The digital marketing process allows businesses to reach their clientele over the internet. This form of marketing will enable you to sell, promote, or advertise your services and products online, helping you target customers more efficiently.
You can reach your digital marketing goals by strengthening your understanding of what it takes to build a digital marketing campaign. Find out more about the ins and outs of different digital marketing strategies with our team at Connective Web Design.
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Examples of digital marketing processes
You do not have to confine yourself to a single digital marketing strategy for your company. In fact, many companies use several processes to handle online marketing. We’ll review the seven most common digital marketing options below.
#1: Affiliate marketing strategy
Companies engage in affiliate marketing when they work with other organizations or firms to produce traffic. Generally, businesses earn a commission for generating leads and traffic. We recommend affiliate marketing as part of any digital marketing plan.
#2: Content marketing strategy
Content marketing focuses on generating content that appeals to your target audience. Businesses focus on genuine content that snags attention, resulting in lead generation. We use the term content to describe things like a blog post, a video posted on social media, or even audio files.
High-quality content draws potential customers to your business and encourages them to spend more time on your website, often increasing the odds of a conversion.
#3: Email marketing strategy
Digital marketing often involves the use of an email marketing campaign. Email marketing requires you to write and send out emails that advertise your services or products to potential members of your target audience.
Digital marketers focus on reaching a large audience online through emails. The correct email strategies can increase sales by resulting in a higher conversion rate.
#4: Instant message marketing strategy
Digital marketing focuses on more than connecting with people through standard means. You may also focus on contacting your target audience through instant message marketing, which uses messengers or messaging apps as a point of contact.
Setting up a chatbot program can increase your options for digital communication with your prospective clients. Maintaining open avenues of communication represents a critical component for any digital marketing process.
#5: Pay-per-click marketing strategy
Compared to other types of digital marketing, pay-per-click marketing can help you save money while meeting your business goals. However, this marketing approach requires setting up a paid campaign that displays ads on digital platforms, search engines, and social media platforms.
You pay each time a potential customer clicks on your ads, allowing you to control how you spend money on your advertising budget. Generally, companies that pay more for ads are ranked first, so they get seen before posts made by other companies.
#6: Search engine marketing strategy
Search engine marketing (SEM) puts the focus on paid advertising and marketing techniques. This digital strategy helps increase the visibility of marketing campaigns, allowing them to reach more potential customers.
#7: Search engine optimization (SEO) marketing strategy
SEO strategies help boost the placement of your site on different search engines, like Google. You may improve your website’s ranking by meeting specific criteria established by Google Analytics. Often, sites rank better if they include specific keywords, backlink to other established websites, and provide helpful content for potential customers.
Learn the flow of digital marketing strategy
The digital marketing process has followed the same basic flow used in traditional marketing for decades. However, the experts have adapted this flow to meet the unique needs of a digital marketing campaign. Generally, the flow requires five distinct steps, as outlined below.
#1. Start with research
The research state of your digital marketing campaign requires you to gather extensive amounts of information. Then, you use the data collected during the research phase to build an effective digital marketing campaign.
Companies often end up gathering and organizing information about:
- Their organization and brand
- Their target audience
- The product or service they want to sell
You may also want to focus on competitors’ online marketing tactics and strategies at this stage of the digital marketing process. Understanding your competition can help you develop a digital marketing plan that makes your product or service stand out from the crowd.
It’s also necessary to do some research about the market
t during this part of your digital marketing campaign. Businesses focus on determining the size of the market, strategies that appeal to customers in the market, and more.
We also recommend performing keyword research early in the digital marketing process. The keywords you use can impact your ranking on Google and other search engines. Having a firm understanding of the keywords that work in your market helps you get off to a good start.
#2. Create your digital marketing plan
Once you have all the information gathered from your research, you can implement your digital marketing strategy. Make sure you have a firm set of objectives and goals before you start working on your online marketing plan.
Goals and objectives may come from your stakeholders or the owners of your company. Designing a marketing plan that aligns with these goals allows you to focus on success throughout the process.
During the creation process, you’ll focus on your branding strategy, which may involve delivering a cohesive vision of your company across social media platforms and your website. You also consider content strategy during the creation phase, discussing things like:
- Content creation for blogs
- Social media posts for your company
- Emails for existing clients
- Potential multimedia messages
The goal of your digital marketing plan should be conversion rate optimization and bringing new customers to your products or services. Part of creating the procedure may involve coming up with a customer persona.
