Digital marketing is more than a few posts into the social media void. It’s a complex strategy with numerous, ever-expanding avenues to explore. You need more than a website to stand out from the crowd. You need a presence, a following, and more importantly, a sense of credibility.
The big hitters you need to know about if you want to conquer digital marketing are Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), social media, digital advertising, and more. Each category has its own specialty, but if you follow a strategy and keep up with the best practices, you can make a powerful impact on the digital world.
In this article, we will discover 10 steps to digital marketing success.
Define Your Target Audience
Your target audience is the foundation for working out your digital marketing strategy. Without a target audience, you could be going back to square one with every campaign you try, wasting time, effort, and money.
If you need help defining your own customer persona, there are a few tools online such as MakeMyPersona. This will help you identify your ideal customer and what it is they are looking for from your business.
Pinpoint Your Digital Marketing Goals and Make them Measurable
Any skilled marketer will recognise how important this step is to your digital marketing strategy. If you don’t set goals, your strategy won’t work. How can a strategy get results if it doesn’t know what results it’s aiming for? Ensure the goals you make are suitable to your business and make them measurable.
For example:
I want to increase website engagement and sales conversions.
This goal is not fully measurable. Therefore, it’s no good for your digital marketing strategy.
This is how you set a marketing goal:
I want to increase website engagement by 15% by the second quarter of 2022 and I will do this by creating a promotional offer: A free guide to property extensions and planning permissions cheat sheet when signing up to a monthly newsletter. I will have these ideas live by September and October 2021.
Setting a goal like this gives you a measurable plan, creating structure and motivation to achieve your goals.
Set Blogging as a Focus
Blogging is still very much alive and crucial to any digital marketing strategy. Creating killer content draws in your audience and keeps them engaged with your business. You will gain more web traffic, reinforce your online presence, and secure a higher-ranking SERP position than your competitors.
The more content you have, the more often search engine bots will crawl your site, the better chance your site has of appearing in a SERP. If you can also incorporate keywords and long-tail search queries into your content, this will also help Google to know how and where to distribute your brand.
If you are unable to tackle the task of blogging alone, you can look at exterior copywriting services to help implement a content strategy that works for you.
Audit and Assess Your Existing Digital Marketing Strategy
Dissect the digital assets and channels you already have. This includes your website, blog content, any social media accounts, Google Ads, paid advertising, and the list goes on! Monitor their results. How effective are they? Which ones should your business be investing the most in?
If you don’t have that many digital channels, that’s okay. Not every channel is right for every business or every target audience. That’s why it’s important to create a bespoke digital marketing strategy.
Automate and Outsource as much Digital Marketing as Possible
If you’re honest, how much time do you have to solely spend on digital marketing? With modern technological advances, automating marketing is becoming more popular. However, nothing beats a digital marketing professional.
A digital marketing specialist will create and implement a successful digital strategy for your brand. They will have all the knowledge to create organic search campaigns, execute paid advertising, implement email marketing, and much more. Nothing beats that personal touch. A professional service can generate better results than the DIY automated approach and is worth your consideration if you are serious about shaping an online presence.
Focus on the Importance of Mobile Optimisation
We live in the era of mobile phones. Up to 70% of Google web searches happen on mobile phones as opposed to a computer or laptop. You need to make sure your website looks good, loads fast, and works well on mobiles. If a mobile user doesn’t enjoy navigating your site, the likelihood of them purchasing through your business significantly drops.
The average user will spend 5 seconds on a website before they decide to move on. You need to make every second count. That means no more cutting corners, and investing time and energy into optimisation.
Customers Need to Easily Contact You
Digital marketing is all about connecting with your online customers. Getting heaps of traffic landing on your page is great, but then you have to ensure your customers know where to go next. If your potential customers find it difficult to contact you, your conversion rate will be poor. If it’s too much effort, they’ll move on to something that is easier.
Make sure your contact page is clear and easy to find. Maybe even put a contact form underneath all your blog posts!
Use the Correct Software
Any marketing effort you make can be completely wasted if you use the wrong tech.
There are many tools you can use when creating your digital marketing strategy, and it can be confusing to know which one is best. For example, you need a fast-running, simple-to-use website for your clients; a free or prepaid template isn’t going to cut it. It will look as cheap as it is. It will run slowly, but worst of all, it will be completely devoid of any personality. Your brand is special, so don’t shortchange it with a website that just anyone can have.
There are several online tools that can help with your SEO as well. At Digital Ladder, we use SEMrush to help with our keyword research, and Screaming Frog for crawling our client’s websites for errors such as broken pages and missing metadata.
Get to Know Your Competitors
If you don’t stand out from your competitors, neither will your results. That’s why you need to know your adversaries inside out, understand what they’re doing and how you can do it differently. What is your unique selling point (USP)? Every company has one and you need to work out what it is.
Incorporate your USP into everything you do. Hook it to the veins of your digital marketing campaigns and rise above the rest.
Constantly Monitor Your Progress
Perhaps the most vital component of a successful digital marketing strategy. Find out what works. Find out what doesn’t. Review and go again. Constantly be looking to revaluate and refresh. You can assign a person or team to this task and get them to identify areas for improvement on a regular basis.
Digital marketing strategies involve a lot of work, but they are absolutely necessary for any business looking to succeed in the modern online battlefield. An effective and well-planned strategy will help to build a unique identity for your business and see your brand soar to unknown heights.
Strategic digital marketing across the UK
We’re a digital marketing agency that fires on all cylinders to take your business to the next level. Let’s work together to create a strategy that gets results.
Get in touch today and see how we can build your brand.
