Happy Monday Marketers!
Welcome back to #MarketingMondays, your weekly marketing toolkit!
Last week we got into an overall marketing strategy, and looked at how your marketing strategy sits at the intersection of your business and customer strategies.
This week we’re diving a little deeper in marketing strategy and outlining the aspects of a digital marketing strategy.
After last year, I think we’re all aware of the importance of digitizing your marketing and ensuring your business is visible online. To do this, there are a number of digital marketing tools and strategies that you can use!
DISCOVER THE TOP 5 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR 2021:
1. SEOSearch Engine Optimisation is one of those buzzwords that somehow everyone knows about, but not everyone can explain! Search Engine Optimisation is how your business ranks on a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Safar. To keep things simple, we’ll focus on Google. We’re all familiar with the way search works – we open up our internet browser, type in what we’re looking for and a whole list of results come up. Where your business ranks on search engines, directly impacts how customers find you online and so optimising your website to rank higher is an important digital marketing strategy. (Because when last did you click on a website on page 2 of results?)
There are a number of ways to optimize your website to appear higher in search results. In order to do so, you need to understand how search engines work. To very briefly sum it up, search engines crawl the internet for content and assign relevanceto the content it finds, based on the user search.
The main point here is RELEVANT CONTENT. SEO involves clever use of keywords that are most related to your business, to increase it’s relevance to specific searches, which in turn boosts your business ranking.
Speaking of relevant content, that brings us to:
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing – the great buzz word of this century! Content marketing refers to reaching, engaging and connecting with your audience. There are a number of ways to do so in digital marketing. Content marketing includes videos, infographics, blogposts and more, with the sole purpose of providing value to the customer. Much like this blog!
Content marketing uses a different strategy to normal advertising and sales – It focuses on providing value and information, building brand trust and giving to customers first.
Your content marketing strategy feeds into every other aspect of your digital marketing strategy. If you were writing a blog, you would include specific keywords to work in as part of your SEO strategy. If you were creating videos, you might feed that into your social media strategy, prioritising platforms like Youtube.
Content marketing needs to be creative, authentic and relevant to your brand’s output. The overall strategy is to provide valuable information, increase traffic and drive conversions!
3. Social Media
Social media is without a doubt one of the most powerful digital marketing tools for businesses and brands. With millions of people at your fingertips, the possibilities for reach and exposure on social media are endless!
While all platforms are great, not every platform is created for every business. Your social media strategy should take into consideration where your audience is and what type of content they consume. The dominant social media platforms today are Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Youtube and Pinterest. Each offers its own pros, cons and marketing hacks!
Social media marketing is also great for personalising your business/brand, starting conversations with your customers and building brand awareness and credibility. When done right, social media can turn customers into brand ambassadors.
Social media advertising is another opportunity to increase brand and business visibility. With targeted ads, you can ensure your ads are only being seen by your specified target market. Social media ads can lead to great conversions when done correctly.
- Video Marketing
The year is 2021, and video marketing is an ever-increasing source of leads. According to OptinMonster, a lead generation software company, video marketers received 54% increase in brand awareness. Video is powerful, and features almost everywhere. However, like with all marketing tools, video has to be used correctly to reap the benefits.
Video marketing topics differ depending on what your brand/business is about. It can be informational or instructional (think about food videos and How To DIY videos), they can be announcements featuring CEOs or famous people, you can create Behind The Scenes videos as promotional content for an upcoming event, or even an “after-movie”/trailer showing people what they can expect (remember Fyre Festival?).
Video marketing works best when videos are good quality, not too long (again, depends on the platform) and relevant to your market.
Used correctly, video marketing can be a fun, creative and important marketing tool for your 2021 digital strategy!
- Email Marketing
Email marketing is not dead. The goal for email marketing as a digital marketing strategy is to remain top of mind for potential customers, while providing current customers with practical, beneficial information, industry news and current insights.
Similar to content marketing, email marketing needs to be engaging, authentic, practical and informative. It’s a value-before-sales marketing strategy that will provide readers with more reasons why they should buy what you’re selling, without ever implicitly listing what you’re selling.
In other words, instead of an article listing why the latest Volkswagen is a great car, a blog post written by a family man/woman describing how the latest Volkswagen was able to easily accommodate their family in a fun and comfortable ride to their beach holiday destination is much better marketing tool. Instead of a brochure listing features and safety, this blog could talk about how wet the road was on the way back, but the car’s braking system and sensors provided safety or even how the bluetooth audio let the kids take turns playing their favourite tracks on the audio system.
Your digital marketing strategy, much like with marketing, sits at the intersection of your business and customer strategy. With careful research, consideration and creativity, 2021 is bound to be your greatest marketing year yet!