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At the end of the day, the digital marketing strategy is not that different than traditional marketing campaigns and sales. Instead of cold calling, you can do email, SEO, and PPC campaigns.
Networking events are replaced by social media marketing through LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Appointments with prospects are now easily substituted by interactive websites to help you prequalify and auto-respond to leads before you start spending expensive human hours on a live sales process.
Moreover, you can create newsletters and industry whitepapers, blog, and create digital PR campaigns.
Every successful sales rep has a sales funnel and every company that wants to increase its bottom line in 2021 needs to have a strong digital sales funnel too.
Your digital marketing plan should have a wide range of engagements with each specific tactic being tested and improved through iterations to produce a lean mean selling machine that your website was born to be.
Here are 7 steps that will help you build your own digital marketing strategy like a pro:
Table of Contents
Company Website
Marketers often refer to a company’s website as a 24 hour day 7 day a week sales machine. A well designed and executed site will have all of the best attributes of a top-performing sales rep. It is informative, efficient in delivering compelling brand values that speak directly to the emotional and functional needs of the site visitor, and always guides them towards the next steps towards conversion.
That’s the reason why your Digital Marketing Strategy should first focus on creating and maintaining a state of the art company website. Design and optimize it in a way that reflects your brand’s identity and goals.
To boost conversions build trust with your visitors. Provide relevant, interesting, and comprehensive content that aims at giving advice and informing users on topics relevant not only to your product or service but to your business niche as well.Don’t forget to optimize your content to reach the largest possible target audience. A digital marketing strategy that does not follow effective keyword and competitor research will render poor results. Consequently the website will have a hard time ranking in search engines and generating traffic.
Leverage keywords related to your business and niche, improve your on-page and off-page SEO, optimize the page loading speed, and don’t overlook optimizing for mobile.
Once you’ve put your digital marketing strategy in motion you’ll be able to track your progress and get insights on users’ behavior via the site’s analytics or an AI chatbot that engages users in a conversation. You’d be able to collect comprehensive information on marketing campaigns and learn what works best for your brand.
Social Media
Social media can help you build long-term relationships with your clients and partners, and could serve you as a fine sales generation tool as long as you’re using it to its fullest potential.
Start off by figuring out which social media platforms your target audience hangs out at. Don’t spread your social media efforts thin, concentrate only on the channels that really matter. A strong social media presence could result in a broader reach.
Sharing useful and informative content on social media gives your followers a strong reason to visit your website and helps guide them through the marketing funnel.
Being an active brand on Social Media can also improve customer satisfaction as it provides a channel for two-way communication, where you can instantly connect with followers and respond to comments, requests, and feedback.
You can also use the data you gather during your Social Media campaigns to ramp up your marketing efforts.
Email and Newsletter Campaigns
Maintaining ongoing communication with your current and potential clients and partners could prove to be a significant competitive advantage. Take the opportunity to reveal the human side of your business. Share your company culture, the causes that you stand behind, the employees that shape up your team. Share your industry knowledge and expertise with them – be the source of valuable information.
Your email newsletter will work its way towards building a sense of community, of involvement and, eventually, of loyalty in your customers.
Don’t forget to add sharing options in your newsletters and links to relevant resources on your website.
Online References (Inbound Links)
Having your website mentioned online is an important goal to aim at. Especially, as it comes to references from high authority and industry relevant blogs and news sites.
Google will pick up on your inbound links and assign an authority score to your website that would reflect to a great extent the quality of your backlink portfolio (among other things).
Given that your site visibility is at stake, you should strive to draft a link earning campaign. But remember not to be too aggressive in order not to fall on the other extreme of the spectrum and get penalized by google for adopting manipulative tactics towards shaping up your site rank.
Video Content
Cisco predicts that by the end of 2021, 80% of all Internet traffic (business and consumer combined) will be video traffic. There’s already a massive demand for video content, seize the opportunity and start developing your digital marketing strategy based on extensive video production.
Engaging video content can be shared across your social media channels and your website. Consider investing in explainer videos, tutorials, product reviews, interviews, get creative.
Video content is entertaining, easy to access and digest, and is more engaging than traditional written content. It has the potential to create consistent engagement and a steady increase in conversions..
Short-form videos like teasers for instance, provoke curiosity and have a great chance to become viral. Long-form videos, on the other hand, drive deeper engagement, they educate and inform your audience and help you build your brand’s image.
Experiment with both to find the right digital marketing formula for your brand.
Voice Search
Voice search is expected to be on the rise in the next few years. By 2022, it’s predicted the 55% of US households will own a smart speaker. Now is the time to start drafting your digital marketing strategy for the voice search boom.
Voice search offers a fast, convenient, and easy method of looking up for information online. Online users tend to interact with smart devices as if they talk to a real-life person. Thus you should consider optimizing for long-tail and question keywords for starters.
Live Streaming
In 2020 worldwide lockdowns made it impossible to carry on with our standard in-person social and business interactions. Live streaming turned out to be a great solution to the challenges that the global pandemic brought to us.
The way brands interact with their audiences is forever changed by live streaming. By all means the live video is an authentic way to grab your target audience’s attention and to easily engage them in a conversation.
You get the opportunity to create a genuine connection because everything is happening in real-time, it’s reactionary and can’t be edited. Plus, you get immediate feedback from your audience, so that you can, in no time, optimize your marketing strategy to fit your customers’ needs.
Research what are the hot topics people tend to watch in your niche and plan on your live stream event. Interviews, Q&As, special events, and even customer support streams would do miracles for reaching new audiences and improving working on your brand awareness.
Starting your own digital marketing strategy can seem like a daunting task. But covering these fundamental digital marketing steps will ensure that your brand has the right approach and is represented in all the channels that matter in reaching your target audience and increasing conversions and sales.
If time is your biggest limitation to starting these initiatives, we at Socialfix are equipped to guide you through the process of creating and implementing a successful digital marketing plan that will have your website off its chair and out there kicking butt as your top-performing sales machine!
