You’ve developed an exciting product, stirred up a buzz with investors, and officially launched your company. Congratulations! But how are people supposed to discover your life-changing goods and services if they can find no trace of you online?
Here’s a quick-start guide to creating an effective digital marketing strategy and growing your customer base.
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Refine Your Identity
Maximising the results of your marketing efforts starts with a clear understanding of your company, audience, and goals.
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Get my plan →Start with your brand. What does it convey? What visual identity and tone of voice will customers associate with it? What lifestyle choices do you exemplify? What about your offerings? Can the competition only hope to match?
Then, it’s time to analyse your target audience. What are their demographics? Their pain points and aspirations? Creating core buyer personas and building your strategy around meeting their needs is the most effective means of building market share and attracting long-term supporters.
SEO, ads, etc., ultimately lead to your website, so make sure it’s up to snuff. That includes being secure, easy to understand and search, loading fast, using clear CTAs when appropriate, and optimising for mobile.
Cultivate a Social Media Presence
Shopping and interacting with brands have become ingrained in the social media experience. Not reaching out to billions of potential customers would be foolish, but you need to be strategic about it. Content that LinkedIn users appreciate won’t go over as well on TikTok, for example. You can repurpose and draw inspiration from existing content. Still, you have to tailor it for each platform’s user base and preferred format.
Community building is the lynchpin of successful social media marketing. Followers are far more likely to convert if you engage with them, act on feedback, and deal with criticism head-on. That shows professionalism and genuine care for the customer, which no ad can do justice to.
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Social media management and listening tools will be invaluable for handling interactions and spotting online growth opportunities. However, additional accounts and tools mean more passwords to keep track of and a greater risk of data breaches. Adding a business password manager to your tool belt lets you create and store as many unique passwords as you need, protecting associated accounts from unauthorised access.
Harness Your Mailing Lists
While broad exposure is essential, your best leads are people genuinely interested in your services. Nothing signals such interest more than visitors who’ve signed up for your newsletter or given you their contact info after filling out a survey or receiving a free eBook.
Email campaigns have a famously high ROI, so pay attention to subject lines and turn sign-ups into purchases with snappy copy and compelling visual presentation.
Work on Your SEO
Search engine optimisation is a constant yet evolving pillar of any digital marketing strategy. AI-backed algorithms now emphasise user engagement more than ever. On the one hand, this means using keywords focused on specific needs and improving the relevance of local SEO. On the other hand, search engines are now examining CTRs and time spent on pages more closely, meaning quality content becomes even more critical.
Shift from Making Sales to Adding Value
While ads remain useful – especially for boosting short-term metrics – internet users are increasingly annoyed by them. Shift focus away from advertising to establishing your company as an authority in your field.
How? By offering free content that followers and site visitors find genuinely useful. Blogposts remain helpful, especially since they add to SEO and can contain backlinks. However, videos have become the most engaging content with the potential to offer value and make your company look more personable.
Handle Your Data Responsibly
Marketing is among the most data-driven digital pursuits. You regularly collect customer insights and strategies based on them, perform sentiment analysis, and set KPIs based on market analysis. Such data is also valuable to cybercriminals, especially the part containing thousands of clients’ personal and financial information.
Securing your accounts and adding further protection through two-factor authentication is a good start. You’ll also want to safely connect to company assets and databases, especially if some marketing team members work remotely. Do so using the best VPNs available since their encrypted tunnels allow you to use even ordinarily unsafe networks to communicate and exchange data securely.
Written by Uzair Kharawala
Partner at SF Digital Studios, a Google Premier Partner agency. Uzair has been helping businesses grow with Google Ads since 2002 and teaches it every week on YouTube.
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