8 Qualities of a Great Digital Marketing Strategy

All companies need some form of digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness. These days, it is pretty much a given that you need to place some effort and resources into your online marketing efforts. But consider for a moment what a great marketing strategy could do for your business. Why should you settle for less?

With all the experts and gurus out there talking about Social Media, Funnels, Video, and now Virtual Reality and even Augmented Reality it can be overwhelming to figure out the right path for your business. And knowing what a great digital marketing strategy actually is, or what that means for your business can be a real challenge.

Unless you work professionally as a marketer and pay close attention to the trends, it’s near impossible to know the best marketing strategies.

Especially since digital marketing is an industry that constantly changes. But with all the options out there, there are a few tried and true methods that you can easily wrap your head around that will help improve your company’s exposure.

Read on to see 8 solid strategies that will drive results.

1. Having a Quality Website

For most businesses, their website the hub for their online efforts. It’s often the very first interaction that their audience will have with them. If that applies to your business, you will want to make sure that you consider every facet of your website.u

Consider this: If the goal of your digital marketing strategy is to drive your prospects or audience to your website, then what is the most important piece that will turn prospects into buyers? It doesn’t take a masters degree to figure out the answer.

So at this point, you might be asking what exactly makes a website stand out, and do the job of actually elevating the overall experience of your brand? It’s many, many small details all working in harmony. We’ve listed out a few of the important ones below so that you can address these if you haven’t already. A premium, top-tier website is:

• Well designed & easy to navigate

• Built with a good flow of information

• Intuitive to the user

• Easy to use, and easy to navigate

• Optimized to look great and work well on tablet and mobile

• Fast-loading

• Set up correctly with Google

• Built solid on-page SEO

• Designed to capture leads, both in the form of slow-converting leads (ie mailing list signups) and fast-converting leads that want to do business with you right away.

• Set up so that every page leads to another to keep your users interested

• Created with the entire flow of your sales process in mind.

With this in mind, a stock website just doesn’t cut it. Sure, you can throw up a Squarespace or Wix template, but if you’re serious about your digital marketing efforts, it pays to go deeper, and consider every aspect of your website design.

Think about it – When you go to a website that looks outdated and takes forever to load, what’s your reaction? You quickly move onto something else.

More so now than ever, people are likely browsing your site from their smartphone, and all the while they’re getting pinged on email, text, Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack.. Hell, maybe they’re even getting a phone call! Not a good recipe for converting a browser into a buyer. So you need to do everything you can to keep them interested in what you have to say.

2. Optimize for Mobile

This relates to some of the points above, but it’s worth reiterating: Make sure your website works amazingly well on Mobile. For many clients, we build Mobile-first sites, meaning we approach the website experience first form the point of view of the mobile user, with the desktop experience taking second place.

When building out a mobile site, you can either build a mobile-friendly version of the website (a separate website specifically accessed by website users) or a responsive website (aspects of your desktop website are used on your mobile website). We create responsive websites, where we alter certain elements and treat them differently on mobile. That is standard practice these days when developing for Mobile.

It’s important to check your website’s mobile performance and look for ways to improve your mobile UX.

3. Great Social Media Presence

Social media isn’t faltering anytime soon. Millions of people are active on multiple social media channels every day. Even in the face of complex algorithms, there’s a good chance your customers will find your company on social media. Now, every brand is different, and some businesses will be best suited to Instagram, others to Snapchat, or maybe LinkedIn, and others to even more niche Social sites. We have found our home on Dribbble, which if you’re not already familiar with is a social sharing site for designers.

If you’re just getting started out on Social Media, it can feel a little bit like the Salt Mines. Endless toil, no results. But… over time it can yield results. It’s a great place to share your work and successes, and it’s also a place you can connect directly with your audience.

It can be tough to stay consistent but try and communicate with your followers as much as you can.

If you’re prospecting for new business, you can also use social media to learn more about your followers and gain insights into the people who already like you. Just by a simple profile visit, you can find out a lot of information about them.

This will help inform your social media strategy as it relates to your overall digital marketing strategy.

4. Blogging and Content Marketing

One of the cornerstones of any good digital marketing strategy is SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, helps potential customers find your brand through a search engine search.

