With over 5 billion internet users worldwide and an average of 3.5 billion searches carried out every day, businesses depend on a well-developed digital marketing strategy to stand out amongst their competitors. With so many businesses cropping up left and right, it becomes essential to create a strong brand image and presence to engage with prospective customers.
While there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for digital marketing, a few dos and don'ts facilitate brand building. As the dynamics of the business environment change quicker than we can imagine, some evergreen yet relevant strategies can help businesses create and maintain their brand image.
Things to Keep in Mind While Making a Digital Marketing Strategy
These seven strategies will help brands effectively scale their businesses and conquer all odds.
Set Realistic Marketing Goals and Track them:
It is essential to know where you want to see yourself in the next three months. Further, it will help you customize your marketing strategy accordingly. It is best to set short and long-term goals. These goals should be specific, realistic, and achievable; plan and focus on achieving them in a set period. One can design strategic and tactical digital marketing campaigns to reap the highest return on investment.
It is also equally important to track your performance.
Know your Target Audience:
Study your audience, figure out what they want, and adopt a strategy to reach them. You should know who is likely to hold an interest in your product and focus on those people. Do not forget the core value of your brand. Targeting the wrong audience will result in a wastage of time and money.
Leverage Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Without SEO, your digital marketing efforts will fail. SEO will help your customers locate you on search engines, which is a significant driver of traffic to your website. It also acts as the best way to help you gain new leads for your business.
Social Media Marketing:
An average user spends 28% of their internet time on social media. Social media is one of the perfect ways to reach more people. It can help you reap enormous benefits like increasing awareness and promoting your brand. However, choosing the right social media platform according to the target audience is essential. If you try to go on all social media platforms at once, you will burn out quickly. So, focus on 2-3 platforms where you can get the maximum audience. Don't spam or overshare your content.
Website Design:
Having a website is not enough, making it user-friendly, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly is essential. Update the website from time to time according to the latest marketing trends to keep your rankings intact.
Content Marketing:
Strategic content marketing efforts can help build your brand presence. Publish high-quality, targeted content on your website regularly and make sure they are search engine optimized.
Local Partnership:
Partner with local businesses and collaborate with them for seminars or festivals; however, the collaboration should have a functional significance. This way, you can leverage a set of already established audiences, making it easier for people to know you.
Things to Avoid While Making a Digital Marketing Strategy
Here are some mistakes that businesses should avoid while creating a digital marketing strategy:
Do not focus only on text-based content. Even if you are publishing blogs, make sure they have relevant images, infographics, and gifs. Also, you want to research what type of multimedia audience prefers on a social media site and leverage that information.
Never ignore customer feedback. Improvise according to their feedback and resolve their issues at once. This will improve your brand image.
Do not forget your current consumers. While you are focusing on getting more traffic for your services, do not overlook the people who are currently making you money. Craft personalized offers for your most loyal customers and reward them for their loyalty.
Do not ignore mobile optimization. To access your services, more often than not, your customers will have to use their smartphones. So, make sure your website content, visuals, images, videos, and text formats are mobile-friendly. Also, make sure your website load time on mobile is less as people don’t like to wait.
Patience and consistency are the keys. None of your efforts will reap benefits within a week or month of your implementing them. You have to keep working consistently to make these strategies work for you.
Note: The author of the article is Mayank Jain, Co-founder, Scalenut.