Top digital marketing strategies to Boost your business

Do you have a start-up business?

Then you have to know top marketing strategies and choose the best ones to develop your business.

Nowadays, the marketing and advertising landscape tend to go digital.

Researchers stated that more than “4.3 billion people” use the internet daily and with “900,000” new users are joining the online community every single day.

That is what makes digital marketing essential nowadays.

It doesn’t matter what is the size of your business, digital marketing is considered to be the best tool to grow it.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a series of actions, plans, decisions that help in achieving the business goals, vision, and mission using the digital platforms.

The first step into making such a successful strategy is to determine the desired goals that you want to achieve.

And to make sure that your goals are clear and reachable, your strategy must be S.M.A.R.T.

This means it must be:

1. Specific

You must determine and have a clear vision of your goals.

To have a specific goal, try to answer the following questions:

• What is my goal?
• What are the correct steps to accomplish my goal?
• What is the level of importance of this goal?
• Who is involved?
• where is the suitable location to achieve this goal?

2. Measurable

One of the most important things is to have measurable goals.

Because your goal must be measurable so you can track your progress and evaluate whether you are achieving your goals or not.

A measurable goal should address questions such as:

• When my goal will be accomplished?
• How much this is going to cost me?
• How many days this goal will take?

3. Achievable

Your goal has to be real and can be achieved within your available resources.

An achievable goal will answer questions such as:

• How can I accomplish my goal?
• How realistic is this goal based on factors such as my financial factors?

4. Relevant

You have to make sure that your goal matter to you and is relevant to your other goals.

If your goal is relevant, then your answer will be yes to these questions:

• Is this the right time for achieving that goal?
• Does it match our efforts and needs?
• Is it easy to apply?

5. Time-Based

Your goal must have a targeted deadline to be achieved.

So, you have a deadline to focus on and something to work toward it.

A time-bound goal will usually answer these questions:

• When?
• What can I do in a specific period (for example 1 month from now)?

How to create your digital marketing strategy?

Creating a digital marketing strategy is not that easy as some might think.

Digital marketing has the most effective tactics and methods to reach the right audiences.

Researchers stated that “97%” of people learn more about a local company via the internet.

Thus, you have to build a strong strategy that enables you to compete in the digital world.

And this can be achieved by the following steps:

• Get an in-depth understanding of your brand.

This can be done by identifying your strength, weaknesses, and uniqueness when compared with your competitors.

• Define your buyer’s persona.

This means that you have a specific and defined audience, and this can be achieved by addressing their characteristics such as:

• Gender: Male/ female.
• Age: Young people, middle-aged people, or old people.
• Income: Low, middle, or high income

And these characteristics must be in line with your brand’s overall vision and mission.

• Decide your marketing strategy.

In this step, you must decide what channels you are going to be using to promote your company or business, and this mainly depends on your buyer’s persona.

Thus, if for example, your business is targeting a young audience you can reach them on social media channels that are mostly used by them, such as, Instagram, and vice versa.

• Set your goals and measure the outcomes.

It’s very essential to set goals and to work toward them as well as to measure your performance on a pre-defined time frame.

It’s an ongoing process which means you get to know what works best for you and keep doing it and what’s not working for you and get to know the reason why it’s not working, as well as developing alternatives.

So, simply put it’s a trial-and-error process.

• With these steps, you can be on the right track and you will be able to use the right marketing tactics.
• Well, by now you can create your strategy.
• What you need right now is:
• what are the best tactics and strategies to apply?
• Where will you be reaching your right audience and increasing your sales?

Top digital marketing strategies for your business

Many strategies can be applied to any business, but let’s have a look at the most effective ones.

1. Choose the best social media platform:

• All of the people around the world use social media.

• A new study stated that There are now more than “3.5 billion” social media users around the world, representing roughly “46 %” of the world’s total population.

