The world is getting globalized, and we are very much validating the concept of it becoming a “small village”. Thanks to the digital technology, now we do not have to worry about physically going for bookings, paying our bills or even, shopping.
Here’s when, from the business’s point of view, “Digital Marketing Strategy” comes into play. The businesses would always want to know their customers’ interests and invest in the same. With a focus on planning and budgeting, most of the SEO online marketing teams spend their time analyzing a capital investment, resource allocation, and competitive landscape.
So what is Digital Marketing Strategy?
Any plan that helps to achieve your company’s targets through various ways, like paid, earned and owned media, helping you campaign for your business, constitutes digital marketing strategy.
And how do you start with the “strategy”?
Well, that requires you to get an idea of where you are currently standing in the market vs where your competitors are. This is called a digital competitive analysis. It is phenomenal in helping you identify your strong and weak aspects and work on them accordingly. Also, an impression of the entire strategy could be forged with the help of this analysis.
When done with the analysis, an enthusiasm on your part in keeping pace with the following will work wonders.
Business availability and accessibility
Whatever your business is- online or offline, you need to pay attention to the availability of your website and it’s easy accessibility. This means that since the potential customers are looking for businesses online, you need to be findable on Google. Based on your ranking, Google will mark you with the searched keywords, if not, then an improvement on your content is required.
While visiting the website, a user would appreciate a user-friendly, smooth experience. For instance, if your pages take infinite time to load, the user might head to another site. The better your UI, the longer the user will stay. Also, since most customers are available on mobile phones, a mobile-friendly site with a faster execution would catch the user’s eyes.
Since Google has started flagging secure and insecure websites, your site’s security also plays a crucial role. Thus, take pains to fix your security issues too.
Identify your ideal customers
You need to identify the who’s and types of your customers, i.e., creating your buyer personas. This can be achieved by researches, surveys, and interviews from your target audience. Your perception about this should be based on a thorough understanding of your customers, their prospects and other businesses who get involved with them.
For instance, you can get to know your customers’ age, location, income, job title etc. Apart from these, an in-depth understanding of their goals, challenges or the common problems faced by them, their hobbies and interests, and their priorities will play a vital role in your business.
Pursue your goals with the digital marketing tools
Your marketing goals should be hand in hand with your business’ targets. As an example, if your business needs to expand by 30%, you must, as a marketer, ensure that you take a lead of 50% more than you did last month.
More important is to know how to measure your goals and work towards it. There are a lot of statistics tools available to help you with the same. This will, in turn, let you make a strategy on how much revenue is to be generated compared to last month or year and take necessary steps.
Work on content
Your website must ostensibly lay down the business fundamentals, with which the user must be able to understand the business purpose and not get confused. Your content may include your website, social media profiles, blogs or even imagery.
Based on buyer personas, you can even audit and identify the existing gaps in your content. For example, if you are a shopping company, based on user experiences, you can figure out what kind of products your customers are searching for if they like a particular product or not if the quality of the product fared well or it didn’t. Then you can think of either introducing a new product or improving the earlier one.
Interaction with customers
You might have accomplished this while building your buyer persons, but this requires a special mention here. Answering your customers’ queries is the key. You need to maintain service pages as well as periodically update them in order to build your customer’s trust. A user, if does not find answers to his or her questions, is bound to push the “back” button, and this may prove fatal to your business.
Today, users do their research and when satisfied with the business, only then think of investing in it. Hence, you need to keep a close watch on their queries and be the first to answer.
Blogging a month at least would also support your customer trust build up. Remember, the better you interact, the better customers you attract.
Also, periodically sending email newsletters remind your customers if you everytime they open their inbox.
Last Tips
When keeping up to date with the times is the trend, why would you want to lag behind? When you think it’s high time you dominated your local market, pay attention to the trends and earn customers’ trust.
Keep communicating with customers through social media, videos, and marketing etc even when they don’t require your services. Give them loyalty points, offers etc to hold onto them and make them come back.
Use AI and get your customers personalized the experience by knowing their interests and marketing the same. Establish voice searches in your site- the easier you make it for them, the better they bank upon you. Also, video marketing could be hot selling. These days, technologies like VR, AR, and 360-degree videos are doing the rounds, especially the how-to and testimonial videos.
With this, a lot has been explained on digital marketing strategy and now you just need to make it happen! Contributed by Hari Babu from TechAriz
