In recent years, building an effective digital marketing strategy has been a top priority. Today it has become a necessity. Every business must find a way to sell their product and/or services effectively. Not only to survive but to get a chance to thrive and grow in today’s competitive market. Learn the basic steps to build a successful digital presence and find the tools you need to do it.

1. Build your Brand Foundation Effectively

Setting yourself apart from the competition is crucial for success. Define the style and voice your brand needs to resonate with your audience uniquely.

If you have not done so yet, first create a strong style guide for your business or brand. Include your mission statement/brand story, logo, color palette, typography, voice, and imagery.

Human perception and psychology play an important role in decision making. It’s a good idea to keep in mind who is in the industry you are serving and the product or service you are offering. Make sure your brand gets perceive effectively and be recognizable as easy as possible.

Once you create your style guide, is imperative to enforce it on all aspects of your business. Your website, social media, email marketing, print materials, etc. while following your digital marketing strategy. Above all, this is especially important as if you do not follow through, your audience will have a disconnect with your brand. This in turn will build a weak foundation suffering the problem most brands out there have; inconsistency.

Related: Learn how to create an effective branding style guide for your business

2. Keep your Content Fresh and Consistent

Speaking of consistency, keep in mind that no detail is too small. In other words, pay close attention to the inner aspects of design and production. Your job is to make sure your brand’s message is understood effectively.

Consistency is key to your brand’s success. For instance, any campaigns on your social channels, blog posts, emails, videos, etc. should convey the same message all across. They all play an important role in how your brand is perceived and understood. This content must be characterized by the personality you have crafted for your brand.

Most audiences in most industries share something in common. They are all hungry for relevant information as fast as possible and from sources they can trust. Consistency, along with your brand style guide and a content calendar, will make your brand stand out.

Related: How a Content Calendar Can Assist Your Marketing Campaign

3. Develop a Strong Email Marketing Plan

The most effective way to reach and convert is to develop email campaign strategies and automation systems. You will bring your audience closer to your desired goal.

The first course of action is integrating your website or landing page with an email marketing platform. There are several companies that offer these tools and they are relatively low-priced with pay-as-you-grow plans. Mailchimp, Klaviyoh, and Omnisend are some of the ones we recommend as they are easy to set up and use. Regardless of your choice, this step will help build your email list and organize your audience to offer a more personalized experience.

Once we have the integration in place, we must create some basic automation emails. These will be triggered based on actions your visitors take within your platforms. In essence, this step will make “following-up” easy and consistent. Meanwhile, you can focus on creating additional and personalized campaigns. Create a journey of content and promotions that will nurture your email audience to conversion every month.

It is important to include an email marketing campaign calendar on your digital marketing strategy. It will help avoid over or under sending emails, thus maintaining your email list healthy.

Related: Keeping Readers Engaged: The Do’s and Don’ts of Email Marketing.

4. Plan and Create an Engaging Social Media Marketing Plan

Social platforms are the backbone of organic traffic. You have to plan and create engaging content to build a fan base. In return, your fans will stand by your side as your brand grows.

If you think about it, one of the most important steps to start a good relationship is engagement. Build your brand to be trusted with relevant engaging content and the rest will follow. With all the right systems in place, we can welcome visitors and give them the best experience possible.

With this in mind, what better place to start creating engagement other than social media channels. The first recommendation to our clients is to think about the audience demographics. Research the platforms they tend to visit the most, how often, and why. In the long run, choosing the right social media platform/s that better fits your business is essential before you start creating any content. You will utilize your marketing time and budget wisely.  Always remember, it is better to have one well-developed social media channel than to have 5 inconsistent and abandoned ones.

It must be followed with a deeper dive into your research. Analyzing posting data will help you get the most out of your campaigns. In time and by visualizing these trends, you can plan & serve your audience with relevant topics of interest. Remember that creating engaging content should be your priority to build trust. In return, it will serve as the leeway to a more organic offer for a call-to-action later, thus welcome them into your strategized conversion funnel.

Related: How to create an engaging social media marketing plan

5. Practice Good SEO

Another important step in our digital marketing strategy is to share your content with channels that your target audience visits often. Specifically, so that you can show up where it matters most. This media publishing plan you create will help connect your brand with your audience in relevant and more organic ways.

To do this, you must reach out to authoritative websites, blogs, influencers, and any other source that can send qualified leads to your channels. Commonly so, these sources will charge you a fee to refer their traffic to you. Don’t feel you have to settle for less, put your business hat on, and negotiate the terms that benefit you the most.

