Digital Marketing: The 14 Most Powerful Digital Marketing Strategies - That Are Going To Make Your Business Dominate In Its Industry
Today, online marketing or digital marketing as it is now known is a vital part of any company’s marketing arsenal.
Many companies now rely almost solely on doing sales and creating leads using internet marketing.
This is a result of changes in buyer behaviours that have occurred as the internet and digital media rapidly matured.
For B2B marketers it is important to realise that almost all buyers now claim that they start their initial search for new product suppliers online.
This process starts as early as six months before the actual purchase is made.
This means whomever their new supplier is, they will first have to experience severe scrutiny by the buyer across the web.
It is for this reason that companies need to be sure that they take a holistic approach towards their presence on the internet. Taking a growth marketing approach to their online campaigns, with a focus on goal focussed results is now the critical starting point for these B2B marketers.
Moreover, they do not purely rely on their website as the be-all and end-all of their online sales machine but take a comprehensive approach encompassing all the factors related to digital marketing.
However, for business to consumer, the situation is slightly different. Many of their sales are now driven via E-commerce stores instead of through their retail outlets.
In the USA, brick and mortar store retailers are already closing down in large numbers, Sears, Radioshack, and Payless ShoeSource, have all closed more than 250 stores in the last years, whilst Amazon and Shopify online businesses are thriving and encroaching into the retail markets.
In South Africa, the situation is not quite as severe, but it may only be a matter of time before the market conditions catch up. Interestingly, most large South African retailers have been quick to embrace E-commerce and may withstand the threat.
Takealot has not yet created “life-threatening” inroads into the South African retail business and Amazon seems to have absolutely zero interest in our country at present. However, to continue to survive and thrive in retail and business, consumer companies must make sure they have excellent product and service representation on the internet and mobile.
With this in mind, we present the digital marketing list of the most powerful implementation strategies any company should embrace.
So, if you want to dominate in your industry on the Internet you should.
1. Do Your Local SEO to Improve Your Digital Marketing and Lead Generation Results
Local SEO is probably the most important and quickest lead generation implementation any company can do.
Quite simply, local SEO ensures that you can be found within the immediate vicinity of your business.
It also optimises your business on mobile and provides easy buttons on mobile to call your business, get directions, and go to your website.
Google has also recently added functions for booking appointments, placing orders, reserving restaurant tables and viewing menus, or for finding specific items. These functions are growing daily so try to stay up-to-date with applying them as they get released.
Your local SEO can be set up in just a few steps. But, to get it right can take a lot more work.
Get started using the “quick 3 step way.”
- Do your NAP – consistent use of your Name, Address, and Phone Number in the exact same order.
- Subscribe to local directories
- Create your Google My Business GMB page
Once this is done, Google will mail you a postcard and pin to enter into your GMB page as I final confirmation of your details being correct. You can also do a live video call with a Google verification expert to validate your company.
Your business will then be verified on Google and appear like the example below on search results pages.
On a side note – your business may already have a GMB page made by Google which you need to claim, update, and ensure all details are correct.
Asking customers for reviews can help your rankings to increase in the local SEO results.
2. Do On-Site SEO
Your onsite SEO is what will help prospects find you via Google and other search engines.
It’s important because it brings free traffic to your website, free traffic is a major component if you want to stretch your digital marketing budget to its maximum.
Also, the higher your company and articles rank on the search results pages – the higher your implied authority appears to the prospect. This is because Google actually recommends you as the first, second, or third choice.
The higher up you appear, the higher the click-through rate to your website and article will be.
A study of 2,067,978 keywords for 63,237 websites by www.advancedwebranking.com found that the click-through rate on the desktop for the top 5 positions are as follows:
Position 1 – 27.92%
Position 2 – 13.5 %
Position 3 – 9.14%
Position 4 – 6.79%
Position 5 – 4.23%
So, what’s important about this?
Well, for example, if your specific keyword (primary product or service of your business) is searched for 3000 times per month on Google and you appear first, it will result in a whopping 837 free visitors to your website and product page.
This traffic results in significant free value because if you had to bid and pay for that keyword on Google at approximately R25 per click, it would cost you R20 925 per month. And that only for ONE keyword, consider the value of appearing high in the ranking for almost all of your keywords.
Plus, that isn’t even looking at the profit of your product sales from getting these free leads.
3. Do Content Marketing & Content Creation
Consistently creating new content for your website or blog pays off big time.
