What is the Best Digital Marketing Strategy for My Business?
Marketing is the backbone of any business, regardless of business size or revenue. While there are many different ways to acquire new customers, digital marketing has become one of the most important.
If done correctly it can become a key factor in client acquisition, retention of existing customers and increase of brand visibility.
The digital marketing space is saturated with different mediums, reach and utilities for your business and deciding which one (or multiple) to go with can be a challenge. Your budget, business size, marketing goal or target audience all play a factor in what the most successful strategy is for your business.
There are 5 key digital marketing strategies all businesses should be aware of, Google Ads, SEO (search engine optimisation), social media marketing, email marketing and influencer marketing.
Google Ads
Google ads are likely to be one of the most common marketing strategies to set up and implement and there are countless online recourses to help upskill yourself to become google ad certified. It allows for fine tuned controls in regards to the type of audience you want to target, how much money you are willing to spend and requires no onboarding fee to get started. To top it off, when it’s all set up and done, you get detailed analytics of where your money was spent, what the results were and whether it achieved any conversions for your business.
Now while Google ads may seem like the holy grail of digital marketing, it isn’t always so simple. The cost of running an ad is dependent on your industry and targeted search terms. If there is high traffic for a certain search term you are wanting to run an ad on, there will also be a high cost per click on your ad. So whether or not running google ads is the right fit for your business is dependent on whether you can recoup that cost per click and make meaningful sales conversions.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Search Engine Optimisation or ‘SEO’ is a way to generate organic – free(ish) search traffic to your website. By curating the layout of content, type of content present and multiple other on and off page optimisations, your website can rank higher on google search results, increasing your exposure to new users. While technically there is no payment to Google for this style of marketing, it is recommended to work with a reputable SEO agency to help you with this as Google guidelines for SEO are constantly changing and evolving and SEO marketing is much more complicated than Google ads.
While all online businesses should invest some time and energy in developing their SEO, it should be noted that this marketing strategy is not instant and results can take at least 3-6 months to show any meaningful change in your website ranking. Hence it is recommended that SEO works in tandem with other marketing strategies(at least at the infant stages of a new website).
Social Media Marketing
Similar to Google ads, social media marketing enables you to interact with a wider audience at a lower cost, depending on whether you want to use sponsored marketing or organic campaigns. These benefits include the ability to generate leads, build brand credibility, and monitor consumer feedback.
Whilst social media marketing can reach a large audience, not all types of people and age groups engage in social media, hence research is needed to better understand whether your brand/business’ target demographic can be reached through this avenue. There is also the risk of your brand running away from you, what we mean by this is that the public opinion of your brand can become ‘louder’ and outweigh the credibility your brand may have held, thus resulting in losing control of the brand image you may have worked hard to build up.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing and is still just as relevant in todays age as it was on its first conception. It allows a business to have a tailored group of individuals to advertise too. As email marketing is generally an opt-in service, this means whoever has opted in to receive communications from your business is already interested and willing to listen to your promotions. There are now many email marketing softwares such as Mailchimp that helps a business to manage their mailing list without the help of a professional service, as well as track relevant information such as bounce, conversion and clickthrough rates.
On the flip side, your mailing list is completely dependent on how many people have signed up to receive information from you, so work must be put in to acquire a healthy and active mailing list as well as retain them by providing relevant and high quality information to your customer base, thus reducing the unsubscribe rate.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a bit more of a complex space in comparison with the other forms of digital marketing. It can be both a cheaper or much more expensive alternative and this is completely dependent on the influencer in question, the reach they have and whether you are well researched in what constitutes a ‘fair price’.
The great thing about influencer marketing is that it helps to humanise your brand, build trust, credibility, broaden your brands reach and generate a higher amount of quality leads when compared to other forms of digital marketing. It is important however to ensure that your brand/business doesn’t just ask any influencer to promote your product or service, but rather find an influencer that garners an audience that can relate to or may already be interested in your business.
In Summary
To sum it all up, there is no ‘one digital marketing strategy to rule them all’ so to speak and results are never guaranteed. There are outside factors that can influence the success of a digital marketing campaign, whether it be the quality of your website, market turmoil or even as simple as your business not offering anything valuable in the eyes of the marketed public. Successful marketing campaigns come from utilising a mixture of multiple digital strategies, trial and error and a willingness to evolve, either your business or marketing plan.
