Digital marketing is the backbone of your marketing efforts. It gives you the opportunity to put your business in front of the right customers, boost your brand awareness, and convert your leads into customers.
Here is how Seth Godin put it a while ago:
“Turn strangers into friends, friends into customers, and customers into salespeople.”
However, digital marketing is not only about building a site and opening a few social media profiles.
To harness its full potential, you need to have a solid strategy to back you up.
Understand your End Customer
For any digital marketer, it is absolutely crucial that they know who their target customers are. The online marketing landscape has become extremely fierce and you need to find a way to reach out to the right people. And, this is possible only if you know who those people are. Not only does this information tell you who your audiences are, but also lets you focus on the channels they use and on the content that resonates with them.
The most effective way to understand your customer base is to create buyer personas. Include as many details about them as possible. Start with their demographics, such as their age, salary, location, education, and family. Research them and learn more about their major challenges, problems, fears, values, and preferences. Most importantly, check them online and try to understand what brand messaging speaks to them.
Target audience segmentation is the backbone of your campaign. Once you set it, you can move forward with choosing the right tactics for your digital marketing strategy. Here are a few ideas that may help you.
Start Blogging
Content marketing is the foundation of your digital marketing presence. It gives you the opportunity to prove how credible you are. Great content engages your audiences, educates them, amuses them, and inspires them to make a purchase. Most importantly, it makes your site more visible on Google and earns you loads of highly authoritative backlinks.
Sure, you need to mind what you publish on your blog. If it’s an article, then make it longer. Lengthy content of over 3000 words performs better in the SERPs. That’s logical, as long-form content gives you more opportunities to insert your keywords subtly and provide more valuable facts. You should also experiment with the types of content. In addition to articles, turn to easy-to-follow infographics, converting videos, and interactive quizzes.
Build an Email List
Email marketing still generates a strong return on investment. Stats say that, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you will achieve about $32 in return. Given these facts, it’s not surprising that almost 90% of marketers choose email marketing as a main lead generation tactic.
Start your email marketing campaign by building a solid mailing list. Make sure you include simple email subscription forms on your site and other online channels. Provide effective lead magnets, such as eBooks, guides, and checklists that will intrigue your target customers and inspire them to leave you their email addresses. Hosting giveaways and providing free products may also be a great way to boost your email list.
Finally, you need to invest in a solid email automation platform. I’ve tried out different tools, but the intelligent features MailChimp and Constant Contact offer won my heart.
If you are looking for an in-depth guide on email list building tactics, here is a great article to check out.
Guest Post on Authoritative Sites
When talking about guest blogging, we usually focus on its benefits for your SEO efforts. Yes, backlinks are still one of the most important ranking signals. And, yes, guest blogging is the most effective way to build spam-free and organic links, but there is more to it than that. In the words of digital marketing company Online Marketing Gurus- “when it comes to backlinks, think quality over quantity”.
Namely, contributing to authoritative blogs in your niche and mainstream media like HuffPost or Entrepreneur will also help you position yourself as an authoritative source of information and build a solid personal brand.
Just like I mentioned when I discussed content marketing, you need to focus on the quality of content you publish on these sites. Most importantly, you need to find highly authoritative sites to publish this content on.
As for finding the right sites in your niche and scraping email addresses, you can always start with a simple Google search and its search operators. Sure, you can always invest in the right tool and automate email scraping and link building processes.
Tighten up your SEO by Doing More Keyword Research
Your site is the backbone of your online presence. It tells your visitors how reliable you are and gets them to choose you over your competitors. However, if it doesn’t appear high in the SERPs, it may go unnoticed.
For starters, invest more in your keyword research. Google’s Keyword Planner could be a great starting point for you. Some other great keyword research tools are Soovle, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, KeywordTool.io, Moz Keyword Explorer, and SEMrush.
Q&A sites, Google’s suggestions, Google Trends, and LSIGraph are also great tools that let you understand search intent and target great long-tail and conversational keywords.
Leave Comments and Provide Relevant Feedback
When starting off, it’s important to participate in relevant online discussions.
Start from social networks. Use social media monitoring tools like Mention to track your major keywords and brand mentions on social and participate in customer conversations. This is a great opportunity to put yourself in front of the right people and take customer conversations to the next level.
You could also join relevant Facebook groups, where like-minded users share their opinions. Now, as moderators tend to remove all spammy content (and people), you need to build trust with users and leave links to your content only when they really make sense.
The same goes for industry-specific forums, Q&A sites, and leaving comments on authoritative sites in your niche. Writing spammy comments will get you nowhere. To get online users to click on the link you provide, your questions need to be valuable and informative.
