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. 

9 Online Business Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

Doing business online is increasingly becoming the in-thing worldwide. Affiliate marketing is foremost among online businesses really attractive to people. It is a type of performance-based business model involving product merchants, affiliates and consumers. In the business, an affiliate promotes products for a business merchant by referring customers to the merchant via links on the internet. If these efforts lead to a sale, the affiliate will receive a commission from the merchant for each successful referral. Affiliates are at liberty to promote products multi-channel online. The most common of these channels are email marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, Google PPC, text message marketing, content marketing, blogging and so on. What matters most to affiliates in this business model is how best to communicate marketing messages to their audience for quick results by way of traffic, particularly organic traffic. 

 
There are many advantages of affiliate marketing over traditional marketing methods of selling products such as Radio and TV ads, Newspaper ads, Billboards, Flyers, and Handbills and so on. Below are some of such advantages. Technically, affiliate marketing is:

1. Very Easy to Set Up: You can set up affiliate marketing business in a matter of minutes because it is quite easy to set up. The only equipment you need is a computer or smartphone and an Internet connection. Even if you can’t afford your own website, you can sign up FREE on a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI and within minutes you are in business.
 
2. Low Risk: In affiliate marketing, you don’t have to spend any of your own money as initial investment. All you need do is to simply join up and in most cases for FREE, and you can start making money from day one. As a performance-based business model, there are no upfront costs or risks involved in the business. This makes affiliate marketing a characteristically low-risk way of making money online.

3. Cost-Effective: Quite unlike traditional marketing methods, you do not need to spend a fortune on advertising. All the ads you need do are online, essentially low-cost and highly effective. You don’t have any need to spend top dollar on erecting Billboards, Radio and TV ads, printing flyers, hiring staff or office space. Even if you spend some money to buy online ads or pay for traffic, it is peanuts when compared to what you need to spend on traditional advertising and the results you get from both. Besides, affiliate marketing is designed and best suited for digital advertising. With a little investment on a computer or smartphone and Internet access, you are in business as an affiliate marketer.

4. Highly Flexible: Yes indeed! You can do affiliate marketing at anytime and anywhere of your choosing. You don’t need to bother your head about inventory, staffing, office space and all that. All you really need do is to promote the products you want to sell as vigorously as feasible and you are in business.

5. No Special Skills Needed: You don’t need any special skills or even prior experience to get started in affiliate marketing. No special qualifications needed either. Once you have a working knowledge of the computer and the Internet and you can operate a smartphone, you are in business. 

6. Website/Blog Optional: Unless you decide to, you don’t even need your own website/blog to get started in affiliate marketing. You can simple join FREE a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI and boom, you are in business. For effective marketing, even without your own website/blog, you can take to social media. If you open accounts on popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, you can do effective marketing promoting products on social media as an affiliate marketer.
 
7. Work from Anywhere: This is the icing on the cake. You can work affiliate marketing anywhere around the globe provided there is Internet access. You work anytime of your choosing 24/7 depending on your convenience. You can work in the comfort of your home or office, on the go, or anywhere else you choose as long as you have access to the Internet.

8. Scalable: If you are already doing business online, you can easily adapt it to do affiliate marketing. If you do business online, chances are high that you are working out of your own website/blog. If so, you can easily turn the website/blog into an affiliate site.

9. Good Return on Investment, ROI: Yes indeed! Every good business owner always has an eye on ROI as bottom line. In affiliate marketing, the average ROI is around 100%. Not many businesses have such high ROI. What this means is that, whatever amount you invest in affiliate marketing, within a few months, you can recoup it 100%.