How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy for your Online Business

Digital marketing usually involves the use of digital online channels to promote products, services and even ideas. These days, businesses routinely deploy digital marketing for many and varied purposes online. For many online business owners, they rely on digital marketing mostly to generate traffic, leads and sales. Digital marketing is thus one great and effective way to build awareness and create a thought leadership position online. This is why digital marketing is essential part of the overall marketing strategy online business owners really depend on to effectively meet the needs of their numerous customers.

Here are some vital steps you can take to create an effective digital marketing strategy for your business.

Understand your Target Audience

This is one of the most essential steps to creating a digital marketing strategy. You must take deliberate steps to really understand your target audience before you can effectively market to them. If you don’t know your audience well enough, you cannot effectively market to them. Knowing your audience means you must know the needs of your audience, which marketing channels your potential customers prefer and exactly how to use these channels to reach them. Among online business owners, the most common channels of preference include social media, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and PPC advertising. To build an effective marketing strategy, you can focus on just one or a combination of two or more of these channels, depending on your objectives and the goals you’ve set for your business. The type of marketing content you produce will be directly influenced by the channels you choose to market with.

Define your Short and Long-Term Goals/Objectives
 
Just like any other business, it is hugely important in digital marketing to clearly define and set out your short and long-term goals/objectives right from the outset and make these goals/objectives an essential part of your business’s marketing strategy. When these goals/objectives are well established in your marketing strategy, they become a vital tool for reaching out to customers. They essentially help to build brand awareness and establishing a rapport with customers no matter how numerous they are. Bearing in mind that your main objective in setting goals is how to make your marketing efforts more effective, you must ensure that the goals are time-based and measurable. You can for instance have short term goals like doubling your traffic and leads in six months and long term goals like an increase in customer acquisition, higher conversion rate, increase in sales and revenue. It is best to set SMART goals, meaning the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Time-bound. If you set SMART goals as part of your strategy, you’re more likely to reach them within your set time frame. You can with such goals accurately measure or gauge how your business is doing as you progress along. That way, you can easily determine if you are making expected progress or if you are even succeeding at all based on your set objectives.
 
Identify your Ideal Buyer Persona

With research and careful analysis, you can clearly identify your ideal buyer persona. This is hugely important because your ideal buyer persona is a very essential party of your digital marketing strategy. A buyer persona helps you to better understand your audience and to relate to people you absolutely need to. An ideal buyer persona helps businesses to reach out to customers, build relationships, generate leads and increase sales. A buyer persona is some kind of abstract picture of what you think your ideal buyers are like. This is a picture you can build up using personal information and work details of who you expect your ideal buyer to be like. Details of such information include age, educational qualification, geographical location, job title and role outside of work, family, income level, gender and so on. These details clearly provide a context of your ideal buyer and therefore very important for your marketing strategy.

Create an Evergreen Content Strategy

All content that brings traffic to your website is great but evergreen content is best. This is because, evergreen content is content that remains relevant for a long period of time, and it brings good traffic for that period too. Evergreen content has the advantage of attracting new visitors while not becoming irrelevant or outdated over time. Search engines like evergreen content as well and they tend to rank it highly in their SERPs. That means good organic traffic in the mix. If you want to have evergreen content as part of your marketing strategy, make sure you consistently create content in form of tutorials, how-to guides, examples, checklists, and problem-solving articles which really attract traffic. These are the types of content that are likely to remain relevant and popular with readers over a prolonged period of time. If you are able to focus on content that has a long shelf life, it can directly benefit your marketing strategy. Such content helps to boost your keyword rankings, set up better SEO, and enjoy steady traffic growth. This is in addition to helping your brand to build online authority and credibility.

Use Earned Media

Your business benefits from earned media if your content is very good. If your content is good, it is shared more and via multichannel to boot. Earned media is simply content that is shared by others and links back to your website. It is usually in the form of written or video content. Earned media can also include organic search engine traffic. The more your content is shared, the more likely others will reference it. As a marketing strategy, earned media usually helps to get your content in front of fans, potential customers, and many others who share a common interest in the content. This process is really enhanced if your content is easy to find and share. Therefore, having a social media marketing strategy is a way to enhance earned media.

Use Pay-Per-Click, PPC Ads

Pay-per-click, PPC ads is the paid form of search engine marketing. PPC ads can therefore be a key component of your integrated marketing strategies. It is a bit technical in nature and you must have the resources to pay search engines particularly Google for the clicks it can arrange for you by way of PPC.  PPC ads are highly effective when used correctly. They enable marketers to reach a wide audience quickly since a vast majority of online experiences start on Google. Since your potential audience probably uses Google every day, Google PPC ads can reach virtually every person in your target audience pretty quickly. For effectiveness, PPC ads can be created in many different styles. You can have ads in form of simple text or images, and you can incorporate ad extensions too. If your ads have extensions, it can increase the click-through rate of the ads. Ad extensions tend to make your ads larger and more prominent on Google SERPs. That means more organic traffic.