In this competitive online arena, every business owner is grappling to maximize their return on investment. For this reason, they are also trying to channel their resources into digital marketing to connect with their target audiences and boost their revenue. This increasing adoption of digital marketing strategies has also amplified the competition for businesses to achieve their desired ROI.
According to a report by PR Newswire, in the year 2020, the global digital marketing and advertising market was estimated at $350 billion and by 2026, the market is projected to reach $786.2 billion.
This research report shows how more and more businesses are leveraging the expertise of digital marketing to boost their online presence in search engines.
If you are a business owner and looking for innovative ways to address marketing challenges, then this post is exclusively for you! Here you will get to know about some effective digital marketing strategies that can boost your business’s digital growth significantly.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a comprehensive set of plans that is required for any business to reach its specific marketing goals in a very focused way via different digital channels. It involves online marketing of products and services using digital platforms and channels for establishing their internet presence.
The main goal of a digital marketing strategy is to build the online presence of a brand, boost customer acquisition and drive more sales. This requires setting clear marketing objectives, a good understanding of your target audience and implementation of different digital marketing tactics to engage with those audiences.
As every business is different, therefore every business website requires different strategies. There is no one-fit-all digital marketing strategy that fits almost all websites. If you want to establish your valuable presence on the internet and want to expand your online reach, then you should think of following a carefully-designed digital marketing roadmap.
However, the best digital marketing strategies are designed with specific goals in mind that need to be tracked, refined and accomplished using specific digital marketing tools and online channels.
8 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies That Delivers Measurable Results to Your Business
Now that you are aware of the role of online marketing strategies in driving business growth, it’s time to explore some strategies that are being used popularly in the industry. As digital marketing strategies are not one size fits all, different strategies are required for different businesses’ target audience to meet their unique goals and needs.
Let’s take a look at some of the most effective strategies that are proven to generate more leads and gain more online visibility. Most digital marketers and agencies implement these digital marketing strategies to boost their client’s business ROI.
- Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an effective process that involves website optimization using some techniques with the aim of directing more traffic to your site. Implementing this digital marketing strategy helps ranking your website higher in search engine results.
SEO involves a variety of tactics like incorporating relevant meta information, optimizing content according to the keywords, etc. It aims to drive more leads and sales to your site by targeting the right visitors.
The more and the higher your business-related keywords rank for, the more people will get to see your website. Thus, it also helps attract target audiences to your site who are actively looking for the services and products that you offer.
Some popular SEO strategies are as follows:
- Local SEO
Local SEO is a set of strategies that helps your business gain more visibility in the local search results.
By implementing local SEO tactics, you can build your online business presence in local searches. This basically focuses on claiming your Google Business Profile and targeting some location-based keywords.
- Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO is an extensive process of improving the online visibility and organic search engine rankings of your online stores.
When you implement e-commerce SEO techniques, you focus on optimizing your website so that it appears and ranks when any queries are being placed related to buying products.
- Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves strategies to boost your website’s user experience and hence its visibility in the search engine results.
With technical SEO techniques, you can optimize your website’s backend. These techniques might help your website rank higher in the search results.
- Enterprise SEO
Enterprise SEO entails strategies that are focussed on optimizing content for large, enterprise businesses.
These SEO techniques are commonly adapted for enterprises. It mainly focuses on helping companies and enterprises by optimizing their website for highly competitive search queries.
Why to Use SEO?
SEO is considered a basic requirement when it comes to digital marketing strategies. It targets almost every audience irrespective of the fact where they are in your buying funnel. The main reason lies in that every user begins their search for any new products or services.
Also, there are other reasons:
- Increased Brand Awareness: When your content ranks higher in the search results, more and more people get to know about it, thus it builds your brand awareness. If your brand has a good web presence, it will attract more people and they will be more inclined to buy your products.
- Higher Conversion Rates: If your website is optimized, it will be quite easy to use and most importantly, it will be compatible with all devices. Thus, it has the opportunity to convert more users.
- Cost Savings on a Long-Term: Once you have created a piece of content, it will increasingly attract more traffic. But in order to target users on a consistent basis, you should produce quality content on a regular basis. This will help you with increasing traffic without any monetary investment.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing basically focuses on unsolicited promotions while answering people’s questions and resolving their queries. This digital marketing tactic helps businesses reach more customers, engaging, and connecting with them via informative content.
These informative contents might be in any form including blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, white papers, and more. It adds value to what the users already know about by answering the questions that they might have.
