In the business world, ‘it’s not about what you sell but how much and how well you sell it,’ states Brian Halligan, CEO & Co-Founder, HubSpot.
And marketing is the key to increasing your sales in the business world. However, marketing in the traditional sense of the word no longer exists.
In the digital era, marketing is incomplete without digital marketing strategies, so businesses spend more and more on their digital marketing strategies.
As of 2021, firms are expected to use 50% of the total marketing budget for digital marketing strategies.
Keeping up with the industry changes and incorporating digital marketing into your marketing strategies is essential; however, that doesn’t mean that you will succeed every time. Only 58% of marketers feel they are often successful with their digital marketing strategies.
I’m sure you must be investing a considerable amount of time and money in your digital marketing efforts.
Do you feel that your digital marketing strategies do not provide you with the desired results? Then follow our 8-step guide to improve your digital marketing efficiently.
In this article, we explain our tried and tested techniques that will help you get best returns on your digital marketing efforts.
1) Redefine your marketing strategy as per your goals
People believe that one of the significant benefits of switching to digital marketing is that it is simpler than traditional marketing, which is true.
However, that does not mean you can simply implement a strategy and forget all about it. Just like traditional marketing, digital marketing also requires setting specific goals and timeframes to achieve goals. Understand your audience base and revamp your digital marketing goals and strategies accordingly.
Doing so is essential because the digital world is fast-paced, and the market trends change frequently. Therefore, you need to know what’s relevant now and how your audience responds to a particular strategy.
2) Create/hire your digital marketing team
The urge to do everything by yourself can be pretty tempting, especially if you run a small business. The motivation may be the feeling of independence or saving up on costs.
However, it is best to hire a professional third-party agency that can take care of all your digital marketing management.
Here are the experts you need to look for in your digital marketing team.
- Marketing storyteller: Storytelling is one of the most compelling ways to communicate with people. It has been used for generations in marketing effectively, and it remains a winning sales pitch even in the digital era. Every brand has a story that helps them connect with their audience, and you need to hire a storyteller who can create unique stories to reach out to your audience that has the essence of your brand.
- Content curators: Your content creators need to create a lot of original content for every campaign. However, using the existing content on the internet and portraying it in a new way can help reduce the workload. And this is where content curators come into the picture. They use the existing content to get the best out of it for your brand.
- Data managers: Another crucial element of any digital marketing team is the people who manage the data. A data manager will analyze the data from your various digital platforms, such as your social media platforms, websites, and other channels, to get insights into your performance.
- Customer service liaison: Customer experience plays a vital role in marketing. You need to ensure that your customers can communicate and interact with your businesses seamlessly to provide a better user experience in the long run. And for that, you need to have a customer service liaison in your marketing team.
Just make sure that the team you choose understands the brand requirements and resonates with its values.
3) Focus on SML
Here SML stands for social media, mobile, and local as these three elements act as the frames in which you need to fit your digital marketing strategies.
They give you the best results. Here’s why:
- Social media: It has become the most common platform where your audience will look for you to know what your business represents. It is a means of interaction and communication. Its reach is so vast that it also affects your SEO strategy, so you need to enhance your social media marketing efforts.
- Mobile: Almost 90% of the population now uses the internet through mobile, which is why you need to optimize all your marketing channels like SEO, social media, and paid ads for mobile.
- Local: Most businesses rely on the local audience for revenue, but they go national or international when creating digital marketing strategies and rarely get the desired results. Therefore, you need to focus on your local SEO and focus on local regions while targeting your audience for other channels.
4) Create multi-channel campaigns
A lot of businesses focus on just one channel to generate results in digital marketing. This practice reduces their engagement levels and conversions, as studies show that customers check at least six mediums before trusting a brand or business and use their services.
Having multi-channel campaigns helps you create more engagement levels and conversions through your digital marketing channels. You should also diversify within the channels to increase your reach.
For example: When creating a campaign for your social media, target multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Instead of just focusing on one with the most extensive audience base.
5) Develop exceptional content creation strategy
In the digital world, content is king, and it is valid for all your digital marketing channels. Therefore, you need to have exceptional content that is unique, engaging, and relevant to your audience. And the challenge is you need to keep doing it again and again for each campaign.
That’s why you need to have a foolproof strategy for content creation.
Here are five tips you can follow to create exceptional content:
- Define the objective: We design each content with a purpose in mind. Identify that purpose first. It can be to build brand awareness, generate leads, or increase sales.
- Learn from the data: Creating a content strategy is all about using the available information and gathering insights to understand your audience and create the content accordingly.
- Formulate a plan: Always have a plan as to how you will move with the execution part. Who will do what, and how the result will look. It will help you simplify the process and get the best results.
- Set the tone: Even if you are creating something unique and new every day, it is essential to set a tone that resonates with your brand and to implement it in all your content
- Repurpose: Use the existing content and repurpose it in a new manner to save time and effort. It is best if you use the content that had the most engagement level in the previous form.
- Be open to ideas: Content is all about creativity, and thinking out of the box is a must-have to succeed in the digital world. Never forget to enhance your content with visuals, audio, and videos.
6) Optimize the content
Often businesses create content and publish it and forget about it. And this mistake leads to a loss to conversions and leads. Therefore keep optimizing your content by adding relevant links, high-quality images, videos, and other elements that offer value addition.
Set up a mechanism to check existing content on a quarterly or yearly basis and make optimizations.
Remove old and broken links and replace them with relevant ones.
7) Rely on automation
All this can seem like a mammoth task when you get to it, and it is if you don’t work smart. Working smart entails using automation to eliminate repetitive tasks that take up time and resources.
Use free automation tools whenever you can reduce the workload and streamline the process. It will help you save time and focus on things that require your attention more.
Some of the best automation tools in the market include:
Marketo: It is a digital marketing automation tool that can take care of all your engagements at every platform, including email marketing and social media management. The personalization and visualization features make this tool one of the best in the league.
DashClicks: Another automation tool that is in a league of its own. It is designed explicitly for B2B businesses that want to focus on scaling. It has innovative inbuilt tools such as Agency Website, InstaSite, and InstaReports that help you grow your business.
ProfitBooks: It is an automation tool for all your accounting needs. Whether it is bookkeeping or keeping track of inventory, or managing other financial aspects of your business, ProfitBooks can take care of everything without you having to hire someone with accounting knowledge.
HubSpot: This tool has various digital marketing tools for CRM, sales, and inbound marketing to make all your digital marketing platforms. With HubSpot, you get a one-stop shop that offers all the functionalities avoiding the need for multiple tools.
Omnisend: If you are into e-commerce, then Omnisend is an automation tool that you must have. With its pre-created workflows, powerful data collection methods, and templates for every category of products, Omnisend can make your e-commerce marketing a breeze.
8) Continuous improvement is the key
Applying digital marketing strategies is a continuous process, and you need to develop, control, and measure it. Measure your outputs and compare them with the goals you had set before starting.
Analyze the data and identify what went wrong. Then take those insights and implement them on your next strategy to get better results.
Wrapping up
Not a concluding note, we want to say that digital marketing is becoming highly competitive with each passing day. To survive, you need to stay ahead of the game and use the tools you have to get the best outcomes.
However, the best part is there is always scope for more growth if you just keep working on your goals.
Hope you liked these tips. Please share your thoughts or queries in the comments section below.
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