Using Digital Marketing to Grow Your Business
Looking for marketing strategies so you can compete? While the business sector for Baby Boomer entrepreneurs appears to be expanding, keeping up with the latest marketing strategies can be quite overwhelming. The digital age is taking over conventional marketing, and if you’re not in the loop, it can be devastating for your business.
The digital landscape is massive, so you might get confused about what strategy your brand should be implementing. Let’s look at some essentials so that you can adequately prepare.
Knowing your products and target audience are critical factors to identify and implement your digital marketing strategy so that it aligns with your business goals.
Why Use Digital Marketing
The world’s headed for digital. This strategy is known to push more traffic to your website, generate more leads, and eventually increase sales. “Digital marketing is any form of marketing that exists online,” according to Pete from HubSpot. It’s important to note that, “Mobile ordering and digital loyalty offerings remain major drivers of Starbucks’ growth…,” but understanding your business goals and objectives is essential to implementing your strategy.
Let’s review
What are Business Goals and Objectives?
Business goals and objectives explain the business purpose and help identify the steps needed to achieve results. Your business goals will help you shape your marketing strategies. So, what are the goals and objectives of your business? Are you trying to build brand awareness? Whatever it is, digital is one tactic that you need to consider when you seek to promote your brand ahead of your competition.
Let’s now look at the basics of some strategies.
Four Simple Digital Marketing Strategies
Social Media
LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all social platforms. The development and promotion of content on social platforms are known as social media marketing. In using this approach, promotional campaigns can go viral in no time once you understand how to hit your target audience efficiently.
Email Marketing
It is the simplest and most effective way of communicating with your leads and nurturing them into loyal customers. Email marketing helps raise awareness about your business and build relationships with potential clients. You can craft your message that it goes to your customer’s inbox on a timely schedule. Besides, you can keep consumers updated on your brand-related sales and events.
Video Marketing
Videos have become powerful marketing tools for businesses in sharing a compelling story. Consumers are drawn to visuals and emotionally stimulated, so if you can appeal to their emotions demonstrating how you can solve their problems, this could be a win-win situation.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO gets free (organic) traffic to your website or landing page. It is the best free traffic source, though this takes a long process to see results. In-depth research on your industry, product type, and keyword would be needed. Based on your findings, develop content that would focus on your target audience, then optimize and evaluate performance.
Now that you understand those basic tactics let’s go deeper.
Create a Simple Digital Marketing Strategy
Define your brand. Think about how you can differentiate it with your unique voice, tone, and color. Also, consider your target audience or segments that you need to reach as this will help you determine what digital strategy you will implement.
Establish S.M.A.R.T goals. To be effective, these must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant or realistic and timely, for example, increase revenue by 20% in 6 months.
Decide your target market. Knowing the audience or segment you would like to target will help you in getting targeted traffic.
Establish your budget. “Your total marketing budget should usually be between 5% and 15% of your total revenue,” According to Adam Fifield @ Mention.
You should have a clear direction as to how much you will spend. Take a look at McDonald’s ad spend – digital marketing budget. “McDonald’s is the brand that spends the most on ads, racking up $963 million in ad spend last year, up 8.6% from the year before. $1 out of every $6 spent on restaurant advertising in America is done by McDonald’s.”
Measure for success. It is imperative to measure your marketing activities to determine your ROI and make changes accordingly. “Amazon performs exceptionally efficiently measured against revenue per visitor, which is one of the key measures for any commercial website, whether it’s a media site, search engine, social network or a transactional retailer or offers travel or financial services,” according to SmartInsights.
Though these steps are simple guides to get started, review your strategy and understand your competition so that you can always be ahead of the game.
“In the world of Internet Customer Service, it’s important to remember your competitor is only one mouse click away.” – Doug Warner
So, What
You now have a good understanding of digital marketing, know your product and target market, so it’s time to formulate your strategy to comply with your marketing objectives, and eventually achieve your business goals.
How about getting started with social media so you can start setting up your campaigns? Need to learn more? Let’s review 5 Tips to boost your social media activities.
“The market will encourage the flow of business, but the consumer decides the path.” – D. Salkey
I’d love to hear what you think, so please share your feedback or let’s connect.
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