As a popular digital marketing strategy, the goal of content marketing is to educate your target audience, increase brand awareness, convert, and nurture more leads. For that, it is essential to create content that can be ideally used at all stages of the sales funnel for multiple user personas.
You also need to come up with new and unique content that addresses the buyer’s needs at every step. But for that, you must have a clear picture of your buyer’s journey so that you can optimize your content accordingly for search engines. This will improve your website’s visibility in the search results.
Why Use Content Marketing?
This smart digital marketing strategy is being used to connect with audiences throughout the buying funnel. What makes content strategy one of the best is that here you don’t have to pay for the traffic that your content brings in unlike that of paid advertising. Your website simply gains traffic with the quality of the content in it.
- Improve your Website’s SEO: If quality content is published on your website, it will significantly improve your website’s SEO. This will help you gain more organic traffic to your site and assist in turning your visitors into buyers.
- Increases your Brand’s Authority: If your website has educational, informational, and interesting content, this will help your website gain an authoritative position in the industry. This will lead your target audience to turn to your website for solutions to any issues they might have.
- Build Good Relationships with Customers: Over time, content marketing helps you with building relationships with customers and prospects. This encourages them so that more customers get ready to make a purchase with you rather than your competitors.
- Video Marketing
Video marketing is being popularly used by companies to increase their reach and promote their brands & products. By adding brand-related videos to your social media networks, PPC landing pages and websites, your business might encourage more conversions and sales.
However, the content of the video also matters. You can create videos related to customer testimonials, interviews with leaders in the industry and product demos. Publishing these informative video contents will help your business expand its operations and grow its revenue.
Some other forms of marketing videos that you can publish include:
- Behind-the-scenes videos
- Announcement videos
- Instructional videos
- Event videos
Irrespective of the type of videos that you create, you can also build brand awareness among your target market. Later on, this digital strategy can also lead you to valuable conversions.
Why use Video Marketing?
According to the Wyzowl report in 2016 about 91% of marketers say that they use video as a marketing tool. In fact, this online marketing strategy has the ability to enhance your website’s conversion rates.
What makes it more trendy and beneficial amongst other digital marketing strategies is that it serves as an excellent addition to content and email marketing.
- Improve Webpage’s Rankings: It has been found that by implementing relevant optimized videos on their website most of the digital marketers end up ranking on the first page of the Google results. This is likely because the inclusion of videos in your website improves your site’s SEO. Thus, it also improves your website’s page rankings.
- Increases Brand Association: When customers watch videos on your site, their chances of associating with your brand increase by 139%. Not just that, about many of the customers who watch your videos are more likely to share them with others. Thus, video marketing promotes and increases your brand association.
- Enhances Conversion Rates: After conducting extensive research, what comes into the display as an outcome is that the landing pages with video content in them are more likely to get converted.
- Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising is a strong digital marketing strategy where the advertisers need to pay every time when the users decide to click on any of your ads. This strategy basically involves bidding on keywords for which you want your online ads to show up.
Thus, when a user searches for any of your ad-targeted keywords, your ads will trigger at the top of the SERP rankings surpassing the organic listings. But you don’t need to pay for the appearance of your ads; you are required to pay only when someone clicks on your ads.
Through these PPC ads, businesses can easily reach those people who are looking out for the terms related to your business. These ads are extensively created for those searchers with transactional queries related to purchasing your products or services.
Thus, when a user attempts to click on your PPC ads, they are redirected to a landing page where they are encouraged to take some action. This might be signing up for an email list, completing a form, downloading any report, purchasing any product, etc.
The main aim of running a PPC campaign is to increase your business sales and leads. With multiple types given below, you can choose to run any of these PPC ads:
- Social media ads
- Search ads
- Display ads
- Shopping ads
- Video ads
- Remarketing ads
Why Use PPC Advertising?
PPC advertising is mostly helpful for those businesses that are looking for a quick boost in their sales. This is even helpful for those businesses whose website’s organic search engine rankings are quite lower than you might have thought. So, it basically propels your site’s ranking to the top of the search engine results.
- Provides Instant Results: Unlike other marketing strategies like email marketing or SEO which takes time to work. PPC advertising, on the other hand, offers an instant way of setting up your PPC campaign and setting the results right away.
- Quite Easy to Track: The ease of accessibility of PPC platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads makes it easier for people to track how their campaign performs. This allows its users to track how many people have viewed their ads, how many click on them, and what percentage of them actually convert.
