Crafting your brand’s digital marketing strategies takes more than using the right tools that everybody else uses. Just like a hammer does not make one a carpenter, building a marketing campaign takes skill, experience, and wit. You need to optimize different other factors to make your campaigns reliable, longer-lasting, and profitable.
From selecting the right website builder to choosing the right channels, among many other KPIs and strategies, you need to masterfully use the most fitting marketing tools to bring awareness to your brand, get leads, and increase conversions.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the marketing component that uses web-based digital technologies like desktop PCs, mobile devices, and digital media platforms for brand awareness.
Now more than ever, digital marketing campaigns are more crucial in this new normal economy. You can use strategies like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), influencer marketing, SMO (Social Media Optimization), SMO (Social Media Marketing), data-driven marketing, EDM (Email Direct Marketing), and the like.
It also includes non-Internet channels like television, mobile phone messaging (SMS and MMS), and call services, since all of these channels also utilize digital media.
According to Hubspot, here are the different types of digital marketing:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Native Advertising
- Marketing Automation
- Email Marketing
- Online PR
- Inbound Marketing
- Sponsored Content
Check the Noob Guide to Online Marketing below by Unbounce to see a clear visualization of the different digital marketing strategies and what comprises each one:
Digital Marketing Steps to Grow Your Brand in 2021
What is Your Elevator Pitch?
Your brand and your goals should be so clear that you can tell someone all about it in a sentence or two. That is your elevator pitch. Your vision for your brand must be in such bite-size form so it is easy to digest for your target market.
An adult’s average attention span is less than 10 seconds. How can you compel someone and grab their attention in such a short time? It is why your brand and what your brand is all about must be clear for you, affiliates, and audiences.
Set SMART Goals
Any endeavor must be broken down into SMART goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. If a task or a campaign is not within these parameters, it will be challenging to gauge if your campaign is a success or a failure.
SMART goals also help your team quickly adjust strategies on the go. Any task or strategy not bringing the campaign to its intended purpose and outcome can be rapidly changed. It will also be easier to identify precisely where the adjustments need to be.
Here is an example of a SMART goal you can set for 2021:
Goal: Increase social media response rate by 100% by the end of 2021.
- Specific: We will target Facebook and Twitter only, based on our brand’s audience demographic, response rate, and CTR (clickthrough rate).
- Measurable: Analytics from Facebook and Twitter; Use of CRM tools like Semrush, Sprout Social, Ahrefs, and similar tools.
- Achievable: 25% increase seen by the first quarter of 2021
- Relevant: Increase brand online presence
- Time-bound: 25% increase should be met every quarter until the end of 2021.
You and your team need to brainstorm and draft your SMART goals for 2021 and include a game plan and timetable, so everyone is on the same page.
Set Goals Tailor-Fit for Your Business
Your goals need to be realistic. For instance, if you include global social media presence as your goal when you only serve your locality, it is not real, relevant, and optimized.
Your digital marketing tools will not be used to their fullest potential, and you’re most likely setting yourself up for failure because your success goals will be based on a lofty yet unnecessary goal.
Set realistic digital marketing goals. If you are servicing a specific locality only, optimize local SEO that gets the most conversions anyway. Instead of partnering with global influencers, partner with local ones who charge cheaper and are more available for events such as a podcast or a meet-and-greet.
Tackle smaller objectives to scale your marketing efforts to what’s reasonable and affordable.
Generate Leads and Sales
Leads and conversions do not happen by chance. You need to be strategic in growing your audience with lead generation and conversions in mind from the get-go.
Growing your following also involves finding conversations about your brand on the web and different platforms. Social media listening and monitoring is an efficient strategy because you can peek into what your target audience is currently looking for, what content they are engaging in, and what strategies convert them.
Generating leads also means you have to be present online. Join forums, guest blogs for other partners or peers so that you will be more involved in your community or target market.
You can optimize UGC (user-generated content) in your content, messaging, follow-up, ads, email campaigns, and the like.
Identify Your Audience
All your digital marketing efforts will be put to waste if you do not have a target audience. Not all audiences are created equal. It will be nearly impossible for you to appeal to everybody, and to target to do so actually desaturates your campaign.
Research your brand’s audience personas, understanding what their challenges are. This kind of strategic analysis gives better insight into how your online presence can stand out from the competition.
Research Your Target Audience
Hitting your target market does not have to be hit-or-miss. There are many digital marketing tools available now that help you research, target, and grow your target audience.