The more valuable content your website contains the more likely you are to be rewarded in the search engine results pages. Therefore, it is important to plan your content topics according to the wants and needs of your clients and prospective clients.
By creating content with headlines that align with the possible search term your target audience may use in Google, you can get a huge payoff in organic traffic, make regular content creation a central part of your digital marketing strategy.
Headlines that start with the words; how, where, why, what, best, etc. usually work best for SEO.
Even if you only create two new content pieces a month, you will soon draw ahead of your opposition in the search results if they do not do any content creation. After one year you will have 24 excellent pieces that can feature when your products are searched for online.
Content takes many forms and includes; articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, social media posts, e-book’s, white papers, lead magnets, case studies, and more.
Producing great content helps position you as an authority in the marketplace so make sure to offer valuable advice about the product or industry as a whole. This is the end goal, however, don’t just focus on trying to sell your products.
Adding real value is the primary digital marketing objective here.
Your Goals with Content Creation Should Be:
- Brand Awareness
- Lead Conversion & Nurturing
- Customer Conversion
- Customer Service
- Retention/Loyalty
- Up-sell
- Passionate Subscribers
Once you have created your content you need to aggressively market it to clients and prospective clients via an email list, social media, forums, groups, sites like Medium, Pinterest, Slideshare, Reddit, and Bizcommunity.
4. Landing Pages are the Primary Springboard for Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
Increasing the number of landing pages on your website from between 1 and 5 to up to between 10 and 15 will increase your leads by 55%, according to Hubspot.
By definition, a landing page is any page a visitor can “land” on.
This happens when visitors are researching your company or they are driven to it via your marketing.
What makes it different is that it is usually a standalone page from the rest of your website.
The reason for this is because the landing page is aimed at only one objective and that is to convert the visitor.
Thus, getting them to take ONE specific action which is usually to click on your call to action button.
Therefore, a landing page has no other form of navigation, and so either the visitor opts-in to your offer or leaves the page.
The two primary types of landing pages are:
- Click Through Pages
- Lead Generation Pages
Click through pages
Click-through pages are there to “warm-up” a visitor before taking them to a sales page. An example of this is an e-commerce page. The click-through page will usually sell the prospects on the benefits of the product and provide a stimulus for them to purchase it. Once they “click-through” they can then purchase the item.
Lead generation pages
Lead generation based landing pages differs as their objective is to capture the visitor data to market your products to them and connect with them at a later stage.
A lead generation page will normally offer some kind of an incentive in exchange for their data. This could be in the form of an e-book download, whitepaper, free consultation, free trial, invite, and many others.
When your incentive or lead magnet as it is called, is directly linked to your product offering, it also provides you with the added insight that the prospect that downloaded your lead magnet is also interested in your product and doing research about it.
Landing pages are often the starting point of a Sales Funnel or Digital Marketing Automation Sequence.
For landing pages to work well you need to apply Bryan Eisenberg’s three golden rules:
- Relevancy – it must be highly relevant to your target market
- Value – the page must add value to the reader
- Call-to-action – make it easy for the reader to take you up on your offer
5. Build a Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is in its rawest form a combination of landing pages stacked on top of each other to provide a sequential process. This process allows your company to convince a potential client to buy your product by attracting them to your funnel using your complete toolset of digital marketing strategies.
Building a sales funnel can be quite a complicated process because there are so many steps and strategies involved.
For starters it needs to be able to take the client from being:
- Unaware to, “they don’t even know they have this pain, problem, want or need.”
- Problem aware to, “they are aware that they have this pain, problem, want or need.”
- Solution aware to, “they know that a solution exists to solve this problem.”
- Product aware to, “the knowledge that you have the product which solves the problem.”
- Most aware to, “they are ready to buy this product and purchase it from you.”
After the purchase, you can still add other offers like; upsells, downsells and profit maximisers.
Quite often the sales funnel is then supported by an e-mail marketing follow up sequence too.
When the process works efficiently your sales funnels combine with your online advertising to push new prospects into the top of the funnel. Moreover, the tool produces sales at the bottom of the funnel at a profitable return on investment.
Best of all once you get it right it provides an automated system for producing revenue.
6. Build a Subscriber Base
Building a subscriber base of prospects who are already interested in your product category or business niche is worth gold to any business. It allows you to communicate and update prospects continuously and converts them into clients over time. You should consider having at least two subscriber lists, one for existing customers and one for future customers.
