If you want to make your business thrive you have to make your online presence strong and develop a good digital marketing strategy. Web marketing will help you drive more traffic to your page and turn more leads into conversions.

In this article, we will learn what Digital Marketing and its strategies are and how to successfully act on it to yield better results.

What is a marketing strategy?

For us to delve any further into learning any kind of digital marketing strategies you first need to learn exactly what is digital marketing. Always remember before learning about anything first learn its basics that is how what you learn will remain in your memory for a longer time.

A marketing strategy is a plan for reaching a set marketing goal or several goals that you can achieve. You also have to take into consideration what your business is currently doing and what you want to achieve with a good marketing plan. If your business has not yet achieved what you hoped to achieve then an effective marketing plan will work wonders in making your business a success.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is described as a series of actions through online media channels to make all your goals come true. These channels might include earned, paid, or owned media. A digital marketing plan will allow you to successfully launch or build your brand.

Make sure that you never copy one marketing strategy for your brand. Every business has its own needs and requirements. So make sure that the digital marketing strategy you develop for your business fits your business requirements. Your business digital marketing strategy should be goal-oriented like:

• Short term
• Medium-term
• Long term

Setting up multiple goals will allow you to develop a more efficient plan for your brand. We advise you to make a long-term plan so your business can thrive and grow much effectively.

How to create a successful marketing strategy that is tailor-made for your business?

Now that you are well versed with what exactly digital marketing strategy is we can start on how to create one for your business.Keep on reading to learn more about your digital marketing plans and actions.

Build buyers personas

For your marketing plans to work successfully, you need to know who interested in your products is first. Your business cannot be successful if you don’t know who wants your products. This is where targeting your audience comes into play. The best way to target your audience is to create your buyer personas. Buyer personas represent the people who are interested in your business and your products. It helps you know more about your customer’s likes and dislikes, what they would like to see from your brand or what things to improve. Moving forward with a strong digital marketing plan you first need to create a strong buyer persona. Because if you know your ideal customers then it is easy to target them and make ads that will appeal to them a certain way.

At this stage you might be asking yourself “How do I create a buyer persona?” well no worries we plan to guide you through everything here!

Do your research. Before starting any business, or creating and digital strategies you must always read up on customers’ data. Research your audience and interview them with the help of surveys to learn more about them, what they would like or what they are expecting from you. Make sure that the buyer personas are based on real and factual data

The demographic information that should be included in the essential information should be:

• Location
• Age
• Income
• Job

You can also add some of the other information like:

• Goals
• Interests
• Hobbies
• Challenges

These personas will help you shape your strategies to their maximum potential and determine which channels are more popular to reach potential customers. Lets work with Softrick Solutions.

Setting your goals:

If you want your digital marketing plan to work you need to make sure that you have set your goals. Even if you want to increase your conversion rate or increase your lead you must establish:

• What you want to achieve
• What is the deadline for those goals to achieve?
• How you will measure the achievement

Here is an easy way to make an effective digital marketing strategy. With the help of S.M.A.R.T, it stands for:

Specific: The goals you want to achieve should be precise. It is better to set a goal in numbers.

Measurable: When you set a goal in numbers it is easy for you to track your progress. For example, you have reached an X number of leads this year that you had set as your goal. This is way easier than to track “increase my companies leads this year”.

Attainable: your goals should be realistic. Many companies make the common mistake of not making their goals realistic. We advise you to make goals that are competitive and not impossible.

Relevant: your goals should be relevant to what you are trying to achieve as a whole in your business. You cannot set a goal to reach so and so several followed or subscribers if you are not running a social media campaign. Hence your goals should always align with what you want for your brand.

Time: deadlines or a timeframe to achieve your goals is always needed and necessary. Whether it is a week or month it is always in your favor to set a timeline.

This S.M.A.R.T technique will help you realize your goals and get successful results with your campaigns that you can measure. It also helps you set up performance indicators KPI for your campaign.

What are KPIs?

KPI is a figure that can help you identify and successfully establish methods on how to measure your progress in your campaigns.

