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Digital Marketing Strategies: Your Complete Guide - 2021 Edition
Best Digital Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Business in 2021
As marketers or aspiring to be ones, we’re all aware of the basic principle of marketing which is to reach your target audience at the right time and the right place.
Digital Marketing rides on that principle better than any other marketing tactics. It lets us reach who we want to, where we want to and at what time we want to. All of this of course in the digital space.
With such an efficient tool at our dispense, comes a great deal of expertise required to handle it. Digital marketing has opened doors to various new avenues and platforms. But it is quite impossible to leverage all platforms to our advantage; both cost-wise as well as efficiency-wise.
So if you’re a digital marketer working in a company or a business owner looking to boost your business with the best performing marketing strategies, this blog is for you.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is having a data-driven framework that states the specific marketing goals you want to achieve, the online channels to be used for the particular digital marketing campaign to achieve those goals, and most importantly a set budget allocated to it.
It is beneficial to ideate a stipulated timeline required to execute that digital marketing strategy end-to-end. For an even broader approach, have a backup/contingency strategy ready in case of a mid-crisis.
Importance of a Digital Marketing Strategy
A digital marketing strategy is important because it gives you a sense of direction, gives clarity as to what goals you want to achieve and the steps to achieve them. This helps you to make the right decisions and leaves no room for any errors or failure of campaigns.
With a defined digital marketing strategy, each teammate would be focused on achieving the target goal without any deviation. This way you get higher productivity and efficiency and bring in better results.
With a digital marketing strategy on board, you can also track your performance and analyze if everything is going as per the plan. If not, you will be prepared to handle such a situation and get back on track.
Many companies still do not abide by having marketing strategies which eventually leads to poor performance.
These are all the reasons why having a digital marketing strategy is extremely important.
How Should I Start Creating A Digital Marketing Strategy?
We recommend using the famous SOSTAC model framework to structure and plan. It was founded in the 1990s and here’s a short brief on it:
Situation - Where is the company standing currently?
Objectives - Where does the company want to be?
Strategic approach - How will the company get there?
Tactics - Exact steps to get there
Action - What is the company’s plan?
Control - Did the company get there?
Once you ask these questions and start formulating solutions around them, you will be able to develop a digital strategy much easier. Let’s look at a broken down process of how to create a digital marketing strategy.
The first & foremost step would be to define the brand you want to strategize for. Understand the vision & mission of the company, their voice, their overall user demographics, and decide how you want the brand to be put across.
Secondly, understand the goal that you have to achieve and build a potential target audience around it. Use demographics to filter them out further. To determine which channels will be the most effective for this niche target audience, you need to conduct an audit on which platforms are the most frequented by the target audience.
Furthermore, use an agency that has experience with marketing strategies for your target audience. A local auto repair shop that is looking to expand its business would benefit from an agency that can provide digital marketing strategies for the automotive industry rather than someone without any experience in that industry.
Remember, your goals must be SMART ( Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely)
Now come up with at least 2 or more different strategies to achieve the same goal. Allocate a budget to each of them. You must know that in digital marketing, the budget you’re willing to pay and the money that is actually required highly depends on bidding. So keep in mind about it and accordingly set a rough estimate.
Lastly, go all berserk on the shortlisted strategies, go through them thoroughly, and after careful analysis choose one of them which will bring in the desired results at a good price. And there you have it, you’re ready to launch your strategized digital marketing campaign.
Do not forget to track your performance from time to time and make any necessary changes if required. This game can be perfected only with trials and errors.
Digital Marketing Strategy Framework
Marketing always starts and ends with the users. Naturally, the first thing to determine is who your users are, where are all of them present on the digital platforms and what content would they like to see from you.
If the answer is social media platforms, you need to build a strong Instagram profile with high engagement with your audience. Having consistent yet relevant posts is important. Pinterest is another big image-based social media platform. If Pinterest resonates more with your users, be present over there.
This is how you start creating awareness about your brand amongst users and eventually lead them to consider your brand when the need arises. Generally, with the number of ads shown to a user daily, it is a huge achievement if you get your user from the awareness to the consideration stage.
Post which there are 2 possibilities: Either the user turns away or ends up purchasing from you.
Talking about the former possibility, a very famous digital marketing strategy - Remarketing is of help. This strategy aims at giving that last push to the users deeper into the funnel and getting them to purchase. So you could give out a testimonial video that wins the trust of the user and back it up a limited period offer or similar and get the user to purchase.
The journey doesn’t end with the purchase. It is equally important to retain that customer and win brand loyalty from them. This way the customer keeps purchasing your product and if they’re really happy with you, they could turn into your brand advocates.
This is what a consumer travels through. Now, let’s look at the best digital marketing strategies that can be implemented by start-ups as well as established companies to make the consumer’s journey end up as sales.
8 Key Elements To Form The Best Digital Marketing Strategies
1.Social Media Marketing
The best way to increase your brand awareness and get higher conversions is through social media marketing. Almost everyone today is present on social media and spends a significant amount of time on it. Thus, it’s the best way to grab attention and the reach is massive.
