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Marketing is an integral part of every business. But how do you keep up with the fast-paced marketing landscape? How do you attract new clients?
Marketing your brand this year should be about reaching your customers, catching their attention, and engaging them- all at the right time. Branding is an essential aspect of marketing in the digital world; make sure it doesn’t take the back seat.
When it comes to marketing online, having an online presence for the sake of it is not going to help. You need to take a strategic approach that gives you a strong ROI.
But remember, marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all. Every brand needs to create its own strategy, but the essence is to create value.
In this article, we will show you how to build a winning digital strategy that will work for your brand and help you connect with your customers online-
Standing Out
As consumers, most of us go online to get what we want now. Even when we are using our favorite social media platforms for the sole reason of entertainment, we interact with brands that catch our attention.
This makes it all the more important to stand out and have an enticing branding strategy. Be present throughout the journey your audience takes before making a purchase. Make most of each interaction point, and put your business in front of people who matter the most to your business.
You need to effectively promote your product or service using a variety of marketing channels such as email, video, social media, search engines, and so on!
Create your branding strategy in a way that you and your customers share a common goal. Your marketing goals should overlap with your customer’s goals.
The top marketers in the world don’t focus on selling products, services, or features; they are all selling an experience.
What’s Your Destination?
You can’t expect marketing results restricting your mission and value statements to just your website. The messaging your brand creates should revolve around what you stand for and the value you deliver to your customers.
Be very clear on your organizational objectives, and fit them into your online marketing process. Marketing success doesn’t come overnight; you need to keep working on it.
Have a thorough understanding of your business and try to see the bigger picture here. This way, you’ll get the hang of which plan is the best for you and which route you should take to get where you want.
Most businesses squander time and money on pursuing the wrong audience. Create a customer strategy to find who your customers are, and how you can find them. Marketing can do wonders if you reach the right audience at the right time; this is how you get the best ROI.
Understand the motivation and needs of your audience. Now build your marketing strategy around what drives them. Figure out the marketing channels you can leverage to reach this specific audience. What do they want to hear from you? What can help them in the journey they take as a buyer? These questions will help you devise suitable plans to target your audience.
Marketing Channels
Using all marketing channels isn’t the right way to kick off your marketing. Analyze which marketing channels make the most sense to reach your business goals and prioritize your marketing efforts accordingly.
In paid marketing, each view or click costs you money. So, be very specific with your target market and what you want out from that particular campaign. Also, the time you spend on chasing the wrong audience means lost opportunities. Timing is everything; you need to be there when your customer is looking for a solution online.
The good news is- great marketing converts easily. Keep optimizing for better performance. Have a KPI for each marketing effort you make, such as views for blogs and conversions for a landing page.
You need to be meticulous with Search Engine Optimization if you want to enhance your brand’s visibility organically on the Google Search Results. You need to optimize your website in terms of technical make-up as well as the content. It is an on-going effort, but you should at least implement the essential optimization techniques.
You want to use marketing channels that take less effort and give you more value. Understandably, you don’t want to spend all your energy on the marketing channels that take a hell lot of effort and offer minimum benefit to your business. Let’s get into it!
Website
Your website is one of the most significant components of your digital marketing strategy. It shows what makes your brand unique, help visitors get to know more about your business and even help them make a purchase. Do a competitive analysis to gauge where your website stands, and if you need to work on it!
As a marketer, it’s your responsibility to have valuable information on your website that your visitors will be looking for, and guide them in their purchase decisions. All of your other marketing efforts eventually bring prospects to your website. This is why your website should be appealing, simple, and easier to navigate. Users should be able to easily find the information they are looking for. And, if your website is not well-optimized for mobile, there’s a lot of catching up to do!
Website visibility contributes a lot to marketing success. Do you appear on the first page of Google for your target keywords? Does your website offer a good customer experience? Your website is one of the best platforms to convert your audience because most people who visit your website do it with intent. This is why you need a combination of paid and organic results to increase your website’s visibility in search.
Email is another such platform with overwhelming opportunities. Make sure your emails are mobile optimized because a majority of users take to phones to check their emails.
