Digital marketing and social media marketing are more than PR buzzwords. Brands utilize digital marketing every day to promote and sell their services and products online. Finding a comprehensive marketing plan to cover every aspect of digital marketing is essential in 2021.
What is Digital Marketing?
While digital marketing utilizes the latest technology and trends, it’s quite similar to traditional marketing. Both forms of marketing help brands build relationships with prospective clients, customers, and interested individuals. The digital aspect of digital marketing focuses on digital channels, such as your website or most used social media platforms.
This ultimate digital marketing guide dives into:
- The ins and outs of creating a digital marketing plan
- The most effective digital marketing tactics to use
- The benefits of working with a digital marketing agency
Read on to learn how to use digital marketing to reach your target audience and successfully promote your brand.
Creating a Digital Marketing Plan
Your next marketing campaign won’t survive without a clear plan for digital marketing. Start putting your marketing first with the following social media marketing strategies:
1. Set SMART Goals
Social media marketing is about more than posting high-quality photos daily. A truly effective social media marketing campaign will take your company to new heights. With the right goal setting, you’ll instantly increase your brand’s social media success.
Brands can start setting goals for their social media campaigns by answering the question, “What do I want to achieve with social media?”
SMART goals are those that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-specific. This framework is an effective way to help you structure your social media marketing goals for each campaign.
Consider the following example for SMART goal-setting for growing an Instagram following:
- Specific — Make your goals specific. The more detailed you are, the faster you’ll achieve the goal. If you hope to improve your Instagram presence, start by setting the goal of gaining new followers.
- Measurable — Be sure to set a measurable goal, such as growing your Instagram following by 200 people.
- Attainable — Attainable goals are ones that you can realistically achieve in the given period. Growing your following by 200 is a realistic goal for a social media campaign.
- Relevant — Relevant goals are those that relate to your brand’s business objectives. These are goals that support your brand’s values, vision, and objectives.
- Time-specific — All goals should have an attainable deadline. If you hope to grow your Instagram following by 200, four weeks is a realistic deadline.
2. Research Your Target Audience
The next step to successful social media management is to research your target audience. Your target audience includes the list of people that are more likely to need your services, products, and content. The most effective social media campaigns rely on data that help you target a very specific audience. Refine your target audience by using data such as the location, language, age, spending power, and patterns of your ideal customer.
Not sure where to begin with targeting the right demographic? Consider your current customer database. Analyze your clients’ behaviors, personalities, and spending habits to better define your target audience. This will give you a clear understanding of the type of followers you hope to reach on your favorite social media platforms.
3. Identify Your Metrics
No social media strategy will survive without insights and metrics. Every effective campaign on social media starts with a data-driven plan. This means that brands and marketers must be sure to track the metrics that matter.
Take your social media management to the next level with metrics such as:
- Reach — Your reach refers to the unique users that view your post. This number determines the rate at which your content spreads across the platform. This is one of the most important metrics on every platform.
- Engagement — Your engagement refers to the total engagement a post receives divided by the number of impressions. This number ultimately determines who interacts with your content as well as the impact on your total reach. Your rate of engagement also reveals your audience’s willingness to interact with your content.
- Clicks — The number of clicks refers to the number of times users click on your content, logo, company name, or links. These clicks reveal how efficient your lead conversion is as clicks determine how each user moves through the marketing funnel.
By tracking clicks during each campaign, you’ll gain a better understanding of what encourages your customers to take action.
- Hashtag Performance — Hashtags are an important way to get your content in front of your intended audience on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Tracking the most effective hashtags will help you to keep growing your reach with each post.
- Paid and organic likes — Paid and organic likes include interactions from organic engagement and paid ads. These metrics will help you balance your time and marketing budget for each social media campaign.
4. Study the Competition
Your competition on social media isn’t the enemy. The most successful brands and marketers research their competition and apply their winning strategies to their social media management efforts. With proper competitor analysis, you’ll have a better insight into what strategies are the most successful in your industry. Pay attention to the hashtags your competitors use, the times they post, how they’re engaging with their followers, and the type of content they share.
5. Curate Engaging Content
Content is at the heart of each social media marketing strategy, though many brands fall flat in what they choose to share. The key to effective digital marketing is to share content that will automatically drive engagement and encourage your followers to take action. Sharing content that is informative, entertaining, or otherwise helpful will help you relate to your followers and attract new ones.
a. Focus on Interactive Content
Interactive content and UGC are popular options for sharing exciting content. UGC or user-generated content is content created by your followers. Ask your followers to share UGC as an incentive to interact with your brand while promoting your company. Interactive content like polls and surveys are another way to engage your followers and create a more data-driven campaign.
b. Share Stories
The beauty of stories on Instagram is the time-sensitive factor. As stories only appear for 24 hours, they encourage your followers and other interested users to take action as soon as possible.
c. Videos
Videos should hold an important space in your campaigns. Both short- and long-from video content are incredibly effective on almost every social media platform. Videos are both an interesting and informative way to reach your followers and other users.