When your website ranks higher on search engines, the better chance more prospects will find your company and engage with you.

The easiest way to achieve search engine results is with content. Content, specifically blogs, helps attract visitors to your page.

Blogs also have a lot of organic, or unpaid, marketing value. Spending money, time or effort (usually all 3) on blogs allow you to create a stream of visitors that is evergreen. Unlike paid advertising, the traffic that comes in from blogging will keep on coming, long after you’ve created the content. Google attaches to certain keywords for better search results. The easiest way to utilize these keywords is by writing long-form quality content.

Another avenue to consider, albeit a more expensive and difficult one to pull off at scale, is video. Youtube is the second biggest search engine, and millions of people are active on it every day, many them searching for videos that relate to your exact product or service. If you’re not living in a cave, you’re probably aware that many brands are creating strong businesses built entirely on Youtube, and many huge worldwide phenoms got their start on Youtube. Just ask the Biebs !

5. Leverage Local SEO

If your company relies on local traffic, use local SEO techniques. These are slightly different strategies than the strategies used for traditional SEO. You’ll use similar keywords, but with your town or county added.

You’ll also use different search engine platforms. For example, local businesses benefit by utilizing Google Maps SEO along with traditional Google SEO. Yelp can be really effective tool for certain types of businesses.

If you run a local business, more clients or customers will find your business using local SEO than any other method. Local SEO is known for its high ROI, and it can create leads more quickly than some of the other more long-term SEO strategies.

6. Email Marketing

Do you think your emails end up in customers’ junk folders? Think again.

True fans of your business love to hear from you. If they’re devoted to your business, they will want to know all the latest happenings, new products and more. Let the sales, marketing, and promotional emails fly. Use them to showcase not just the things you’re trying to promote, but your brand’s character as well. Remind your fans who you are!

With marketing automation software, you can tailor email promotions to each customer by segmenting your list, and even take it to extreme lengths if you so choose.

Say you run a clothing boutique. You can tailor your emails to send out different promotions based on each customer’s size and style preference. Other personable email marketing ideas include rewards programs, birthdays and holidays. There are plenty of software options out there for this. Some of the larger and well-known players like Hubspot and Infusionsoft offer an incredible amount of options and features, but you may end up paying for a lot of things you don’t need if you’re just getting started. If that’s the case, check out Drip or ActiveCampaign for more stripped down – but still extremely powerful – software options.

7. Provide Incentives

A little customer service goes a long way and always helps your marketing campaign. You can offer incentives, such as winning a product or a coupon for trying your app or visiting your website.

People, as a rule, love free stuff! So don’t underestimate the effect that a competition can have or providing discounts for social capital, such as a follow or a like.

8. Have a Detailed Marketing Strategy with Goals and Objectives

Every month, view your marketing performance and come up with a new plan of goals and objectives. This ensures you’re looking back at your performance and are finding new ways to make progress.

At first, it’s normal to feel like you’re throwing darts into a dark room, hoping to get some hits. But after a few months, you will begin to understand what marketing tactics work for your company. It’s important to analyze what you’re doing, and what is and isn’t bearing fruit.

In order to measure the success of your campaign, it’s a good idea to document your goals early on.

These goals could be more social followers, more website visitors, higher engagement on your site, or even better, more conversions and sales! We like to tie goals as closely as possible to the desired end result because, at the end of the day, it’s not about work for work’s sake. All this effort is so that you can grow your business, increase profitability and create a better life for you, your employees and your family.

Time to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy?

If you want to increase your brand awareness, start by figuring out where your customers are looking.

After that, come up with a tight strategy to market to them. Once you’re up and running, make sure that you continuously audit and refine your tactics. It’s not always easy to know what’s going to work the best right out of the gate, so be patient, and keep making an effort. Have faith that you will reap the rewards of your hard work – it’s just a matter of time!

If all this sounds great, but you don’t have the time or expertise to handle it yourselves, give us a call! We work with local businesses here in Orange County, as well as national brands across the country. We would love to chat with you about crafting a digital marketing strategy that’s 100% custom and tailored to the needs of your business.

Schedule a 20 minute call with us today – We look forward to talking with you!