It can be hard to pick where to start when developing a digital marketing strategy. How you proceed with your digital marketing strategy is another question that frequently plagues any company looking to differentiate itself from its competitors online. It is still a common challenge for many businesses given how many know how vital digital and mobile channels are for acquiring and retaining customers in this current business environment. Yet most do not have an integrated plan to support digital marketing, promote company growth, and engage their audiences effectively online.
If you are a small business, or have just started your digital transition, the options available can be overwhelming. Digital marketing encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies used to reach consumers online. Picking the right digital marketing approach/strategy can be crucial for any company lacking the manpower to fully field a marketing team capable of manning a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. For those companies, finding and utilizing the strategy most applicable to their product/service is key. Using the right strategy for your product/service can help make up for any shortcomings in budget or manpower.
What are the options?
For better or worse, there are multiple options available for any company looking to digitally market themselves. We can go over some of the options available now.
Content marketing
There is content marketing, which involves creating and distributing content like text, pictures, videos, or things like podcasts, that adds value for your audience, instead of just showing an advertising message. Depending on whether your company is B2B or B2C, ‘content’ can be anything from social media posts, blog articles and fun videos to something more serious like white papers or reports, webinars and educational videos. Content creation is a flexible and useful digital marketing strategy applicable by pretty much any kind of firm in any kind of industry.
The benefits of going with content marketing are that it’s free as it’s about attracting customers to you and your brand instead of paying to push your message out to a cold audience. Content is versatile and can help you build your brand as you inform, entertain and inspire your potential clients/customers. It is also what fuels all the other types of digital marketing, with it driving search engine optimization, social media, email, and the other forms of digital marketing.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is an interesting option, it includes everything a business does via social media channels. Almost everyone is familiar with social media, but a digital marketing strategy based on social media must enter the social networks with an integrated and strategic approach. Social media marketing goes far beyond simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments. For social media marketing to be effective, your efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than purely perfunctory. To help keep posts consistent, there are many online tools available to automate and schedule social media posts, although marketers only should use automation as a tool, not a “fire and forget” solution. Users will quickly figure out if your posts are simply being managed by a bot.
The social media marketing campaign should not be isolated from other marketing functions. Social media marketing needs to work with the company’s wider marketing effort to coordinate their message across all platforms, online and off, so that every part of the brand is telling the same story.
Compared to other channels like television, print and even online display advertising, social media offers a whole new field of engagement and interaction. Instead of simply broadcasting messages out to a mass audience, you can really interact with your customers and listen to what they have to say. There are all sorts of channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. As well as options ranging from organic, for example, Facebook groups, page posts, stories and Messenger. To paid, like Facebook ads. Pretty much every business should be on at least a couple of these social channels.
Using Social media marketing has additional benefits like the fact that the effort you put in can be multiplied as people like, comment on and share your content with their friends and connections. Facebook advertisements have also become increasingly sophisticated and you can target specific customer segments with your content to get your message seen by the desired demographics more easily. There is however the caveat that these social channels are constantly making changes, adjusting their algorithms or finding new ways to make money, and as such, it is hard to stay on top of all these changes and to keep your marketing working effectively. Social media marketing is a commitment, and there are definitely industries that benefit more from adopting it, B2C industries in particular.
Email Marketing
Even with the increasing presence of social media, email is still a valid channel for your digital marketing strategy. It can be part of a content marketing strategy, providing value to consumers and over time convert an audience into customers. E-commerce sites and retail brands are seeing a lot of success with pushing seasonal promotions and discounts through email marketing. You can also use email newsletters to engage with existing clients as well as develop your prospects by giving them value beyond just pushing your products and services. Having an email list means you can stay in touch with your followers independently of any changing algorithms, and also allows you to stay relevant to existing customers/clients.
Email marketing is far less demanding than other digital marketing options thanks to the fact that much email marketing has been automated, with plenty of marketing automation softwares specialising in email marketing being available online. Consider email marketing if you have a large demographic you plan on targeting as email marketing is easier to generalise with if you wish to.
In Summary,
there are many digital marketing options available for any kind of company in any kind of industry. Content marketing, social media marketing, and even email marketing are just a few of the strategies you can use in your digital marketing efforts.