- Spending on Control: This marketing strategy provides you with the freedom to limit or change your spending on advertising. You can pause your ad marketing campaigns that are underperforming, so you don’t have to commit to a certain amount and gain full control of your spending on PPC ads.
- Social Media Marketing
One of the best digital marketing strategies that aims to build brand awareness and optimize your website’s conversions is social media marketing. This marketing campaign features one or more types of social media platforms, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
The main goals of using social media marketing tactics include:
- Driving huge traffic to your site
- Promoting your products, services, or content
- Engaging with current as well as prospective customers
- Building the brand’s visibility and awareness
- Gaining more followers and fans
Apart from promoting your brand with organic social media posts, you can also advertise via paid ads on social media channels. Though these paid ads target more specific users, once if the spending on its advertising ends, its website traffic also ends as well.
Why use Social Media Marketing?
There are almost 3.5 billion people worldwide who use social media platforms to connect with others. This makes it a perfect avenue for reaching out to the target audience. However, there are less than 30% of the businesses that actually use social media as their top digital marketing strategy. This provides businesses with an excellent opportunity to invest in this strategy.
Listed below are some other reasons that justify:
- Excellent Interaction with the Audience: With about 4.59 billion users in 2023 worldwide using social media platforms, it becomes essential for businesses to choose the right marketing channels on social media. You must conduct some research to know more about how the advertising platform actually works and try to take advantage of this platform to interact with your audience directly.
- Cost-effective Marketing: Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways of marketing your brand on a low budget, unlike paid advertising. All you need to do is incorporate A/B testing and conduct other optimization processes to achieve higher conversion rates.
- Significant Increase in Brand Loyalty: A research report indicates that many people like to recommend the brand to others with whom have gained a positive experience on social media. So, social media marketing increases your brand’s loyalty amongst others and helps in building long-term positive relationships with their customers.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best digital marketing practices that involves sending informational and promotional emails to build long-term relationships with audiences. This email strategy also involves building brand loyalty, nurturing leads, and promoting your products and services via email.
The main goal of email marketing is to convert prospects into buyers by always staying at the top of the minds of potential customers. So, users might not need your products and services now, but when it is time to make any purchase, they will remember your brand and might refer to them as well.
Thus, this digital marketing strategy also works well when a business is planning to retain its existing customers or gain some more new customers. In fact, proper implementation of these digital marketing tactics builds brand awareness while encouraging their customers for repeated purchases.
Through emails, businesses share with their leads some personalized content like exclusive deals, coupons, and useful information like relevant news and messages related to your business and upcoming sales. This encourages customers to keep coming back, especially if previously they have liked your brand. Therefore, it turns their one-time buyers into your brand’s loyal fans.
Why Use Email Marketing?
Irrespective of the fact whether your business is related to manufacturing operations or technology, nowadays, many companies are making use of email marketing to increase their brand awareness.
Another advantage that makes email marketing so popular is that for every $1 invested in this strategy, it provides an average return on investment of $36. So, it’s damn profitable for your business! Some other advantages are:
- Affordable Pricing: In comparison to other digital marketing strategies like SMM or SEM, email marketing is quite affordable. When you invest in this digital marketing tactic, you get a subscription to a popular email marketing software that simultaneously sends thousands of emails to different customers.
- Bring More Traffic: As your email contains your website’s link, it brings more traffic to your site. Some key performance indicators that you can monitor include the open rate which suggests how many recipients have actually opened your email; and the click-through rate. By click-through rate, we mean the ratio of how many users have clicked on the link in your email to the number of users who have actually opened the email.
- Delivers Targeted Emails: Your subscriber list contains all who have opted-in to receive some sort of information from you. But you can further segment your list to share super-targeted information with your targeted audience that is more likely to be well received by them.
- Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Account-based marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to engage a specific set of targeted companies with tailored campaigns and convert them into sales. This is one of the most powerful B2B marketing strategies that can be extensively used for reaching out to more companies that seem a good fit for your business.
As this strategy targets only specific high-value accounts that you select, it promotes your business to them in a more targeted way to make them clients.
Account-based marketing helps your sales and marketing teams target specific prospects through the sales funnel using some strategized marketing tactics. Thus, it helps you with targeting the accounts that matter the most to you.
Why Use Account-Based Marketing?