Use the Best Digital Marketing Tactics
With a clear plan in place for crafting your digital marketing campaigns, you must have the right tools and tactics to get the job done. These tactics will help you put your plan into action. These top tactics include SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, video marketing, PPC, and voice SEO.
1. SEO
SEO or search engine optimization is what determines your website’s ranking in search results. Since 80% of customers use search results to conduct their product research, SEO is an essential part of any marketing strategy. As potential customers search the web for certain phrases and keywords related to your brand, SEO will determine whether you appear in their search results or not.
The ultimate goal of SEO is to help you attract more traffic to your website. With the most relevant and related keywords, you’ll easily be able to connect with your target audience as your site appears in their searches. These keywords should include words and phrases related to the services or products you offer, as well as your city, industry, or any other details that will help you connect with your demographic.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is another fail-proof marketing tactic every brand must have in its digital marketing arsenal. With content marketing, your campaign should focus on engaging, connecting, and reaching our followers through various content like blog posts, infographics, videos, and more.
While some brands believe all their efforts in content marketing should be sales-oriented, this isn’t the case. To experience the greatest results with content marketing, it’s important to provide value to your followers. Focus on crafting informational content that users are excited to share, talk about, save, and otherwise engage with. Ultimately, this type of content will encourage users to become followers and followers to eventually become loyal customers.
Content Marketing via blog posts is a great way to focus on SEO. Creating content that targets specific keywords is an effective way to climb the ranks in search engine results while providing relevant information to your target demographic and bring more traffic to your site.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a game-changer for the world of marketing at large. Popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are the go-to apps of choice for brands hoping to connect with their target audience, build brand awareness, and increase conversions.
While social media can drive sales for your brand, this shouldn’t be the main focus. Social media management experts recommend using your social media to share promotional and informational content while building relationships with your customers and interested users.
4. Email Marketing
Email Marketing Is another cost-effective tool for your digital marketing strategy that offers an ROI of 4400%. With email marketing, you’ll be able to reach out to existing customers while attracting new ones. This technique is best for improving brand awareness, encouraging repeat purchases, and engaging with followers outside of popular social media platforms.
One of the benefits of email marketing is being able to directly reach your consumers. While email marketing doesn’t guarantee that your mailing list subscribers will take your desired action, each new email will force your brand to the top of your clients’ minds with the latest information, personalized content, and relevant news.
5. Video Marketing
Video marketing is another strategy that should be part of any digital marketing plan. While video takes on a variety of forms across the world wide web, with video marketing, the most effective type of videos are:
- Instructional content
- Behind the scenes visuals
- Announcements
- Photos from events
- Limited time offers
Whatever type of video content you choose, the main focus is to grow your following and connect with your target audience. Carefully crafted video content can improve brands’ conversions by 85% and more.
In crafting your video content, make an effort to create high-value content. Statistics show that the average adult spends 5 hours each day watching videos, making it more important than ever to have a relevant video marketing strategy.
6. Voice SEO
Voice SEO is an often overlooked digital marketing tactic that is poised to take the world of marketing by storm. With many consumers turning to voice search technology to answer quick questions, it’s a good idea to include a plan for voice search optimization in your digital marketing campaign. Take advantage of this tactic by optimizing your website content for voice searches.
By crafting content for voice search, you can guarantee your website will rank higher in google’s search results. Voice assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Mini, and Siri all use featured snippets from websites with optimized content when responding to voice search.
Earn a featured snippet in searches by using relevant keywords in your website content. This will get your brand closer to a position zero ranking, which will ultimately increase your visibility with consumers, leading to more product/service purchases, increased store visits, and improved brand awareness overall
Work with a Digital Marketing Agency
While the benefits of digital marketing may seem obvious, it’s not always easy to know where to begin. While the statistics paint a clear picture of how important it is to have a strong digital marketing strategy, many brands fail to invest in this form of marketing. That’s where professional social media management comes in.
With the help of a digital marketing agency, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of a foolproof social media strategy. Consider the following benefits of working with a digital marketing agency:
1. Trust the Experts
There are countless apps, tools, and tech on the market that promise to take your brand to the next level. Likewise, there’s also a seemingly insurmountable amount of data to comb through for every post, making it a challenge for brands to run their business and grow their online presence at the same time. With the help of a digital marketing agency, you can continue to run your brand while entrusting all things digital media to the experts.
2. Get Measurable Results
Tracking your campaign and monitoring the metrics is an important part of digital marketing. Despite this, it’s not always easy to stay on top of all the data related to your current campaigns. Thankfully, digital marketing agencies are well equipped with the reporting tools and experience to properly collect and analyze the relevant data.
3. Tell a Cohesive Story
An effective marketing campaign must go beyond sharing videos and photos online. The best campaigns tell a cohesive story to attract followers and future customers. This storytelling helps to promote a consistent image of your company as your brand’s message spreads to as many people in your target audience as possible.
Perfecting social media marketing is no easy task. Use this information to guide your next digital media marketing campaign and solidify your brand’s presence online.
