12 Ways to Optimize Your Digital Strategy for Results

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A well planned digital marketing strategy is a critical component of running a business. It is a multifaceted process has many key elements that all combine to promote growth. From defining your objectives to figuring out your target market and running ad-campaigns on Facebook and Google, it’s a long road, but well worth the journey. An in-depth approach to developing your digital marketing strategy can reveal new opportunities and expand your reach and most importantly, help achieve your marketing goals.

Below the Bold x Collective share the best advice, tips and tricks to develop a strong digital marketing strategy for your brand.

1. Define Your Goals & Objectives

What are your goals and key objectives? Do you want more conversions? Do you want to see an increase in social media engagement? Or maybe you want to make it in the top five results of Google (SERPs)?

The four common goals that the Bold x Collective team find are most important for a lot of businesses right now are improving brand awareness, engagement, conversions and lead generation.

Lets start with brand awareness - the reason this is number 1 on our list is because as a business owner, you want people to know about your brand and what your company is about. Brand awareness encourages repeat purchases and leads to an increase in sales, as well as positive word of mouth;

Engagement is important because the more interest you see from your target audience, the more people become invested in your brand. Most businesses don’t want one-time customers and prefer repeat customers that become a part of their community. Also, businesses that focus on building their social media engagement usually benefit from better marketing reach, ROI and greater brand awareness which attracts more potential customers.

Whether you’re selling a product or service, you cannot overlook lead generation. A lead is anyone who’s interested in what you’re selling. The more traffic your website or storefront has, the more chance you have of getting “leads”. The formula is simple: the more qualified traffic you get, the more chances you have to get leads, the more leads you have the higher your conversion rates.

Conversions are one of the most important parts of your marketing strategy. The conversion encompasses the process of turning website traffic into sales-ready opportunities that are entering your buyer pipeline. Once you get qualified traffic onto your website, it’s all about ensuring these leads convert. You do this by creating a highly optimized customer experience on your website. Ensure that they have access to all kinds of information they may be looking for, and make sure it’s easily accessible to help them convert.

2. Create Buyer Personas

Target market and buyer persona are often mistakenly used interchangeably. Your target market is a group of consumers at which your products and services are going to be marketed towards. A buyer persona is more narrow. It is a fictional representation(s) of your ideal buyer. Create a buyer persona for your brand and describe this person in detail. What does this person do for a living? What is their annual income, familial status, age, likes and dislikes? What is their personality type? What is their typical day like at work, at home? How do they use the internet and social media platforms?

When creating a buyer persona, you should consider your customers' specific demographics and online behaviours.

If you own a skincare clinic you are going to have a specific type buyer persona. If you run a soccer academy, your buyer persona will be another type of persona. A buyer persona will help you define your target audience.

3. Competitor Research

Know your competitors and their digital marketing efforts. Competitor research helps you understand why customers choose to buy from you or your competitors. It also clarifies how your competition is marketing their products. Over time, this helps you improve your own marketing efforts and your business on the whole.

The goal is to look for things your competition is doing right and wrong, that you can use to improve customer experience.

4. Define Your Target Market

Your target market ties into creating your buyer personas. Identifying your target market helps your company with developing effective marketing communication strategies. A target market is a group of individuals that share similar needs or characteristics that your company hopes to convert, into a customer, as these users are the ones that are most likely to purchase your product.

Knowing your target audience helps with your overall marketing strategy. From creating content to deciding which social media platforms to focus on, knowing your target audience will greatly impact your overall brand awareness.

5. Budget

With any digital marketing strategy, you must define your budget. It's very important to set a realistic budget for your marketing, as it will save you a lot of stress in the future and it'll help you decide to which resources you should strategically allocate your money.

When creating your digital marketing strategy, you'll need to be aware of costs such as keyword research tools, ad campaign budgets, how much you are willing to spend on your search engine optimization strategy, creating content and other marketing efforts? If you don't know how to budget for a digital marketing campaign, discuss this with a digital marketing professional.

6. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization is crucial for every business, as we tell each and every one of our clients. Search engines such as Google, have millions of users per day that are looking for answers to their questions and problems.

If you have a website, blog or online store, SEO can help you get organic traffic from search engines. Also, the majority of search engine users click the top positions of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), so as a business, you want your website to be on the first page, so you can get your potential customers onto your website rather than your competitions.

