What are the most effective digital marketing strategies? An online marketing strategy is different to a marketing technique or method. A single method of online marketing will never be as effective as a broader strategy. For example, blogging is an example of a marketing technique or method.
Using blogging, re-marketing and email marketing together is a broader strategy. Blogging on its own can work wonders as a marketing method to bring targeted customers to your business. But when you start adding other marketing methods to that technique, you can create far superior results with a much bigger and more effective marketing strategy.
Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies
The most effective online marketing strategy for one business, might not work as well for another. For example, if you’re an affiliate promoting physical products, your strategy might work really well. But if you applied the same strategy to digital products, you may find the results aren’t the same. Digital products are very different to physical ones. For example, a digital product might need more explaining than a typical physical product who’s value is more obvious. Therefore you might need more touch points with a digital business model.
Most customers don’t buy on their first visit to a website, which is why you need to apply a bigger strategy than just using one marketing technique. Here’s a few marketing techniques you may already be using to bring customers to your business/products:
- Blogging – whether written or video content. See also find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty
- PPC – pay per click advertising (Google Adwords, Bing, Facebook, YouTube etc.)
- Email marketing – collecting emails from a website/landing page and following up with automated emails.
- Social media marketing – placing content or paying for ads on social media sites
- SEO – search engine optimisation (gearing your content for optimum exposure from the search engines)
- Link building – a part of search engine optimisation
Most Effective Online Marketing Strategies
Most customers will need multiple touch points before they will buy and most website visitors won’t buy on their first visit of your website. How many touch points before a sale? Usually 6-8, depending on your business.
That’s why it’s good to use at least two methods of marketing from a website: the first to get visitors there in the first place, the second to bring them back and make the sale. You can use blogging as an SEO strategy or PPC (pay per click advertising) to get customers to your website. But to keep them there and/or bring them back you’ll need another marketing method such as re-targeting and/or email marketing (preferably both).
Once you have zoned in on a marketing strategy which works, you’ll know it because you’ll be getting more sales. It’s likely to be different across the board depending on your particular business, the products you sell and the customers you attract.
Let’s start with your ideal customer: the customer avatar!
Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies: Your Customer Avatar
Your customer avatar is the “perfect” customer who will love you, your products/service and remain a loyal customer for years to come. They will recommend you to everyone who asks! Imagine this person, what they look like. Get an idea of where they hang out, where do they go online? How old are they, where do they live and what are their interests?
The closer you can get to knowing the intricate details of your perfect target audience, the less time and money you’ll waste on targeting the wrong customer with your marketing. When you know your perfect customer well, you’ll know their pains and problems and you’ll be more adept at talking to them in a language they understand. See customer avatar worksheet pdf.
Every single interaction with your customer is a point of contact and all points are an opportunity to send a marketing message. The wrong message will push customers away, the right one will attract them.
Targeting In Your Advertising Campaigns
Online marketing platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Google Adwords etc all offer a huge amount of potential for targeting your customer avatar. You can target people from the searches they conduct online, but you can also add other demographics such as location, language and audience segments. That’s why it’s so important to know who your perfect customer is (customer avatar).
You can target people by how they have interacted with your website too (re-targeting) and use other filters to zone in on the most likely candidate to buy whatever you’re selling.
You can use video too and pay to show your video on YouTube for certain people who meet your criteria. Show your ad according to the interests and other videos which your customer avatar watches.
Most Effective Online Marketing Strategies: Re-Targeting
Re-targeting is definitely one of the most effective online marketing strategies you can use in combination with other tactics and techniques. Once you have brought visitors to your website, through organic traffic or paid traffic, most of them will leave without taking any action. That’s why re-targeting is a good idea. With re-targeting, you can track them and show your display adverts to them on other platforms and websites which they browse on.
By calling their attention back to your offering, you remind them of their prior interest. You’ve probably seen retargeting being applied yourself when you browse online. After you have been searching for a particular item, that item tends to follow you around on other platforms! It’s super targeted advertising because you are showing the ads to people who have already shown an interest in the product.
It’s also cheap too because you can target only those people who have landed previously on your website. They may see your advert, but only engage again if they intend to see your site again or make a purchase.
Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies: Email Marketing
Email marketing is a similar tactic which allows you to re-engage with your audience after they have landed on your site and signed up to your email newsletter. Email marketing is much better than re-targeting though because it allows you to maintain contact with subscribers over a long time frame than is possible from a website.
On a website, most visitors are gone in a few minutes never to return. But if you offer them something of value, in exchange for their email address, you can continue drip feeding them information through your emails week in week out. This can extend your connection to a potential customer for weeks, months and even years and decades.
It also allows you to talk about your products and showcase its value. With digital products this is particularly useful because digital products typically are more obscure than physical ones and therefore may need more explanation for a sale to be closed.
Split Testing
Split testing is used in multiple ways in online marketing and it allows a marketer to show two versions of a landing page, advert or email message, to see which one performs the best. In the case of landing pages, split testing allows you to see which version of a landing page performs the best. The best one can then be split tested again and again until your find the best performing version which gives you the cheapest cost per lead or best conversion rate.
You can also split test adverts too to find out which ones are best and why. Through split testing various elements of a sales funnel, an online marketer can optimise the system for the best profit and the least cost.
A good split testing software is Convertri, which allows marketers to split test pages against each other to optimise performance.
Summary
So there’s a few marketing strategies which can be used in combination with each other to optimise your marketing campaigns. No marketing method is perfect on its own and there’s no real definitive marketing method which is better than the rest. However, paid marketing is much faster and more scalable than organic marketing. Organic marketing can work wonders too over time, bringing in traffic for free!
Your overall marketing strategy will depend on your products/service, your marketing budget and business model. With low value products to offer, it’s much more difficult to use paid marketing and still turn a profit, for example. But with the most profitable digital products, you’re much better off using paid marketing methods because you can recoup that expenditure and turn a profit much more easily. Only by testing and measuring different techniques combined will you truly know the most effective online marketing strategies for your own business/products and unique audience.
Ideally use a combination of marketing methods in your overall marketing strategy including:
- Social media marketing – paid and unpaid social media marketing methods are available.
- SEO – search engine optimisation allows you to get free traffic from the search engines
- PPC – pay per click advertising is the best way to generate instant traffic quickly
- Email marketing – lets you collect emails from a website and follow up over a longer time period than is possible from a website.
- Re-targeting – lets you “follow” your website visitors off your website to other platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, eBay and other websites which allow advertising
- Split testing – split test landing pages, adverts, email messages and any other element of your marketing to optimise for best results.
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