Digital marketing refers to promoting a product or service through online channels, such as social media, search engines, and mobile apps. This form of marketing has become increasingly prevalent since the advent of the internet. As digital marketing continues to rise, companies and service providers have to compete in an increasingly saturated market.
This blog details new businesses’ best digital marketing strategy via multiple digital marketing channels. Let’s dive in!
1. Setting Marketing Goals
Your marketing strategy should be measurable and realistic to help you achieve long-term business goals. Setting clear business objectives will enable you to bridge the gap between services offered and market demand. Avoid setting goals that lack definable outcomes, such as “increasing brand awareness.” Instead, for online marketing, have a clear idea of the demographics, regions, and target audiences.
Your goals must also be quantifiable and scalable to ensure you’re progressing steadily. While it is a good idea to aim higher, keep them accurate and achievable. This is key when applying digital marketing strategy for new business, as it ensures your marketing goals generate and redirect traffic to your website that translates into a profitable consumer base.
2. Creating a Digital Advertising Plan
As a means of online marketing, digital advertising can generate traffic for your website and establish an online presence through email marketing, social media marketing, or blog posts.
Search engine optimization is also an important tool, and once implemented, you can cater to customers at every stage of your marketing funnel and easily reach out to your potential customers.
Understanding your competitors and studying their marketing tactics can also give you a significant boost, as you will be able to stand out amongst your competition. This edge can increase your clicks, imporve conversion rates and help you reach a larger client base.
3. Creating a Brand Identity
Branding is an integral element of marketing and establishing a name for the business. However, focusing on building an image for your brand and telling a story is what establishes a customer base and keeps your target audience returning. As a digital marketing strategy for new businesses, the creation of a brand image has two components. Initially, you need to make your brand known. As digital marketing becomes more and more prevalent over traditional and print media marketing, it will become pricier. Google bidding wars can be impossibly expensive for small brands. Therefore it is important to invest in a good marketer.
Then, you have to seek ways to grow organically, which entails raising brand awareness and producing content that does not directly advertise but does educate, increases traffic, and gives people value for their time. Increasing traffic organically is at the crux of creating a solid brand image.
4. Setting Up a Website
Within a highly competitive environment, having the best quality online and mobile website is crucial. High quality in terms of speed, user-friendliness, and design is more likely to increase traffic for your website, which should be optimized for smartphones, as over half the online purchases made are over mobile. Mobile web design should be easy to use and responsive, with readable links as the customers use their fingers to click.
With social media’s prevalence in everyday life, most company owners recognize the value of an online presence. An outdated website and social media profile will not be appealing to customers. Allocate an amount of time to maintain and keep up your social profiles. Engage with your patrons and stay current on trends to appeal to your audience. These social media strategies will enable you to enlarge your customer base.
5. Building Online Content
A large part of implementing any social media strategy is creating content for key social media platforms. Marketers invest in content marketing to educate rather than directly promote, which helps engage an audience, subsequently increasing your website’s traffic and creating an online presence. This media strategy is viable through any digital channels, such as blog posts, videos, or social media posts.
Written content is typically the most popular, as it is not pricey if done internally. This content can be on landing pages, emails, and blogs. Videos tend to be more engaging; however, they may be costly to create, as they often include the price of actors or animators, editing software, or filming equipment.
A good digital strategy means aligning your content with your target audiences, allowing them to engage with your content, and implement search engine optimization strategies.
6. Search Engine Optimization
In online marketing, the role of search engine optimization is to increase the exposure of your service or product. When customers are searching for a product or service online through a search engine, you must ensure that your website is listed in the search engine results so they can find you. Audiences are unlikely to scroll through several search engine results pages to find your company and are much more likely to click on the first few results.
Search engine optimization increases brand awareness, and your online presence and generates more traffic for your website inducing higher chances of lead generation. It further makes your website user-friendly and mobile-friendly, subsequently increasing sales via inbound leads.
7. Email Marketing
Digital marketing campaign often implements email marketing, as it can help attract new customers, and inform your existing customer base of new releases and promotions, however, these marketing tactics may only work if you segment your database, such as dividing old customers and new customers and targeting them differently, sending out more emails to the customers who are engaging with your content, or you could target certain demographics based on age, gender or location.
Your content should be personalized and engaging to avoid being marked as spam. Ensure that your emails are sent out at the right time of day and the right day of the week. Your emails should be optimized for viewing on mobile, as many of your target audience will receive your emails on smartphone devices.
8. Visual Marketing
Visual content is appealing to businesses and consumers alike. Whether pictures, vertical, short-form video content, 360-degree videos, live content, stories, or social television, the demand for visual marketing is exponentially growing.
This is one of the most engaging ways to make a connection with your target audience. Therefore it is crucial to incorporate visual marketing for all screen sizes, mobile or PC, into your digital advertising strategy.
An important visual tool is to stream live videos when you have an important event, a launch, or a promotion. Always plan a live stream beforehand, while keeping it short of capturing interest. You can also create a YouTube channel for businesses and consumers to view. This could include demonstrations, product reviews, testimonials, tutorials, expert reviews, past live streams, web conferences, and seminars.
9. Optimizing for Voice Search
The rise of voice technology has been a prevalent topic in marketers’ minds. Voice searching via assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Chatbots is becoming increasingly popular. Brands focusing on consumer-friendly content are more likely to succeed in these spaces. Offering condensed, valuable content enables brands to make space for themselves in this market.
Optimizing for voice search entails focusing on conversational keywords that can help answer people’s queries. For this, you may need a team of marketers to optimize your keywords and sites. Voice search saves consumers time and gives brands more insight into what customers wantin detail.
10. B2B Marketing
Although focusing on consumers is imperative, business-to-business content may be neglected. It can be highly profitable for most companies, as B2B searches are often based on intent. A foundation of trust is built when a business offers educational content and not promotional content on certain solutions.
Consumers are more likely to be interested in talking to a third-party representative to learn more about your product or services. Incorporating blogs, papers, and other long-form content that address problems can help build a target audience’s trust. Marketers will try different strategies as brands continue to fight for attention in these competitive times. By considering marketing trends, you can stay ahead of the curve.
11. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing, one of the oldest forms of marketing, has been brought back to life as online marketing.
With affiliate marketing, also known as influencer marketing where celebrities promote products or services and get a commission every time their promotion leads to a sale or click. Many large companies, such as Amazon, have affiliate programs that pay hefty monthly amounts to websites and people selling their products.
The Bottom Line
Digital marketing has become crucial as print media and traditional forms of marketing continue to become obsolete. Just ensure that your promotional activities on various platforms must align with each other. Parts of your digital marketing strategy is a plan aimed at an extensive vision and business goal that is achieved only through the right strategic planning.
Any beginner needs to invest in proper digital marketing to continue to grow and thrive. Having a small business can be highly rewarding, as you can set your work timings and be your boss if you follow these digital marketing strategies for new business. However, it can quickly get daunting to manage when marketing your business is concerned, as only a few people can reach this level.
That’s why the book “Digital Marketing For Small Business Owners” was written. Visit the website to purchase your copy and manage all your digital marketing needs.