• So, to guarantee the success of your campaign, you have to choose the most used social media platform for your audience.
• For example, if you are a business-to-consumer (B2C) type of business, “Facebook” and “Instagram” are going to be the most effective platforms to get your right audience.
• On the other hand, if you are a business-to-business (B2B) supplier, you can use “Linked in“.
• Also, you have to identify the best platform for the region that you sell in.
• Looking for the middle east: The most used platforms for (B2C) in Egypt and North Africa are “Facebook” and “Instagram”.
• while in the gulf area, they use mostly using Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and they have less usage of Facebook as a social media platform.
• Thus, you have to choose an effective platform to maintain your campaign success.

2. Establish a strong presence

• After choosing the best platform, you have to maintain a strong presence in it.
• Yes, your goal is to reach the right audience, but remember, social media is a two-way communication not like traditional marketing one-way communication, such as Tv and radio ads>
• And one-way communication means that there is no engagement between the advertiser and the audience.
• There are various types of content types, your content might be storytelling posts, live videos for your special events, collections of your products, informative posts about your products, and so on.
• Also, you have to keep an eye on what people say about your brand.
• Many tools can help you to monitor what your audience says about you.
• such tools are “Hootsuite”, “Google alerts”, “Tweet Deck”, and “Hub spot”.
• One advantage of having a strong presence in social media is E-word of mouth.
• Or what’s also called (EWOM/ Electronic Word Of Mouth) and it is the action of recommending or not recommending your product or service through online channels.
• This would happen when a customer uses your product, they can use the recommendation option on Facebook social groups, recommendations websites, or videos using YouTube.
• With the strength of your presence, you can share your customers’ recommendations.
• You also can’t ignore negative comments, if you can do something to help them eliminate their dissatisfaction, then you should do so, and try to improve these areas of your business.
• But if you can’t and the reviewers are just trying to give a false image about your brand, then you will reply kindly and try to correct their view of your brand, which will indirectly give a good impression about your business.
• Remember, you have to act as fast as you can, as a word in social media can circulate very easily which might affect your business very badly.
• Besides, you can increase your online presence by using paid media.
• Paid media Are such as using Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Google ads, and any kind of online paid campaigns. which can help you in determining your objectives and how you will achieve them.

3. Use the power of “SEO”

• If you will build a website for your business, you have to consider search engine optimization as a first strategy.
• SEO is a cost-free method that will help you reach your targeted audience without any cost.
• And this is opposite to “Paid ads“.

• The fact that “92%” of searchers select businesses on the first page of local search results”, makes you understand the importance of SEO.

• Thus, you have to create great, unique, and engaging content that follows SEO principles.
• This can be achieved through writing blog posts, based upon “highly- researched keywords“.

Build an Email list

• Email marketing is one of the tactics that can be considered as cost-free.
• Also, it’s important to have an email list that can offer you direct access to the right audience so that, you just need to track your results.
• An email list can be obtained by either offering your customers free exclusive content which can be downloaded by subscribing using their email address or paying a third party to get the list from them.
• But, it’s always better to get your customers to subscribe which means the ones who will subscribe are the ones who are genuinely interested in what you are offering.
• And that’s contrary to obtaining the list from the third party where the people in the list might not even know you.
• Social media can offer you the ability to reach a specific number of people depending on your budget (if you are using a paid campaign) or a specific number of active users if you are using an (organic/unpaid) campaign.
• Aside from social media, email marketing offers you a way to send the email you want directly to your core audience for free.
• That is why most marketers consider it the most effective strategy.
• You can use the MailChimp tool to create your email campaign, all you have to do is to create a free account and start to reach your audience!
• Remember, make the content of your email as unique and insightful as you can.

Summary

The increase in internet usage opens a new window for start-ups and small businesses to market their brands at the lowest possible cost.

An effective key to digital marketing is to grow your business and to maintain your growth, and it’s also important to use the tactics and strategies that suit your business.

One important factor for succeeding in the digital marketing competition is to create unique content that your audience will be engaged with.

And always Keep an eye on any new methods and try to use them.

You’ll soon see an improvement in your sales, and you will gain more loyal customers to your brand and products.