Digital Strategies and Trends

Digital Marketing has revolutionized marketing techniques for the rapidly growing business world. More and more businesses are investing in new and updated digital strategies to smoothly run their business and capture leads. Digital Strategy consists of a series of planned actions to help you find new customers and grow your business through online marketing.

Your Digital Strategy is not the same thing as your Digital Marketing Campaigns. Digital Marketing Campaigns are the building blocks and actions taken within your digital strategy to move towards meeting your business’ growth potential.

Some key points to keep in mind while making an effective plan for your marketing are:

• Build Buyer Personas – A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. And that ideal customer is looking for exactly what your business offers. As you create your buyer personas, consider your ideal customer’s age, location, income, job title, hobbies, interests, languages, and priorities. Once you build your buyer personas, you’ll have a much better idea who you need to target for your product or services.
• Set an Objective – Define your overall marketing mission by asking yourself where you want to be in five years. From there, set goals that will help you to achieve your marketing objective. It also helps to refine your mission to make sure you’re on the right track for success.
• Get to know your KPI – Get realistic with your Key Performance Indicators by analyzing your previous marketing efforts. You can use Google Analytics to measure conversions, and you can use BuzzSumo to assess the success of your content. Using KPI tools helps you feel more confident when making changes to your current marketing efforts.
• Stick to your Budget – Look at the previous historical data and identify what has worked in the past. Understand the exact costs per lead and your average conversion rate. Then plan accordingly for your future goals by allocating a specific amount for each digital channel. Also, assess the capability of your team to deliver effective content, plan your reach, schedule posts and budget accordingly.

Digital Marketing Strategy Trends

We are living in an era of Digital Transformation. Even though there’s a lot of changes taking place in digital marketing, there’s still a few marketing methods that continue to be effective.  Email marketing, PPC, SEO and especially content marketing are here to stay.   There are also some newer digital marketing methods that are transforming the process. Let’s have a look –

• Chatbots – This is an AI-based technology which uses instant messaging to chat in real-time with site visitors or customers. They provide virtual customer service and also automate repetitive tasks without any human involvement.
• Voice Search – This is the latest developing trend as it provides relevant information through spoken content with a smaller number of errors. Google, Siri, and Alexa are the pioneers in this trend.
• Visual Search – With visual search, users can upload an image to conduct a search and get more specific results. A visual search tool allows users to snap a photo of an item to find out where to buy it online, search for similar products, or view pinboards of related items.
• Video Marketing – Incorporating Videos in Digital Marketing services is one of the most important steps. Not only YouTube, but you can also stream live videos on Facebook and Instagram. This humanizes your brand.
• Social Messaging Apps – Messaging apps are very useful in sending messages to customers directly, and they allow personalization and add value to the users’ experience.
• Artificial Intelligence – Businesses that adopt AI have accelerated growth and gives your business an edge over your competitors. AI can spot trends in your industry and also recommend needed changes to improve your marketing efforts.
• Hosting Webinars and Live Events – To engage with your audience, include webinars, podcasts, and online promotion of live events so that your customers can have a memorable experience that stays with even after the event is over.
• Viral Marketing/Advertising – This method of marketing your services or products from person to person via word of mouth or sharing via social media platforms, spreads out quickly and reaches a wider.

Challenges for Digital Marketing Strategies

• Keyword Stuffing – This refers to the practice of stuffing a webpage with keywords. Keywords can be stuffed into a web page’s meta tags, visible content, or backlink anchor text in an attempt to gain an unfair rank advantage in search engines. Not only does keyword stuffing look spammy, but it could also land you a penalty.
• Ad Blocking – This is not a new thing, as there are now countless software options that exist to block ads before they even appear on the screen. In turn, this practice leads to the usage of native and sponsored content.
• Innovation – With a Digital Transformation taking place, Innovation in the methods of marketing is very critical to the ongoing success of your business. Companies need fresh ideas to market their products and services. So, this becomes another challenge for marketers to promote their products and services.

Conclusion

An advertiser’s endeavors can only be fulfilled by keeping up with evolving digital marketing techniques. A digital strategy that effectively uses all available digital marketing options is  absolutely needed for the online success of your business.

About The Author: Nick Piolotto is a software engineer with a passion for writing and sharing his thoughts, knowledge, and experience with the world through his blogs. His expertise lies in digital marketing and the use of modern technology in brand promotions.