Existing customers already trust your company and love your products. Therefore, letting them know first about new product releases, special offers, and building ongoing brand loyalty is likely an effortless way to make new sales.
The future customer list takes a little bit more work. But, the fact is that more than 75% of visitors to your website are not ready to buy and are just looking for information. Sadly, the majority of your visitors will never return.
But…
What happens if you could convince them to open up a line of communication with you?
This line allows you to receive the right to provide them with niche-specific information and the odd sales email. It is now easy to build a follow-up series of emails to continuously provide these subscribers with information.
The 4 primary ways to build your subscriber base is by:
- Using a landing page that offers a lead magnet or opt-in incentive.
- Adding opt-in boxes on your various websites and product pages,
- Adding opt-in boxes to your articles.
- Adding opt-in boxes to your social media platforms.
By providing regular content to your subscribers you can drive traffic back to your website via email links. It is also super easy to re-purpose older article content that they may have missed.
7. Do Email Marketing
As far as digital marketing is concerned, Email marketing remains the most profitable method of online communications. As we mentioned above it is imperative to build your subscriber base and to leverage it for driving future sales opportunities. However, the best method for using email marketing is by creating an email follow up sequence.
This works by offering the subscriber a lead magnet to opt-in to your list.
Once the prospect is on the list they will then receive continued emails that provide them with value. A follow-up sequence should ideally be at least 12 emails or more. But, the idea is not to simply bombard your subscribers with sales offers.
Your sequence should be carefully planned and offer a good mix of, content, opportunity, and recommendation together with establishing authority in your niche.
Your sequence must open up conversations by asking them questions that they can respond to.
From time to time you then introduce an offer that takes the prospect to landing pages.
This is where they can buy or choose to interact with you further by reserving a consultation or phone call.
8. Build a Growth-Driven Design Based Website
What is meant by growth-driven design?
It simply means that your website is an ongoing digital marketing project that has a strategy based on continuous improvement. When it’s functioning optimally your website should:
- Provide your sales team with new leads daily.
- Sell your products online.
- Help nurture your clients through their buyers’ journey and the stages of awareness (problem aware, solution aware, product aware) decision making until they’re ready to buy your product.
- Establish your company as an authority in the marketplace via great content pieces.
Building a Growth-Driven Based Website is a 3 Part Process
1) Strategy – determine your complete future action plan for your digital marketing strategy and decide how your website fits into the process. Decide on who your buyer personas are and how your website will cater to their needs. Using historical data is worthwhile to determine what has worked and what doesn’t work.
2) Build a launchpad website – simply get the most important website assets out and launch your site. This allows you to launch in a much shorter time. Thereafter, you can usually conduct usability testing and improvements.
3) Continuous improvement – now it’s time to turn your site into resounding sales-focused success and establish your company as the authority in your industry.
This happens because each month you build on the previous months’ results and follow a carefully mapped sequence.
This sequence focuses on improving each aspect of your; audience results, value, usability, conversion optimisation, stickiness, personalization, assets, and building brand promoters.
9.Master Social the Right Way
Facebook throttles the exposure to the people that like your page unless you pay for a blog post boost.
I see little value in building out your page likes.
Sure, it is a nice vanity metric to have and it looks good if people see your page has 1000’s of likes. But, if you are paying to get them it is expensive. However, if you are earning them by sharing valuable content then that’s great.
Before you get excited, people liking your page does not necessarily mean that they are interested in buying your products.
They are certainly not half as interested as people that have visited your website or clicked on one of your advertising campaigns to visit your product landing page.
This is why you would rather want to consider using a Facebook Pixel to target your warmer prospects on Facebook and not your likes.
By adding the Facebook pixel to your website and landing pages, Facebook builds up a “database” of everybody that has visited your site or pages before.
You can then easily (re)target these prospects on Facebook and try to move them closer to buying your product since they are already displaying interest by visiting your website.
After you build your pixel you can ask Facebook to build what is known as a lookalike audience.
Facebook will create an audience that matches the key characteristics of the people in your pixel.
Thus, providing you with a better, wider reach.
For instance, if 75% of the people in your pixel are gym lovers then the lookalike audience will seek out more of these types of people.
Quite quickly you will be able to boost your articles and ads to a good number of potentially interested clients. Therefore, you need to spend your time building your authority within your niche and aim your digital marketing content out towards them.
