it weren’t for the marvels of technology. If you can squeeze it into your budget, consider using marketing analytical tools that will analyze trends for you. Scouring through compiled data is a lot more financially viable than compiling the data manually.
In a Nutshell
Digital marketing aims to get the word out about your new business. You can reach more people through this method of marketing than any other, owing to the majority of people having access to digital devices. Before you do anything. you need to have a clear idea of who your “dream customer” is. All of your content after that no matter what platform it releases on will be geared towards that demographic. Getting your marketing content right from the start will improve your results. You need to provide excellent customer service to ensure that your brand earns a good name for itself across the web. Finally, you need to formulate a way of measuring your marketing goals to find out if it’s working. If you follow the advice on this page your business will sail smoothly through the sea of digital marketing and prosper through the other end.
