Speaking of digital marketing, the website is your fundamental marketing channel because it has a larger audience reach than any other advertising platform. Therefore, to all businesses, SEO digital marketing forms the core of brand promotion, establishing credibility through thought leadership and attracting potential leads. In other words, to be found on Google is the priority of every business.

Businesses are generally of two types- B2B (targeting consumers on behalf of other businesses) and B2C (targeting individual consumers). Therefore, the goals, needs, and buying processes vary relatively, necessitating the formulation of customized strategies for more precise results.

Despite the fact digital marketing is the pivotal component in business growth and expansion, nearly 17% of businesses are not aware of how to create an effective digital marketing strategy (Smart Insights). It is the lack of planning and disposition which do not fetch them desirable outcomes.

So, it is essential to understand how digital marketing works when you sit down to curate your strategy.

• Recognize Business Goals: A clear marketing goal helps you create a focused strategy. You must know the purpose of your marketing campaign. Whether improving SERP rankings, creating brand awareness, or generating leads, a defined objective enables crafting a more impactful strategy, witnessing fewer failures.

  Like, if your goal is to promote brand awareness and reputation, you must prioritize tactics that will help you attain the same. Social media marketing, managing reviews, posting testimonials, etc, will work best in this case.

• Identify Buyer Persona: What is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is the information you gather about your target audience. For every business, the target audience differs. When you analyze your target audience and create a database based on demographics, interests, preferences, and behaviours, it helps you to segregate your ideal consumers.

  Buyer persona helps you to learn more about your audiences through meticulous market research that influences your marketing campaign. By understanding the needs and preferences of your target consumers, you can serve them better.

• Pick Marketing Channels: It is not necessary that all the marketing channels will work for you. Some may work well for you, while others may be a waste of time and money. Hence, pick your promotion platform wisely For example, a B2B may want to focus more on SEO, content marketing, and paid campaigns to engage with B2B buyers.

  However, you can always switch your marketing channels to maximize the effectiveness of your online marketing strategy. You are not stuck with your channel forever!

• Allocate Budget: Now, setting your campaign budget is a crucial consideration. You must not go overboard with your marketing budget because it will affect other areas of your business. And neither do you want to keep it too less, making it challenging to accomplish your goals. So, what should you do?

  Allocate a certain percentage of your investment to marketing, focusing on attaining your primary objectives. When you start witnessing results, you can increase them to your needs or extend your campaign approaches.

• Perform Keyword Research: No matter whichever campaign tactic you choose, the keyword is the core of it. Especially SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing cannot drive favourable outcomes without the correct implementation of keywords. These are the popular words or phrases used in search queries. Keywords add value, relevance, and significance to your content, impacting visibility and traffic drive.

  Hence, conduct a thorough keyword research and use it strategically in the title tags, meta descriptions, headings, Alt texts, etc., to help your content rank in search results and attract relevant web traffic.

• Create and Optimize Content: Now that you are aware of your marketing goals, buyer persona, campaign channels, budget, and keywords, it is finally time to work on content. For any campaign, content plays the most vital part. It is the most powerful component that helps you to connect to audiences. Apart from that, content increases the expertise and authoritativeness of the brand, affecting website ranking, traffic drive, audience engagement, and lead generation.

  From text to visuals, your content influences the decision making process of a consumer. The more valuable and engaging, the better your chances of acquiring leads. Therefore, optimize your content according to the search engine trends and user’s intent to derive optimal benefits.

• Publish and Distribute: After you have well-optimized content, now comes the promotion part. Blogs, articles, guest posts, social media posts, guides, tutorials, podcasts, videos, etc., you have diverse mediums to share your content. Once you promote your content, you can share it on different platforms.

  You can create topic clusters to categorize your content and link the pages so that audiences remain engaged!

• Track and Measure Performance: What happens after implementing your digital marketing strategy? You just don’t leave it there. You must track and monitor results to evaluate their effectiveness. Using various performance tools and metrics, you can evaluate whether your strategy is working or not.

  By analyzing bounce rate, engagement rate, keyword rankings, impressions, conversions, cost per lead (CPL), cost per click (CPC), customer lifetime value, and other KPIs, you know your success rate!

• Tweak Based on Analysis: Lastly, remember that online marketing is dynamic. What works today may not work tomorrow. So, you have to keep upgrading your strategy to make the most out of it. As you evaluate your campaign performance, refine your strategy based on the findings to encourage better results. The secret to successful digital marketing is tracking and tweaking!