To accomplish your business goals, you need to create a digital marketing plan and choose the right marketing strategies to include in your plan. Today, there are many options for marketing strategies and channels, so how do you know which ones are right for you?
In this guide, we’ll discuss how to create a marketing plan for your business and discuss the top digital marketing strategies to include in your plan. Plus, we’ll provide examples of how companies successfully used each strategy to help you see how they can benefit your business.
Search engine optimization, commonly called SEO, is one of the best strategies for growing your business online. What is SEO? It’s a digital marketing strategy that helps your website show up on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant search queries, which drives more qualified traffic to your site.
It encompasses a wide range of tactics, from including keywords in your content to earning links from other websites to improving your page speed. SEO is an important business strategy because of the popularity of search engines and the competitive nature of SERPs. Organic search — the unpaid listings in search results — drive more than half of all website traffic, and about 75% of search engine users don’t go past the first page of results.
So, landing on the first page of search results for an important keyword can lead to a significant boost in traffic to your website. Creating an SEO strategy involves steps such as:
For an example of a successful SEO strategy, let’s take a look at KOA, a network of public campgrounds with locations across the country. KOA turned to WebFX to help them create a custom SEO strategy that would boost their market development strategy‘s effectiveness by driving more traffic to their website and reaching qualified leads. As a result of their campaign, KOA improved its keyword rankings and saw a 150% increase in organic traffic and a 198% increase in organic transactions.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating content to attract potential customers to your business and meet your marketing and business goals. This content come in many forms, including:
In your content, you cover topics related to your business or industry and relevant to your target audience. The goal is to provide users with value, while establishing yourself as an authority in your field. Content marketing will also help your target audience get familiar with your brand and move leads closer to becoming customers.
Most of your content will be freely available online to attract potential customers. You might require information such as email addresses to access some long-form content in order to convert prospects into leads. For an example of effective content marketing, check out the ‘grow’ blog from Acorns, a financial services company that focuses on micro-investing and robo-investing.
Acorns partnered with business news organization CNBC to create high-quality content for its blog, which offers practical financial advice. The blog is well-designed, gives readers useful information, and introduces users to what Acorns offers.
Partnering with a leading news organization is not a requirement for using content marketing, but working with professional content creators can be beneficial.
Whether you’re creating your own content or working with a content marketing pro, Acorns’ blog is an excellent source of inspiration.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a method of placing ads online in which advertisers pay for each click their ad receives. The two main types of PPC ads are search ads, which appear on SERPs, and display ads, which show on other websites. Search ads are the most common type.
To place these ads, you bid on keywords. Your ads can then appear above the organic search results when someone searches those keywords.
Creating a PPC advertising strategy involves:
PPC advertising is an excellent strategy for getting results quickly and creating ads for events such as holidays or sales. You can learn more about the effectiveness of this marketing strategy with examples. Let’s take a look at Furbo, which makes interactive dog cameras that owners can use to see, talk to, and give treats to their dogs remotely.
The company took advantage of the benefits of PPC advertising when they partnered with us on a campaign for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For the campaign, we created a Smart Shopping campaign on Google Ads and used the Maximize Conversion Value bid strategy. The ads ran on Google Ads’ Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail ad networks.
The campaign resulted in a 348% increase in conversion volume, a 76% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS), and a 54% decrease in cost per acquisition (CPA).
Email marketing involves using email to build relationships with leads and convert them into customers. When done right, email can have a return on investment (ROI) of as much as 4400%. To create an email campaign, you’ll need to choose an email marketing platform.
These platforms allow you to:
To build your email list, add opt-in forms to your website as pop-ups or in footers, sidebars, and elsewhere on your site. Offer incentives to users who sign up for your email list, such as access to exclusive content or a coupon code. One benefit of email marketing is that subscribers opted into hearing from you, so they’re likely highly qualified leads.
Once leads are part of your email list, you can send them personalized content that encourages them to become customers — this is known as lead nurturing. Drizly, which lets users order beer, wine, and spirits online for delivery from local stores, provides a great example of effective email marketing. To encourage users to sign up for their email list, Drizly offers a $5 discount.
In the emails, subscribers are treated to the same humor and tone as the brand uses on its website. The brand’s emails relate to current events, such as holidays, and sometimes include special offers. The emails even reference the weather in the subscriber’s area and encourage them to order from Drizly rather than going out in the rain.
About seven in 10 Americans use social media, and 77% of social media users buy from brands that they follow. If your company isn’t using social media yet, now is a great time to start! Social media marketing involves growing your business by using social networking sites such as:
You can use these sites to build relationships with potential customers, answer customer questions, and bring new leads to your website. To create a social media strategy, you need to:
As with creating your overall marketing plan, your brand, audience, and goals will help you develop an effective strategy. For instance, you need to know which social media sites your audience uses when choosing platforms to market your business. For an example of an innovative and inspiring social media campaign, let’s turn to personal care products company Dove.
Audiences are 10 times more likely to engage with, comment on, or share video than text. Videos are highly engaging, memorable, and user-friendly, making them an excellent way to connect with customers online. You can use videos in a number of ways in your marketing, including:
When creating a video marketing strategy, follow these tips:
One brand that excels when it comes to video marketing is GoPro. Since the company makes video products, this might not be surprising, but GoPro’s approach to their videos takes their content to the next level. Many of GoPro’s videos focus on extreme sports and adventure since that’s the primary use for their cameras, and these videos are highly engaging.
One of their most successful videos, though, deviates from this theme slightly and features a firefighter saving a kitten from a burning building. The video has racked up over 44 million views at the time of writing.
Influencer marketing is a growing type of marketing strategy that lets you work with people who have influence with your audience to promote your brand. These influencers could be traditional celebrities. More often, they’re someone who has established a strong presence and reputation online in a certain niche, such as a blogger, YouTuber, or social media personality.
Consumer-to-consumer word of mouth results in more than twice the sales of paid advertising, according to a McKinsey study. Influencer marketing lets you tap into that power by working with consumers who are influential but still relatable to your audience. Here are some steps you can follow to create an influencer marketing strategy:
For an example of a successful influencer marketing campaign, we can look at Bigelow Tea’s partnership with Ashley Thurman, a blogger and social media influencer who blogs about DIY projects and recipes. Ashley created a recipe for Bigelow Iced Tea with Lemonade Ice Cubes and shared it on her blog. This helped Bigelow reach Ashley’s blog’s readers and her social media followers and increased their visibility on the first page of Google for searches like “ice lemonade drink.”
It’s important to think of your website as a strategic asset rather than just something you need to have. Your website is at the center of your digital marketing and is crucial to your success. It’s where users often go after they interact with your marketing materials, and it drives conversions for your business.
A well-designed website also creates a positive first impression on new visitors. Make sure your website:
For an example of a well-designed website, check out Wealthsimple’s website, which was featured on awwwards. Wealthsimple is a financial company, but they set themselves apart from their competitors with a clean, modern design that features fun, animated GIFs.
This design style complements the company’s brand and products since it focuses on making investing easier for the average user.
Their website is also pleasing to look at, fun to explore, and easy to navigate. Design aspects such as these can encourage users to stay on websites longer and help them absorb the information the sites present.