Auditing online marketing strategies

Auditing your online marketing strategies is very important. You must understand how your campaign functions to pinpoint where your campaign needs improvement. You will need to take three different media types on your site as follows:

Earned media: Earned media is a type of media that is free for your business.

Any publicity of your brand or business comes from promoting and advertising it through various media channels. This media contains the content written about your company that you didn’t create. This includes articles and other internet reviews written about your business. For example, if you have won an award and deserve to be talked about on the internet then that is earned media. You do not have to pay for that, instead, you receive it. Regardless of when, whenever someone says something good about your business, this is a free endorsement and it is thus an earned media.

A good way is to map your reviews, awards, and articles so that we can monitor areas that could be more efficiently utilized into earning more earned media.

Owned media:  media that is in direct relation with your business is considered owned media such as company-owned blogs, social media profiles, images, and other merchandise. This is the media that is explicitly mentioned alongside your name and bears rights to the brand.

It is easier to gauge the growth and health of owned media assets as a greater reach is available over them. We measure growth through say; the number of likes and views on your media content or by the time potential customers spend on the website or reading the blogs and interacting with other customers.

The results of these owned media are the most essential as they determine the needed improvements and adjustments. These stats also allow us to predict consumer habits and thus create a more profitable business model for the future.

Paid media: this kind of media is bought such as advertisements we see whether it is digitally on the television, on the internet as pop-ups or side-adverts, or in the physical world as billboards and banners, flex signs, etc.

Pay-per-click ads and social media ads are the most effective way of paid media today. Paid media work based on whoever pays more has more screen time duration and frequency. The more people that view your ads mean more potential customers for the business, which is the main purpose of paid media.

Paid media require that we keep auditing them such that we keep track of how and what strategies of media are doing best. This allows us to focus our efforts on the most lucrative mode of ads. Suppose you are hoping to increase the quarterly conversions by a margin of 20%, then by observing the marketing strategies you conclude that social media ads were more effective. In such a case a greater investment is required in social media to further maximize efficiency.

In this way gaps in campaigns can be avoided. Current trends and changing online climate make for constant places for new content which makes our business more user-friendly and leaves a better user experience, this is targeted at improving search results on google.

An extensive study of the growth and health of all marketing efforts results in a better campaign with improved reach and efficiency as it is targeted and more streamlined towards the customer.

Estabiish a working budget:

To maximize the marketing efforts in both efficiencies and reach we must create a budget for our marketing and stick to it so that we do not bleed our funds to market grossly. Exhausting the company budget for online marketing does not make sense, so it is most advisable to create a working and sufficient budget for online marketing.

Each campaign requires a separate budget, as this separation of budget allows a more clean and compartmentalized approach to keeping all efforts inside the allotted budget. A centralized system of the budget might result in the accidental exhaustion of funds into a single marketing strategy. This kind of over-investing must be avoided at all costs.

Resource management is another fundamental tactic that enables us to limit our most precious resource which is the humans, we deploy for a specific campaign or marketing venture.

Tools such as google analytics are most effective in running our campaign and must be included in the means and budgets of the brand.

An excellent launch of the business requires a well-formulated budget, resources, and marketing strategies for its success and continued growth.

Optimizing search engine results (SEO) for digital marketing strategies:

Consider search engines are spiders that quickly move through the web and fetch all the search hits based on the search topic in a ranked order based upon hidden parameters defined in the algorithm of the search engine. While these parameters are hidden we can manipulate them to some extent based on a few things:

1. Several external and internal links connect to and from the webpage. As backlinks help increase credibility.
2. Keywords that are relevant to the search topic title i.e. they are referenced.
3. The activity observed on the page such as the visitations to the page and time spent on its domain.

The better we create our content based on these three tips the better visibility for our page upon search. This means a higher rank and automatically a better chance of being visited as exposure is still one of the primary ways of attracting business to this day. First page results are the most likely to be visited that is why a great deal of attention is given to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as this optimizes the Click-through Rate (CTR) or the rate at which the user clicks through to the content. This helps content in standing out from the saturated fields of search results.