10. Make Irresistible Offers
With your landing pages, e-commerce stores, or websites you really need to make irresistible offers to convert your visitors into clients or buyers. If you make your offers so good then the prospect will want to snap them up immediately.
It also helps to limit access to the offer through scarcity but please not false scarcity.
For example, you can include limitations like only available for 48 hours or the first 50 clients only.
One way to add oomph to the limiter method is to add bonuses to your offer.
The bonus then falls away after the elapsed time period or first 50 purchases.
Let’s put that aside for a moment.
For offers to work well there are 3 important factors to consider:
1. Who exactly is the offer aimed at?
2. What is the transformational outcome for the buyer (before and after state)?
3. What exactly is your offer?
11. Spend a Large Percentage of Your Digital Marketing Budget on Adwords Advertising
An Adwords campaign is all about staying relevant, getting ahead of your audience, and remaining integrated with the rest of your online marketing efforts. Using landing pages in conjunction with your Adwords campaigns proves to have excellent results.
Google AdWords is an easy and effective platform that allows you to creatively use text and images to reach a highly specific audience.
You can ensure that your ads appear in the search engine results each time a user searches for specific terms.
This is a fantastic tool to get your company to rank first in a search engine’s results. Keywords are free until someone clicks on your ad. You also have the option to set a strict budget.
Why Should You Use Adwords?
1. Fast Results
PPC (pay-per-click) often provides much quicker results than Organic SEO does. It is most appealing because it’s a great way to gain traction to your website. You can literally pay your way to the top. However, it is crucial that you remember to budget carefully, as your top-ranking could become short-lived.
2. Google Pushes Ads
Nowadays Google places all ads above all the organic results, unlike before where it only placed one or two at the top of the search results. Plus, Google is even showing more ads in more places.
It’s pretty obvious that Google wants to help people who help them.
However, don’t ignore organic SEO. You need to continue yours because there are still users who prefer natural results over paid promotions.
3. Testing
This tool allows you to track all aspects of your efforts, from the ad text or image to the landing page and the time of day it’s presented to searchers. Everything is measurable and you can clearly see what works and what doesn’t. The best part is that you can return to the ad and make the necessary changes.
4. Flexibility
You have the ability to specify a range of variables, from keyword match types to the exact times and locations it’s published. SEO.com says that you can even target more than first-click customers by (re)marketing. This allows you to keep in touch with and convert those people who visited you once but didn’t make a purchase.
5. Effectively Manage Your Budget
You can set a maximum cost per day and will never accidentally go over budget this way. Plus, you can change your spend immediately. Particularly, if you’re spending a lot on ads that are working but you have reached your budget cap. Moreover, if you’re receiving a lot of clicks and no one is buying your product, you can then lower the cap.
12. Do Facebook Advertising
Facebook not only allows your company’s ads to reach a wider audience, but it gives you the ability to customise your target audience through its marketing features. However, according to JeffBullas.com different types of businesses may find different social media more, or less, relevant to their business’s marketing strategies.
Generally, Facebook is most useful for B2C companies and less so for B2B companies.
1. Audience Targeting
The type of targeting Facebook uses is quite unique, compared to other platforms. As a Facebook user, you build a fairly comprehensive profile about yourself. This data is what Facebook extracts in order to fine-tune your target market.
The data Facebook uses for targeted marketing includes location, age, gender, interests, education, job, life events, likes – brand connections, apps, groups, mobile device usage, purchase behaviour and travel.
2. Custom Audience
Facebook is literally unrivaled by any other social medium within this department. You can create a custom audience by choosing which targets to include.
Custom Audiences are clients that a business already has a relationship with elsewhere. For example, many companies use the e-mail addresses of their loyalty-club members to create a custom audience. It is also possible to transfer a circle from Google+, through Google contacts to a Custom Audience on Facebook.
3. Lookalike Audience
This is another unique tool on Facebook that allows you to create a new target audience that is similar to an already known audience. The benefit is that your users targeted through a lookalike audience are more likely to have an interest in your brand than those who have been reached through other marketing techniques.
13. Do LinkedIn Advertising
If your goal is to reach more business owners and decision-makers, then LinkedIn Advertising is a highly cost-effective digital marketing method for you to consider.
Susan Hallam, founder and Managing Director of Hallam Digital Marketing explains that Linkedin allows you to reach well defined, highly specific groups of users on LinkedIn. This ranges from Sage accounts users, to individuals interested in health and safety, or even to financial directors in the UK. She says If you can define your favourite kind of customer, then you will likely be able to reach them by advertising on LinkedIn.
