Today, people spend twice as much time on the internet as they used to 12 years ago. It says a lot about how people perceive the Internet, the way people shop and buy has completely changed. This means offline marketing is not as effective as it used to be. Marketing has always been about reaching out to your audience where they are already present. Today, it means on the Internet.
With over 14 years of experience in business and marketing, advertising via traditional means like newspapers, pamphlets and hoardings had worked well for me. But, as the technology is evolving and the emergence of digital media has brought about different means of promoting your brand, the ROI over the years have decreased. And eventually a dull set in through the business, and traditional advertising methods started to take a back seat. And the trend didn’t just apply to myself, but it spread like wildfire throughout every business.
This is where digital marketing stood out as the shining white knight. In other words, any form of marketing that existed on the Internet came to be known as Digital Marketing.
Digital Media has become a universal phenomenon that has given consumers access to information, anytime and at any place they want. Consumers want brands they can trust and companies they are more familiar with, information that is more personalized and relevant, which is then offered according to their preferences.
Online branding assets like email marketing, digital advertising, and online brochures come under the spectrum of digital marketing. And, every good digital marketer knows how each asset or tactic can support them to achieve their objectives.
Some of the most common assets and tactics used by marketers are listed below:
Assets
- Blog posting
- Website
- Infographics
- Social Media
- Interactive tools
- Online brochures
- Logos, fonts, etc.
Tactics
- Content marketing
- SEO ( Search Engine Optimization)
- Social Media Marketing
- Inbound Marketing
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
- Native Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Online PR
- Email Marketing
How to Create the Right Digital Marketing Strategy?
Aim for below points to achieve integrated digital marketing Lifecycle:
- Plan and create a strategic roadmap
- Reach and build awareness drives
- Interactive experience, flow, and content
- Conversion and building multi-channel sales
- Engaging customers, generating loyalty and retention
- Building brand with emotional connection
- Managing growth with a sustainable approach
Identifying the glut in traditional advertising method
Incremental advertising while promoting a brand becomes obsolete beyond a threshold. Past this 'Saturation Point', the responses that you get does not approve of the cost incorporated for branding. You need to determine this saturation point and shift to digital media. The saturation point can be measured by determining the amount of exposure that an advertisement exercise requires, beyond which it will not generate a positive response.
This can be done by creating a model that can recognize brand credibility, category clutter, and product features. The need for more exposure is required when the categories are highly cluttered due to the multiplicity of available choices. At the same time, innovative product features and high brand credibility tend to reduce the number of exposure required.
Define Goals and Identify Tools
Goals are the essence of expectations. A business strategy is based on the expectations of your boss, the client's’, CEO of the company, or anyone whose opinion need to be taken into consideration. It is your job to decide if there is any room for compromise. All you need is to set more realistic goals which are attainable. But to achieve them you require determination, hard work, and perseverance.
To attain these goals, you can start by researching and finding out the major current trends in your industry. You can use Statista to search for general industry trends and Moz to get an insight into what traffic sources are most beneficial and why. Use Google Analytics to identify trends that will generate organic traffic and keep track which channels have performed better.
Create Content that is unique, relevant and addresses the buyer persona
Every visitor to your website will stay there only if they find the content interesting. To enhance your SEO, you need to start with creating content first. Link building is another aspect you need to concentrate on making your website rank better and discoverable. A solid internal linking structure keeps the visitors intrigued while giving them a considerable information and lots of relevant contents. Besides this, you need to keep creating and adding new content to keep your customers engaged, and to give web crawlers new data to refresh and index. If your blog resembles another blog, your visitors need not stay and research as they are looking for something new and fascinating.
Track Progress and Evaluate Results to Improve Strategy
Digital Marketing requires real time actions, and because of that, we tend to think there is no need for planning to create success. But, planning helps you to deal with the challenges posed by the real-time nature of this medium. There will be lot of digital marketing data flowing from various channels or tools, which will be futile if they don't match with your business goals. This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPI) comes into the picture. KPI indicates how well a company is achieving its business objectives. When faced with choosing the best KPIs, always go for those that will assist you in reaching your business goals.
For example, let's say you want to set goals for your SEO strategy. The important business goal you should set is how to increase your revenue streams from organic traffic. Also, you need to define a definite number for both short term and long term period that is more achievable.
At the same time, to implement these tactics, you have to consider some internal processes like:
- Website Visibility through content, backlinks, and rankings
- User interaction via on-page portal, managing bounce rates, session duration and usability
- Website speed, accessibility, site structure and redirections from the site
These processes are generic and will differ for every site out there, depending on which processes you focus on the most. Once determined these metrics will help you realize if your business goals are attainable early in the development stage.
There are lot of ways you can optimize your digital strategy when implementing it for your business, and it is very important that you concentrate on how the experience will migrate on to mobile devices. If you keep the above points in mind, you’ll be able to create digital experiences that will work for your audience and achieve the results you are hoping for.
If you have already opted for digital marketing, it’s likely that you have at least reached some segments of your audience online. But you can always think of some areas of your strategy that needs a little improvement.