2.Content Marketing
When it comes to content marketing, it is all about engaging with your audience and giving them content that is useful for them. This can be done in the form of blogs, videos & more. While providing useful information to users, in a way, they start familiarizing themselves with your brand and what you stand for.
3.SEO
Search Engine Optimization is optimizing your website with relevant keywords and content to rank higher on the search engines when a query related to you is typed in. Today, SEO is a widely used digital marketing strategy.
4.Email Marketing
Emails are considered to be the best mode of a formal communication channels to interact with your consumers with customized and personalized messages. And now you can devise a digital marketing strategy around it.
5.PPC
PPC - Pay-per-click is a very famous form of digital marketing today. This simply means that you bid for the keywords you want Google to rank you for and every time someone clicks on your ad, you will be charged.
The next three strategies that we’re going to discuss are great ways to attract and push your consumers deeper into the funnel.
6.Video Marketing
Today, most of the users end up watching videos that are informative yet quirky and funny. Users find it more visually appealing to watch videos than read a piece of content, and many times they end up sharing it with their friends and family too. To push consumers to purchase, give CTAs in the video.
7.SEM
SEM i.e. Search Engine Marketing means ranking higher on Google through paid advertisements. You can promote your website by increasing its visibility through SEM. With the number of websites competing on Google today, SEM strategies are very vital in getting traffic to your website and acquiring leads.
8.Influencer Marketing
The latest trend in the market is the influencers. Influencers are people on social media platforms who influence their followers with their opinions on various things and engage with them. Audiences love and trust their favorite influencers and thus, it’s best they hear about you from the people they trust.
Digital Marketing Strategies For Your Brand
The above-mentioned are the top key elements to formulate a digital marketing strategy. Having a mix of them in the right balance is the focal point of any digital marketing strategy. Here’s how you can form digital marketing strategies for a start-up.
You can start with social media marketing to build awareness and brand recognition. Run sponsored posts and stories on social media platforms about your brand or the product you want to promote. Find out your target audience and filter them for your ads.
Try keeping your creatives interesting and add a surprise element to entice users to want to know more about you. If you can make it interactive, then it’s a bonus!
You can also kick-start Influencer Marketing side-by-side. Get influencers to create a mystery around your brand/product and leave it to that. When many influencers are talking about it, it may generate curiosity.
By the time you’ve created enough awareness, it’s time you get deeper into the funnel. Put out relevant content through SEO-optimised website content, blogs, and articles so that you can show up on the search results when users are trying to find something similar.
With the help of analytics, find out the traffic coming in and where it is coming from. If it’s from your social media posts, start advertising to those you clicked on your ads. If it’s coming from the blogs, send them to relevant pages on your website from those blogs.
Now, these are the people who are your potential customers and are needed to be pushed deeper into the funnel to make the purchase. Remarket to them using video marketing or SEM. Ensure you choose the right keywords. Offer additional discounts.
You can also continue with the influencer marketing campaign, this time you can get them to review your product/service and share it with their followers. The chances of your target audience purchasing your products now will have increased.
Track how many sales did you get with this strategy and compare it with previous ones. See what worked out for you.
To retain your consumer, run email marketing campaigns with regular automated emails to your consumers announcing new products, discounts, sales, birthday special discounts, and a lot more. You can also send them reminder emails to buy the things they have added to their carts.
This is how you devise digital marketing strategies, by adding a perfect mix of different digital marketing elements. Let’s look at a few examples of digital marketing strategies by leading companies.
Examples of Digital Marketing Strategy
If you want to know how India’s leading food-delivery app operates its digital marketing, here’s a detailed study & analysis of Zomato’s Digital Marketing Strategy. Give this interesting piece a read which is sure to get your brain running with many ideas,
Also, if you’d like to read about how the audits are done and how a digital marketing strategy is formed for India’s largest food & grocery store, read this blog on BigBasket’s Digital Marketing Strategy by the students of IIDE - India’s leading digital marketing institute.
Check out how this international personal care company runs successful digital marketing strategies and campaigns - L’oreal’s Digital Marketing Strategy.
We hope these examples of digital marketing strategies with ppt have been helpful in this process.
Conclusion
Well, that’s it from our side. We hope this blog has helped you understand all the things needed for Digital Marketing Strategies and get you started with your own!
Although we do know that it is not easy, to begin with. You need to upskill yourself with in-depth knowledge and waywardness of Digital Marketing. So we recommend going for an MBA-level post-graduation in Digital Marketing which teaches you everything about the digital marketing strategies mentioned above and many more along with managerial skills.
And if you’re someone with a time-crunch and looking to study from the comfort of your home, go for this Online Digital Marketing Course and it’s sure to get you kick-started with some amazing digital marketing strategies.
Do let us know about your views in the comments section below. We would love to hear from you.
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