In addition to the above, we also highly recommend keyword research. By using effective keyword research tools, you can rank higher in search engines for certain topics, which will help drive more traffic to your website and promote your products or services, just as we mentioned above. We highly recommend using an SEO professional from the Bold x Collective team.

7. Social Media

When choosing social media channels, you should choose platforms that resonate most with your target audience. Popular options include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest. But, that doesn’t mean they’re all the right fit for you or your business. Marketing on social media can help build a very strong digital marketing strategy, if done correctly.

We recommend that all businesses take advantage of the right social platforms. They allow you to connect with your customer, create overall brand awareness and of course with the end goal of boosting your leads and sales. More than three billion people in the world use social media, so it’s here to stay.

Having social media profiles is one thing, but it’s important to ensure they’re properly optimized and constantly maintain them. Everything from creating content, to follower growth and reputation management is all crucial. It's important to engage with your audience and work towards building a larger audience, which will help gain more customers over time. When using social media as a business, you will need to keep your customers in the loop with live updates, replying to comments, sharing posts and more. It's crucial to always be active on your businesses' social media platforms. If you don’t have time to commit to this, we always recommend an agency to help.

8. Ad Campaigns

After developing all the other components discussed above, we recommend running ad campaigns. There are different platforms you can use for this - Google ads, social media (Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn) ads and many more, which you can pick and choose depending on who you’re targeting.

Digital advertising gives you the ability to tell your brand’s story and share content with a larger audience, which can help increase the size of your market. Your audience is always on digital channels, and most likely on more than one at one time. The size of your reach has never been greater than it is right now, or cheaper!

When putting together ad campaigns, you can go as far as creating look-alike audiences to people who have visited your website and social media channels in the past; users that have certain types of demographics, lifestyles and behaviours.

We always recommend using a professional to create your ad campaigns, to not only be cost efficient, but also to ensure your ads are properly optimized for success.

9. Re-Marketing & Re-Targeting

Re-marketing and Re-targeting is something we always recommend to our customers. It gives you the ability to "re-capture" sales that you may have previously lost. Ever seen an abandoned cart? Or someone that was previously viewing your services, but didn't convert? Well, you can re-target to them with social media ads, Google ads or even through email marketing.

Re-marketing is usually done via email, where re-targeting is done by using ads based off of cookie data that has been captured.

We highly recommend both re-targeting and re-marketing to e-commerce businesses, specifically in the form of abandonment emails. Have you ever added items to your cart, closed the page and had emails come to you, telling you to come back and make the purchase? This is a great marketing tactic that needs to be fully taken advantage of!

10. Email Marketing

Email marketing isn’t dead, and it should be included in your digital marketing efforts. Firstly, it can be incorporated with the social media side of your digital marketing campaign. The email list can now receive news and special offers from your company. This can also help with long-term follower growth and engagement on your platforms. Not to mention, your email list is a free tool that you always have access to when delivering a message to your audience.

Another way to do this is by having a welcome offer on your website. Offer a discount or some value that will benefit your website visitors. The more you offer, the more likely your website visitors are to sign up for your email list. As an e-commerce business, you can offer a certain percentage off the users first purchase. As a service-driven business, you can offer a free consultation or a PDF of key information that the visitor will receive after signing up.

11. Content Marketing

“Content is king.” Creating intriguing, engaging content that aligns with your company's brand can connect with and attract your target audience.

Composing the right message, in different forms, for your target audience is crucial. Different forms of content include blogging, video, photos, podcasts, infographics, articles, webinars and much more will help diversify how you deliver key brand messaging.

Organizations that have a content strategy, along with good, quality content, are more likely to be successful. There is just so much noise on the web and creating a thorough map to help your business stand out digitally will help accomplish your marketing goals in the long run.

You can use this content on social media, which will help build your audience, and it can be used on your website, which will greatly impact your organic search results.

12. Measure

Analytics measure and examine marketing performance to maximize efficiency and improve ROI (return on investment).

Analytics will help you decide which marketing efforts are worth further pursuing, as well as which marketing efforts you should discontinue. Maybe the money your spending in one area can be allocated elsewhere. The numbers tell all, and if you know how to read them, they never lie.

Create a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

When creating a strong, well thought out digital marketing strategy, you'll want to utilize each and every one of the components we mentioned. Each item on this list plays a roll in the strength of your strategy, so it's important you do not skip steps. At the Bold x Collective, our team can help you create a highly successful marketing strategy that will get your brand results. Contact our team to learn more about how we can help your business reach its full potential.