If you intend to optimize your company’s ROI, then ABM proves valuable. As this involves targeting those specific accounts that are likely to turn into your customers, it provides you with a superior chance of earning higher ROI from those clients.
- Personalization: Another thing that makes this strategy exceptionally great for businesses is that it does not take any generic approach toward marketing. It creates personalized messages for its targeted accounts and tailors their digital marketing campaign accordingly in order to meet its client’s specific needs.
- Close Collaboration: Account-based marketing encourages teamwork a lot and it helps them move accounts through the sales pipeline. This strategy helps the marketing and sales teams to work together as a team to identify key accounts and design personalized campaigns for better aligning with them. This helps them win many valuable clients.
- Expedited Sales Cycles: In B2B, multiple stakeholders are involved when it comes to making a purchase decision. Thus, it makes the sales process slow. But with ABM, the sales cycle gets accelerated. This is because here the primary decision maker along with other relevant prospects are nurtured simultaneously along with specific content created for them.
- Influencer Marketing
The market size of global influencer marketing has more than tripled and is estimated to grow more in the upcoming years. This makes it a popular and successful digital marketing strategy to reach new audiences.
Influencer marketing focuses on targeting those audiences who might be interested in your brand, products, or services. So, you can easily leverage the influencer’s reach to increase your brand awareness.
You can even partner with influencers who particularly align with your brand for promoting your products and services. There are a number of ways in which you can partner with them like through guest blogging, sponsored content, product collaborations, etc.
But before partnering with them, you must conduct extensive research to know more about them. You must ensure that they have followers who align with your industry. This will make your target audience passionate about what brand values or services you are promoting.
You can even collaborate with these influencers by promoting an event, sending them samples to try, through commission unique content, etc.
Why Use Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing is one of the trendiest marketing strategies used nowadays. As these influencers have stronger bonds with a small and more engaged community, marketers often prefer to work with them for branding purposes. Here are some other benefits as well:
- Gain Trust and Credibility: Audiences see influencers as trusted personalities within their niches. This is the reason why when they recommend any brand or product, consumers are more likely to be influenced by their endorsements. This not only adds trust and credibility to your brand but also increases the chances of converting your target audience into your loyal customers.
- Enhanced Brand Exposure: When you partner with influencers, they significantly allow you to tap into their existing reach and audience. You can even promote your products and services to a wider audience by leveraging an influencer’s platform. This helps you boost your brand awareness and gain more visibility among new customers.
- Unique Content Creation: Influencers are far more skilled in creating unique and authentic content for a brand that seamlessly resonates with their follower’s likeness. When you partner with them, you can easily tap into their creativity to create compelling content for promoting your brand offerings. Creating these user-generated contents not only fosters trust among the audiences but also positively influences the buyer’s decisions.
Apart from these 8 strategies, there are other strategies as well that help improve your business’s ROI like marketing automation, native advertising, earned media, etc.
How to Choose a Solid Digital Marketing Strategy?
Every aspect of the digital marketing strategy is important as it helps your business in achieving specific digital marketing goals. But choosing digital strategy is not that easy; you just cannot assume any strategy, it should be backed by data and insights.
The secret to choosing the perfect strategy lies in identifying who your target audience is and how you can achieve your specific marketing goals. It also involves several other factors like selecting the right tools based on your marketing goals, etc.
If you want to elevate your business operations and are looking for the perfect digital marketing strategies, then consider the factors mentioned hereunder.
- Create Buyer Personas to Identify Your Target Audience
Buyer personas represent the fictional people who are likely to buy your products and services. These personas play a major role when it comes to choosing an effective digital marketing strategy as they help you understand the people whom you are targeting.
These buying personas act as hypothetical examples of the people whom you want to actually reach via your marketing messages in order to get more sales and revenue. So, creating these buyer’s personas is not that easy; it should be rooted in data and research. Also, it involves information about your target audience’s needs and interests.
In case you use your own intuition to create personas, they will not match the characteristics of your target audience. It will lead you to the wrong focus. Therefore, creating buying personas requires speaking out with customers either through telephone interviews, apps, surveys or through in-person.
Collect these basic pieces of information to create your buying personas:
- Location from where your prospective customers are doing shopping
- Their popular hobbies or interests for certain demographics
- The details of the customer’s income or occupation
- What drives them to make the purchase
- The challenges that they face in the way of achieving their goals.
On the basis of this information, if you create several personas, then it will be quite easier for you to create tailored messages for your audience. If the audience is able to resonate with your marketing messages, they will find it interesting and will also encourage them to make a purchase from you.
