With the current huge number of people daily on the internet, Digital Marketing has come to stay especially for SMEs that are struggling for Brand Visibility hence the importance of knowing the strategies to deploy in achieving their goals in this digital age. Digital Marketing has been defined as a system that uses digital channels to attract, convert and engage Ideal customers for life time generation of demands for your products and services and to that effect, you have to pay attention to below strategies for business growth opportunities and improvement.
Digital Marketing Strategies Plan
If experts defined Digital Marketing Strategy as using online resources to reach your target customers, it then means you need a strategic plan on what you want to achieve and be deliberate in achieving them. Your Logo, Brand Colours and Images must be catchy and sharp for your Brand Visibility and Appeal. Before you start your campaigns, you must know your Campaign Objectives, what you are promoting, the time to promote and how best to promote. You must know the benefit of what you are offering to your audience and the value they stand to get which must be much higher than your offer and then tailor your content along that line to help you achieve your goal. Your strategic plan will help you optimize your marketing strategies and guide you in allocating resources effectively.
Understand your Audience – Digital Marketing Strategy
The success of your adverts depends on how well targeted they are and the biggest advantage digital marketing has over traditional marketing is that you have the ability to target specific ideal customers and to succeed you must understand who your audiences are, their interest and behavior, their needs and pain point, their demography, the platforms they prefer and why they should buy from you. That way you can target your audience using appropriate keywords. In other words, you have to be active and conversant with all social media platforms and understand their advert policies as it is crucial in driving both adverts and organic traffics to your website for customer acquisition and retention for your business. To this end, in driving visitors or traffic to your website via paid campaigns, search ads, display ads, social media advertising, affiliate partnerships or even organic traffics, you will be interested in how they behave when they land on your page, how many minutes they spend and their exit page and you will use all these information to create personalized contents as well as make an informed data driven decision for your business. Simply put, understanding your audience by investing time and efforts will help you drive engagements and conversions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your Search Engine Optimization has to be top notch to enable for ranking on various search engines especially Google. Your website has to be optimized by making sure that your On-Page SEO is perfect with all the Parameters and Focus Keywords in place for your Website Visibility and for Search Engine crawling and indexing to enable for organic driving of traffic to your Website. You have to know what people are searching for and then optimize your website for that. So Your Blog Articles has to be super as they play central role in your Search Engine Traffic. Developing a good SEO strategy is the way to go as well as keeping an eye on your Off-Page SEO to get “dofollow Backlinks” from Authority Websites that will enhance the chances of your website to be recognized by Google. Your Local SEO which is an SEO strategy that helps your business be more visible in Local Search results has to be very good as it helps improve your ranking on Search Engine. Your website must be registered with Google My Business to enhance visibility and trust. The statistics you get when you have a Google My Business account is enormous and some of the data will help you when you are running Google advert as you can know the exact time and day visitors looked at your business. You have to keep an eye on your Technical SEO for your Speed, Image and Security Optimizations which will positively impact the performance of your Website when they are improved using appropriate Plugins and finally your Keyword Research must be water tight as you have to know what people are looking for and optimize for relevant keywords and phrases that are related to your services or products which can attract users who are actively searching for them.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. It is a great way of helping SMEs as you can have as many lists as possible in your Email Marketing Account with which you can communicate directly with your website visitors, nurture them by engaging them and also retain them using personalized messaging. It commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness and happens to be the most scalable way of nurturing your leads as your audience can always go back to their mails to read their emails. Connecting your landing page to your email marketing platform is a great way of identifying the visitors who has shown interest by opting in with their details for your follow up. So you can measure your open rate, actions taken through your click through rates to enable for improvement.
Keep a content calendar
If Content strategy is the planning, development, and management of content, written or in other media then you need a content calendar to achieve that. Since Content Strategy is a long term goal that requires you to be consistent for months in pushing out valuable and engaging contents in order to build trust with your audience so as to achieve good results from your activities, you have to be deliberate in creating a content calendar that will help you in scheduling your contents ahead of time across various social media platform as planning ahead can create timely and targeted contents that can resonate with you audience. This is for ease of planning your content as you push them out on constant basis. As you post, your content should follow the recommended pattern which is; Awareness, to enable you describe your product or service in order to educate, enlighten and entice your audience to wake up their Interest as well as inspire and entertain readers so that their Desire to take Action will be strong and tempting. Content calendar helps your business stay organized and plan for long term (AIDA)
Digital Marketing Strategies – Performance Analysis
You have to constantly analyze your performance using available tools for various Platforms which gives access to valuable insights and you have to constantly review your strategies to see where improvement is needed for cost effective growth. Google Analytics will help you track the flow of traffic on your website and ensure that the data of anyone who visits your website anytime is captured. This aids in understanding the performance of your pages so as to know the ones to optimize and you can also use the data to retarget your site visitors. For Influencers, always check their engagement rates before using them for business promotions and constantly do competitors analysis to compare your performance with other key players in your industry.
Have a High Converting Website And / Or Landing page
Website Development is defined as tasks associated with creating, building and maintaining Websites and Web applications that run online on a browser and Websites are central to your digital marketing strategy and being Online is very crucial in this digital age and social media era. As you drive traffic from your social medial platforms and Google to your website, you definitely need an interesting, fast loading time, functional, user-friendly and secured Website and / or Landing page which can enhance user longer visit duration, for the purpose of lead generation and you cannot have a Lead campaign without a Lead form that people will fill when they come to your page and so you must have a good Website and/ or a Landing Page which will help your overall Brand Visibility efforts. The least thing your Website visitors can ask for is a fast loading Website and you need not have technical glitch on your Website pages as it is a big turn off. Your Website should have very well Optimized Contents and so detailed Keyword Research is needed to achieve high converting Website traffic. Also make sure your Website is secured as Google favours secured Sites. Also ensure that the overall look and feel or appearance of your website is beautiful.
Conclusion
SMEs can conveniently develop and implement good Digital Marketing Strategies by following the above suggestions in other to improve customer engagement and competitive advantage in terms of attracting new customer and retaining old ones as they drive their ideal customers or traffic to their well-built and functional Websites for lead generation and ultimately converting them to paying customers capable of making repeat purchases. The above strategies will equally help them rank organically on search engine results and benefit their overall Business performance and competitive growth in this digital age.