Analytics tools both for web and social media are available so you can get the exact data you need to launch the most effective digital marketing campaigns.
It helps you determine which channels to use based on your target audience. For instance, the two leading advertising areas are Facebook and YouTube because of their active user bases. Knowing this, you may want to target these channels first for your content and advertising.
If you know your demographics fall around younger audiences, you will head on to Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat since it’s where the millennials and Gen Zs are.
If your demographics involve yuppies (young professionals) to business or corporate audiences, then Twitter and LinkedIn are the right platforms to invest in as well.
No platform can serve all your target market. And although you do not have to choose them all, you can affix your strategies to the most prominent ones where you think you can get the most conversions, based on actual data.
Collaborate with Peers and Influencers
Collaboration is crucial in this digital age. The more vast and well-connected your network is, the better for you and your brand. Customers who see your brand standing together with other reputable brands or influencers bring in trust, leading to conversions.
For instance, affiliate marketing is such a profitable and smart strategy for brands and individual bloggers or influencers. It pools strengths together, audiences together, credibility, and the like. You can begin by connecting and putting together A community of non-competitive, synergistic companies in your market and agree to encourage cross-advertising.
Show Your Brand’s Personal Side
Remember that the more human your brand is, the more audiences trust it. Sometimes, in the effort to be professional or corporate, brands lose the human touch people look for.
Audiences follow your brand not just for what you sell or promote, but for the brand’s story and the people responsible for the brand.
In this modern age, where openness is essential to consumers, make sure that your target market can get to know your business at a more personal level.
Similarly, showing off your brand’s human side means showing off the faces behind your social feed. Engaging with your followers in conversation allows you to get to know them and show your personality.
Use the Most Efficient Metrics
All strategies you use need to be based on data, especially since hiding “Likes” on social media platforms, Facebook, and Instagram. Businesses need to rely on different metric tools to get exact data on reach, clicks, engagements, conversions, and the like.
- Reach / Impressions: the number of unique users who viewed your post.
- Clicks: the number of clicks users do on your content, brand name, or brand logo. These click-throughs give you a clear insight into how users move through your marketing funnel. If you know what makes people click, then you can harness your content to drive those clicks further.
- Engagement: the number of social interactions divided by the number of actual impressions. The number should give you a picture of the users who interacted with your content are good ratios compared to your total reach.
If your engagements are low, assess if users see you are approachable or have made it difficult for them to interact with you. It should also be a clear sign if you are not making much effort to engage with your audiences and that it’s time to increase or revamp your strategies for increased social interactions.
- Hashtag performance: you need to check your hashtags’ performance if they produce engagements for your content. If you have hashtags that garnered much interaction, double your efforts on those hashtags while impressions are up. You can also optimize trends or viral hashtags to boost impressions for your content.
- Likes (Organic and Paid): You need to know if your likes are coming out of your organic lead generation efforts or by placing ads on the web or social media.
Of course, the goal is to wean from paid ads, but using both to optimize likes is still a great strategy, especially if, despite the ad spendings, your brand is gaining good ROI.
- Sentiment: opinions or reactions users have about your business.
If your digital marketing strategies are data-driven, they will be more effective. Make sure you are creating and releasing content based on what these metrics are showing to ensure every campaign will convert.
Create an Editorial Calendar
Consistency is vital in digital marketing. Even the most prominent brands post consistently, and an editorial calendar will help you follow a content schedule.
An editorial calendar allows you to fine-tune your content on each platform before posting. You can also choose the best time to post your content based on data when your users are online. Lastly, you can create a flow in your content in a week or month to emphasize campaign hashtags and keywords and avoid posting the same content over and over again.
When you post purposefully and strategically, you can maximize every post’s effect to get as many impressions and conversions from every post.
Conclusion: Digital Marketing is Best to Boost Your Brand
There are a number of digital marketing methods you can use with your campaigns. More and more strategies are opening up as tools and technologies that support digital marketing are also increasing.
Digital marketing puts you where your target market is and makes your prospects find out more about you.
Ad agencies such as Facebook use digital marketing to run their marketing campaigns. With the creativity and innovation of digital marketing, companies can develop their brand and generate a loyal following.
Mayleen Meñez used to work in media before finding her true passion in NGO work, travelling the Philippines and Asia doing so. She homeschools 3 kids and loves reinventing Filipino dishes. She is a resident SEO writer for Softvire Australia and Softvire New Zealand