The emails you write should connect your customers to your brand. Don’t go for long subject lines, or the ones that seem too complicated to comprehend. Write the most important points about the message you want to deliver, and then use supporting arguments as you go, if necessary at all. So, if the recipient stops reading at the early stage, they will still get the gist of your email.
You don’t want people to read it and take no action; you want them to respond to drive communication and engagement. Also, you want to grow your email list while at the same time driving revenue from it.
Social Media
Are your social media accounts reflective of your brand? Social media should not be just used to advertise; you should use it to build meaningful connections with your audience as well. Leverage social media channels to build a community and make sure the audience senses a feeling of belonging. Get people interested in what you have to say!
There was a time when marketing had a one-sided approach. Brands would send a message, and customers received it, end of the story! But the advent of social media changed it all. Social media has paved the way for meaningful interaction between a brand and its customers. Your posts should be for a specific audience, don’t go too broad in your approach here.
Create posts that resonate with your audience, something that will keep them coming for more.
Content
Investing time and money in creating high-value content will pay off not just now but even more in the long term. Valuable content is one of the top reasons users engage with a brand online. Stay up to date with the online marketing landscape to gauge which trends work the best now. Write for your audience; write what is useful to them. This is how you create an engaging copy for your marketing.
Write great content and make your content easy to scan because most of the people don’t read online material end to end. They leaf through it, and only when they find it extraordinarily valuable, they take time out to read the entire piece.
Your content marketing efforts should boost brand awareness, attract new customers, and drive revenue. Your audience must have certain questions that they look up on the internet, are you answering these questions? The content you create should answer the questions your prospects have. If not, it’s time you refine your strategy.
Video
Video content is the match-winner in your online marketing strategy. You may understand how crucial video is by the fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine. Creating videos is a great way to drive brand awareness and increase your website traffic.
Videos can influence the decision-making of your prospects like nothing else, and help them make a purchase decision in your favor. Videos can also help you improve your search engine rankings.
They appear in Google search results, and in turn, give you more opportunities to generate leads and convert more. But don’t make a video just to check another item off your list. The quality of your video content has to be paramount for it to work.
You may also do paid promotions to help your videos reach a wider audience and garner more engagement.
The Goal
The goal of marketing is to help prospects enter the funnel, and then move them from the top to the bottom of this funnel. The funnel shape implies that only a fraction of prospects complete this journey and turn into customers.
The modern marketing landscape focuses on converting awareness into a purchase. You need different marketing strategies for prospects in different stages of the funnel.
Your marketing efforts should make this progression from one stage to the next easier for your audience. Too many touchpoints don’t mean more conversions. What matters here is how well you understand what your buyer needs at a particular point and giving them what they need.
For example, the buyer journey of prospects that are aware of their problem and not looking for a solution yet and that of the prospects that are aware of their problem, your solution, and are ready to buy will vary to a great extent.
Your marketing’s end goal is to create a better online experience for your customers. Your marketing doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be good enough for you to drive results.
Source- SuperOffice
Bonus Point
A/B test all your marketing efforts to get the most out of your marketing efforts. But to dive deeper, keep only one or two variations to know what’s making an impact. To include more variation, use a specialized testing platform such as kissmetrics.
We can’t emphasize enough the importance of data your marketing collects. You need this data to create a marketing map. This way, it will become much easier to know your goal and what you need to do to achieve it. This won’t only improve your overall brand experience, but will also help you to tap into new business opportunities and discard strategies that are not bringing the desired results. Experimentation is the key to marketing, and tracking is crucial to understand what is working and what is not.
Wrapping it Up
Gaining visibility and reaching your ideal audience isn’t easy. But once you’ve found the right marketing strategy for your business, you will be overwhelmed by the potential online marketing has and the wonders it can do for your business.
Success in marketing requires in-depth knowledge, as well as consistency. The kind of marketing you do conveys the value you’re keen on delivering to your audience, and how much you care about their satisfaction and experience with you.
It doesn’t matter what route you’re taking to market your business online as long as you’re implementing the right set of strategies. Like Rome wasn’t built in a day, marketing takes its own sweet time before you can reap your rewards.
Business opportunities are increasing with online marketing as users are embracing new digital technology and ideas. The success you can achieve with online marketing is tremendous if done right.