By catering to your buyer persona’s needs, you will be able to easily target the audience whom you want to reach.
- Set Your Goals and Objectives
Another thing that really matters while selecting a digital marketing strategy is to establish your long-term and short-term marketing goals. This will help you assess what strategies you need to implement to achieve your marketing goals and objectives or not.
Ensure to create S.M.A.R.T goals for your organizational growth (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). Be sure to document all your business objectives, strategies, and goals, as it can help you with selecting the most relevant strategies for your business.
Like, if your goal is-
- To increase your product sales- your areas of focus should be optimization of your website landing page, email marketing, etc.
- To drive more traffic to your site- your selection of strategies should be SEO, PPC advertising, and email marketing.
- To raise consumer awareness- you can choose to reach out to influencers or create videos on different online platforms, etc.
- Audit Your Existing Digital Marketing Strategies
Before implementing any new marketing strategies to your site, you must evaluate your existing digital marketing channels, be it content marketing, email marketing, social media optimization, SEO, PPC, etc.
When you conduct an audit of your existing digital marketing strategies, you will assess the performance of your current campaigns and recent outcomes. This will help you with analyzing what strategies are working best for you and what needs improvement.
Like, if you get to see that your website is receiving much traffic from the Google search results, then it will be a wise idea to invest more into the SEO strategy in future. Doing this will drive more traffic to your site.
Also, you must avoid leaping for the trendiest strategies rather than just focusing on those strategies that provide enhanced value for your business.
- Identify Your Competitors
Identifying your competitor’s website is equally important while you are sorting out an effective digital strategy. This will help you analyze what strategies are working for them to optimize their website’s rankings on search engine results.
Based on your competitor’s strategies, you can analyze what digital marketing strategies might work for your business. You can also speculate some other marketing tactics that might prove effective in communicating your message to the target audience.
You can also choose to tweak their strategies a bit and use them for your website’s success.
- Based on Your Marketing Budget
While picking out a marketing strategy for your business, you must ensure that it doesn’t break the bank. This is why it is important to establish a realistic budget for your marketing strategy. This will help you analyse how much you can invest in different digital marketing campaigns.
Ensure that your digital marketing budget should fit within the overall financial goals of your company. To be more specific, depending upon your budget, you can spend on different campaigns including SEO, PPC advertising, etc.
- Measure Your Campaign’s Performance and Report
It is important to monitor the performance of your campaign from time to time. You should consider tracking some key metrics to analyze the success of your digital marketing strategies.
Here are some key metrics that gauge the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies:
- Cost per lead
- Click through rates
- Digital conversion leads
- Returned website visitors
- Customer lifetime values
This will help you understand what strategies you should choose for earning a higher return on investment. It will also restrict you from making any further investments in campaigns that do not assist your company’s growth.
FAQ’s
Digital marketing provides you with unlimited options for targeting the right clients at the right time. It helps your business establish enhanced brand credibility, offers more seamless interaction with your customers, and provides measurable and cost-effective results for your campaign’s performance. By using multiple digital marketing strategies, your business can do effective targeting for local as well as global reach.
A digital marketing campaign involves a sequence of specific marketing-related activities within your digital marketing strategy that is being planned and executed towards achieving a specific end goal rather than an overall goal. These campaigns typically have a specific start and end date.
When it comes to the most effective strategies, it is the one that perfectly aligns with your brand, campaign objectives and your target audience. However, these are unique depending on your target market, industry, and business.
If your company’s main aim is to drive more traffic to their site, then SEO strategies will be the most cost-effective option for them. Similarly, if your company wants to create buzz around product launches then event-based strategies will probably be best for them. There are some companies that simply want to engage audiences through unique content, for them content marketing strategy would be an ideal option to consider.
Final Words
At present, if you want to achieve your business goals, then there is no other better option than executing effective digital marketing strategies. From SEO to Influencer marketing, there are a variety of strategies that can help your business reach unique goals.
So, any brand that wants to promote its offerings to its target audience should leverage effective digital marketing strategies to drive excellent results. What makes these even more effective is that they are easily measurable. It also allows you to transcend through the sales funnel and make any changes in your strategies in order to drive more leads and revenue.
In case you are struggling to achieve your desired business goals, hire an digital marketing agency to improve your marketing ROI. Their team of specialists will help your business reach its goals through tailored campaigns and result-oriented strategies.