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effective digital marketing strategy

An effective digital marketing strategy helps you drive business growth by expanding and reinforcing your customer engagement in the most competitive online arenas. But every strategy has its own unique advantages, limitations, and ROI. In this article, well look at some specific examples and explain how to build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that delivers measurable results.

The term digital marketing strategy often is confused with other related concepts a true marketing strategy is a comprehensive gameplan that outlines how youll reach your target audience and convert them into paying customers. It serves as a blueprint that guides you toward your organizations unique marketing goals.

Marketing tactics are the specific actions you'll take to implement your marketing strategy. These may include:

Writing blog posts
Responding to customers on social media
Sending emails
Designing advertisements.

Marketing strategy vs. marketing campaign

While a marketing campaign goes together with your marketing strategy, its important to understand the distinction between the two. A marketing strategy looks at the big picture.

A marketing strategy determines your overall business goals, your customers goals, and how you plan to achieve both. A marketing campaign is a promotion thats designed to achieve one specific objective under your strategy, rather than your overall business goals. A marketing campaign usually comes with a specific start and end date. You may launch a campaign to promote a new product, generate more traffic, or attract a new customer demographic.

There are many digital marketing strategies out there. Some deliver better results than others, so well examine the 6 most effective digital marketing strategies used in our current industry.

Understanding digital marketing strategy - 6 strategy types

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing refers to the whole ecosystem of strategies, tools, and tactics that a marketer uses to convert a website visitor into a paying customer. It includes:

Content marketing
Email marketing
Lead nurturing
SEO
Marketing automation
Website optimization
Website analytics.


Inbound marketing is an overall approach to attracting, qualifying, nurturing, and delighting customers and prospects. It is not a one-off or something that is deployed quickly or temporarily; rather, it is focused on a long-term relationship with customers.

Why use inbound marketing?

It's affordable. Inbound marketing can save you money while leaving you with a higher ROI. Youll target a specific group of people rather than anyone and everyone with the hope that youll be successful.

Trust and credibility. When prospects and customers do their own research and discover that your content answers their questions, your business is positioned as a trustworthy industry expert rather than just a sales-hungry entity.

Relationship focus. Through inbound marketing, you can build trusted relationships that not only turn into sales but create repeat customers. Inbound marketing content drives quality traffic to your website and provides visitors with valuable content that encourages them to convert in every phase of the marketing funnel.

Content marketing

Content marketing is focused on answering peoples questions and truly helping them through content rather than interrupting them with unsolicited promotions. It includes content such as blog posts, landing pages, videos, podcasts, infographics, white papers, eBooks, case studies, and more.

In most cases, content marketing has several goals. You may use it to:
Increase brand awareness
Improve brand loyalty
Educate your target audience
Convert and nurture leads.

Savvy marketers create content thats ideal for multiple user personas in all stages of the sales funnel. For example, a user who is unaware of your brand and found your website through organic search needs different content than a prospect who is almost ready to buy. Youll need to understand your buyers' journeys and come up with unique content that addresses their needs every step of the way.

Why use content marketing?

Strong relationships with customers. Content marketing gives you the chance to build a relationship with prospects and customers over time. It also nudges them toward the finish line, making it more likely that they'll choose you over your competitors when they're ready to purchase.

Better SEO. Quality content will significantly improve your website SEO, so you can enjoy more organic website traffic that turns visitors into buyers.
Increased brand authority. When you produce interesting, educational content, youll be able to position yourself as an authoritative source in your industry. Your target audience will then turn to you for solutions to any problems they may have.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website and your content in order to achieve higher rankings in search engines and increase the amount of organic traffic to your site. It involves a variety of tactics, like:

Creating high-quality content
Optimizing content around keywords and user needs
Incorporating meta information
Ensuring your website is optimized for search engines.

Ultimately, SEO strives to bring in the right visitors organically to drive more leads and sales.

Why use search engine optimization?
Higher conversion rates. An optimized website is fast, easy-to-use, and compatible with all devices. Which means its more likely to convert users and leave you with loyal customers.

Increased brand awareness. If your content ranks highly in search results, you'll be able to build brand awareness and trust with visitors. They'll be more inclined to purchase your products and services than they would if you didn't have a good web presence.
Long-term cost savings. Once a piece of content is created, it should attract and build increasing traffic over time. You'll still need to produce quality content on an ongoing basis, but youll be able to target users who are actively looking for your products and services without an ongoing monetary investment.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing uses social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to:

Promote your content, products or services
Build brand awareness and visibility
Gain fans or followers
Engage current and prospective customers
Drive traffic to your website.
It requires an ongoing advertising spend and, most of the time, a website landing page designed specifically for users from that ad spend. As soon as your advertising spend ends, the website traffic, likes, and followers end as well.

Why use social media marketing?
Cost-effective marketing. With a relatively low budget, you can use social media marketing to expose your audience to your brand even when theyre not thinking about it. You will, however, need to incorporate A/B testing, or some other form of optimization, in order to get the most out of your ad spend and achieve high conversion rates.
Audience interaction. About 45% of the world's population uses social media, and most of them use it about three hours per day. Choose the right channel(s), do some research on how the advertising platform works, and take advantage of the opportunity to interact directly with your audience.
Improved brand loyalty. Research indicates that 71% of people who have a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend that brand to friends and family.

Email marketing

Email marketing is the practice of sending promotional and informational emails to build relationships with your audience, convert prospects into buyers, and turn one-time buyers into loyal fans of your brand.

These emails may discuss exclusive deals, promote website content, upcoming sales, or general messages on the behalf of your business.

Why use email marketing?
Traffic to your website. Your emails should contain links to pages on your website. Key performance indicators include the open rate (how many recipients opened your email) and the click-through rate (the ratio of users who click on a link in the email to the number of users who opened the email).
Cost effective. Compared to other marketing strategies like direct mail, SEM or SMM, email marketing usually is cost-effective. Your investment will include a subscription to email marketing software that sends thousands of emails simultaneously, and the cost of someone to administer the program.

Delivers targeted messages. Everyone on an email list has opted-in to receive information. Which means: They want to hear from you! By further segmenting your list, you can deliver super-targeted information that is likely to be well-received.

Video marketing

Video used to promote your products, services, and brand may include product demos, interviews with thought leaders in your industry, customer testimonials, or how-to videos.

You can add videos to your website or social media outlets to encourage more conversions and sales.

Why use video marketing?
Improved SEO. Marketers are 53 times more likely to end up on the first page of Google results if they utilize a video on their website, because including a video in a website improves SEO, which improves the page's rank.
Increased conversion rates. When marketers include video on a landing page, it can increase conversion rates by up to 34%.