An analytic tool should be integrated into your digital marketing strategy. Data is king, you cannot measure progress without it. To this end, you need to be able to analyze all the traffic that goes through your channels from every source. Then again, this will ensure that your investment is worth every penny.

Related: SEO strategy: 5 reasons why it is important for your business

6. Finally, Use Paid Advertising Wisely

This is more than just showing up on people’s search results. You must make sure your brand’s message is understood across all ad campaigns. Ensuring to drive relevant traffic to your channels, maximizes your ROI.

There are two mainstream methods of digital advertising. Pay-per-click and social media ads. They both have their advantages and disadvantages depending on the business needs, but if done right, this can be great to keep your advertising budget in control. With this outreach method, you have to make is sure you are getting the best lead out of every click, if not it will be a waste of money. A great advantage is that you can target audiences by demographics, gender, geography, and more.

As mentioned in other steps, it is important to know your market before you dive into paid advertising for your business. It will help you to develop a plan to research the right keywords for your niche. The point is to attract the right people to click on your ads. In other words, what you create as an ad must be original to stand out. There is a sea of competition and you must be creative with the messaging. Also, the landing page your visitors are going to, must carry on the same message and brand overall. This will ensure they stay connected while getting to know you, thus increasing the probability of conversion.

Related: Advertising with Google, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube: What are the benefits?

Tools for Your Next Digital Marketing Strategy

Every business has its own story, the one that sets it apart from the competition. A good story can change how any idea can be perceived by the public or cultures at large. This is the focal point and, if developed and marketed right, this can create the ripples that we all hear about, the ripples of change.

So, the next question that needs to be asked is — how can we create and manage all these different aspects of digital marketing?

There are tools and services that can help you manage most of these tasks. Some are particularly good and some lack some versatility but focus on specific needs. Ultimately and what you choose depends on your business goals. Full disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Here is a list of tools that could help you manage your marketing strategy:

Content Creation Tools

1. Place-it – Get unlimited downloads of over 56K templates! You can make a logo, video, mockup, flyer, business card, and social media image in seconds.
2. Canva – Create beautiful designs with your team. Use Canva’s drag-and-drop feature and layouts to design, share, and print business cards, logos, presentations, and more.
3. Shutterstock – Download the best royalty-free images; including photos, vectors, and illustrations. Enjoy straightforward pricing and simple licensing.
4. Themeforest.net – Discover thousands of premium WordPress themes & website templates, landing pages templates, email templates & more.
5. 123rf.com – find thousands of affordable stock content. Photos, videos, audio, and more.

Social Marketing Tools

1. Hootsuite.com – a complete social media management system.
2. Sprout Social – another complete social media management system 🙂

Email Marketing Tools

1. Mailchimp – Create beautiful, branded emails that make you look like a pro.
2. Omnisend – A tailor-made email marketing platform for e-commerce retailers.
3. Moosend – An All-in-One Email Marketing Platform.

 Media Publishing and Ads Tools

1. HubSpot – A marketing automation software to help you attract the right audience, convert more visitors into customers, and run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale.
2. Semrush – Manage your SEO, Advertising, Content, and SMM.
3. BluHorn – Easy-to-Use Media Buying and Planning Web-Based Platform.
4. Google Ads – Get in front of customers when they’re searching for businesses like yours on Google Search and Maps.

SEO Research and Keyword Research Tools

1. Helium10 – A software that contains multiple Amazon seller tools to help you find high ranking keywords, identify trends, spy on competitors, & optimize product listings.
2. Semrush – Manage your SEO, Advertising, Content, and SMM.
3. Google Search Console –  Tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.
4. Google Trends – Explore how Google data can be used to tell stories.
5. Jaaxy – Google, Bing, and Yahoo data are pulled directly within Jaaxy, offering you a 99% keyword and associated data coverage for all of your searches.

Analytics Tools

1. Google Analytics – A software that contains multiple Amazon seller tools to help you find high ranking keywords, identify trends, spy on competitors, & optimize product listings.
2. Semrush – Manage your SEO, Advertising, Content, and SMM.
3. Google Search Console –  Tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.

How can we help your business?

As every business is different, we need to know more about yours. We can make a complete scan of your brand and current marketing efforts. Talk about what is working and the opportunities that you have discovered could help. This unique and valuable information will help us develop a digital marketing strategy for you. We can help you find the most effective ways to spread your message, so your voice can be heard and understood across digital channels.