How does it work?
To begin with, you need to create your ad. Better yet, create up to 15 different versions of your ads so that LinkedIn can test them and you can see which ads perform best. Linkedin then also has a variety of targeting options for you to choose from. These include the; industry sector, job function, company size, geography, and gender.
The last step is to finalise your budget. There are two models to follow. You can choose to implement a price per click model or a cost per impression model. This model depends on the number of times your ad displays, despite the number of clicks. However, I recommend setting a daily budget cap so that you do not exceed your spend limit. Hallam says there’s a minimal fee to activate your account, which then allows you to start or stop your advertising.
It’s also valuable for you to know that Sponsored Updates are also available. This is a different type of ad that allows companies to pay to promote their content to certain audiences on LinkedIn.
Or Sales Solution…
The key to remember is to use social media as a digital marketing tool to expand your relationships and engage your customers. If you are not doing this then there will be someone who is. Stats show that your competitor(s) will eventually take business away from you and your company. Follow the Know, Like and Trust model and the steps below will get your company to dominate your industry.
1. Make your personal brand clear
The days of creating a profile on Linkedin to find a good job are long gone. You need to create a fantastic representation of yourself and your brand and then find out what people are missing. Your profile should be powerful and should provide the right solutions to your ideal prospects’ problems
2. Find the right people and prospects
It is no good to have a single connection within your company to help you close a deal. If you’re counting on this to make a sale then you’re actually using an incredibly outdated system. Moreover, your chances of losing the deal to a savvier social seller who’s using LinkedIn more effectively than you are, are very high.
The best way to get your social savvy on is, to begin with a basic (free) company search on LinkedIn. Linkedin says as you become an expert, you’re going to require a more refined search filter and look-alike model that is available on LinkedIn’s paid (Sales Navigator) version. However, if you’re just beginning then the free basic search is a great place for you to start.
3. Always track your insights
The old sales technique of cold calling is still one that some use. Yes, it can work. However, one needs to be prepared for an 80-90% chance of rejection and not take it personally. Better yet, just don’t do it. Instead, you should start by embracing social media. Be the leader that you are and engage with your followers, curate content, share, and like. By no means do you need to be a pro writer, but even a simple one-liner could get you to the top of your prospective client’s mind.
4. Build and maintain strong relationships
It is crucial to maintain and value your relationships built with the people that you already know and have been, or are closely connected with. These people are actually the ones who support what you’re doing and believe in you as a person. This offers a strong foundation to the core of your company, increases its personal value, and provides your new connections with the trust that you are something worthwhile. This could be what you need in order to attract more business towards your company. Inviting thousands of random people, who share nothing with what your company stands for, can be a pointless exercise. Rather, target those with similar interests and values.
14.Build Authority in the Marketplace
This is not something that will happen overnight.
To become a trusted influencer takes time and a carefully planned strategy to build up your authority.
The best way to start is by focusing your digital marketing efforts on one specific niche or area that you can align your company with.
It is a lot simpler to target a specific area or niche than trying to dominate an entire industry at once.
It is better to start off small and then increase your authority within your niche.
The stronger your authority gets, the wider your niche will get too.
How do you make your content different?
In today’s world, there is an excessive amount of regurgitated content. There are so many companies and start-up’s providing basically the same product or service. There really is no point in producing generic content, because so much of it already exists. Plus, it definitely won’t catch attention or spark an interest.
Your goal with your digital marketing and content creation is to take what others have done and make it better. You need to stand out if you want to create a stronger authority than your competitor(s).
The best way to do this is to research extensively about what your competitor(s) are doing. This way you will know exactly what to use in your content to make it much better.
A great technique to use is Google. Whatever ranks highest, is clearly what’s working. If there’s text and visual, then use this style in yours – but, maybe add a stronger visual and less text instead.
How do you establish trust?
Content marketing is most successful when you take the time to perfect each and every post and then making a conscious effort to promote it properly.
You also need to be patient.
No matter how beautiful your posts are, their results might not necessarily reflect your expectations at first.
The key is to craft a well-planned strategy and be consistent with it from start to finish, even if it takes longer in the beginning.
Lastly, you need to diversify your offerings.
The digital world and the marketplace are constantly changing. Therefore, if you are malleable and can offer content, products, and services that are in line with these changes and promote them with an integrated digital marketing strategy, then you will have every chance of dominating your industry in the long run.
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