A customer persona involves a description of your ideal customer. Once you decide what your perfect customer looks like–focusing on things like age, gender, and even education level–you can build a marketing plan that relates directly to their needs and concerns.
In many cases, the experts recommend going through each step of the buyer’s journey for your customer persona. You can look for areas to improve, allowing you to personalize your marketing strategy to reach the ideal customer for your products or services.
#3. Promote your services and products
Your digital marketing work doesn’t end once you create your digital marketing strategy. Instead, you move on to the promotion of your services or products. Generally, meeting your digital marketing goals requires you to utilize a variety of digital platforms.
Depending upon your company’s goals, you may focus on promotion on search engines, including:
Social media marketing also plays a vital role in the promotion process. Develop your social media presence by regularly posting and communicating with your customers through platforms like Twitter or Instagram. You can also target customers with social media ads.
We also recommend using both affiliate and email marketing as a way to promote your services or products. Effective emails can increase your website traffic by encouraging new people to visit your web pages.
Finally, you may set up an e-commerce website for your company, allowing your potential customers to place orders easily. You can find out more about all of these promotional options by reaching out to members of our team for additional advice and guidance.
#4. Analyze the results of your campaign
Have you developed a content strategy, set up a marketing campaign, and advertised your products or services? If so, you’re ready to analyze all the campaign results. Analysis requires you to gather information about:
- Sales
- Revenue
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
- Target audience response
- Customer behavior
You can use the analytical process to consider the overall effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy and to look for areas of improvement. You do not have to maintain a static digital marketing process. In fact, the experts recommend that you adjust your strategies based on the overall results of the process.
You may also gather information about the efficacy of your digital marketing process by requesting customer feedback. Take your customers’ opinions into consideration as you adjust your marketing strategy to function more effectively in the future.
#5. Optimize your digital marketing strategy
You can use your digital marketing analysis results to continually strengthen your marketing plan. However, the process does not end as soon as you reach the optimization stage.
Instead, you use the information about successful – or unsuccessful – strategies to continue reaching more customers. You may want to increase your investments into areas of the marketing campaign that show the results you’re looking for while limiting funding to areas that don’t lead to customer engagement.
Draw on your organization during digital marketing
You may have a dedicated team working on the digital marketing process. However, that doesn’t mean that other members of your organization cannot help with all types of digital marketing.
All the employees in your organization may have unique ideas and perspectives to add to discussions about inbound marketing, offline marketing, social media marketing, and more. Gather information from employees as you create your digital marketing plan and create content for your company.
You may also send completed content to other employees. They can share this content on their social media pages, increasing organic search results in some cases and generating more leads for your company.
Create an outline for your digital marketing process
The digital marketing process often involves many different steps, with a significant focus on creating content. Therefore, we recommend that you sit down and develop an outline for your digital marketing strategy with your marketing team before beginning the creation process.
Part of creating an outline involves focusing on the marketing channels you want to reach. You need to decide if you want to make a blog post, social media message, or another form of content for each step of your digital marketing strategy.
You may need to complete additional research each time you work on an article. The research may include looking for sources to back up the information you want to share. You can also focus on researching keywords designed to help with inbound marketing.
Strong headlines and digital marketing strategy
Content creation plays a tremendous role in the digital marketing process. Part of creating good content involves making sure you have headlines that grab the reader’s attention and draw customers to your posts and website.
Marketing companies put a large amount of effort into researching the best tips for generating headlines that work to increase organic search results. Different types of digital marketing may require different headline structures. However, we generally recommend that you focus on the following.
Including keywords in your headline
Part of search engine optimization involves the use of keywords. Including the primary keyword you’re targeting with your article in the headline can help your search engine ranking, making it easier for potential clients to find your article.
Add emotion to your headline
Part of lead generation involves reaching out to your prospective customers on an emotional level. We don’t necessarily mean using scare tactics or fear to drive page views, though that may work for your digital marketing process.
You may also want to focus on the positive, using the headline to point out ways your product or service could directly benefit your potential customer. Consider this digital marketing strategy to boost sales for your company.
Highlight the value of your article
Potential customers are more likely to click on articles they feel will add something positive to their lives. So, focus your content marketing on how you can help your clients as a way to improve your digital marketing strategy.
Using terms like “better,” “new,” or “improved” may increase the odds of lead generation through your articles. However, once you entice someone to click on your article, make sure you follow through by providing information that benefits your potential clients.
Structure your digital marketing efforts
A strong structure for your digital marketing process can make developing and implementing content easier. Structure gives you set goals to reach and helps you understand the rules you need to work within while developing blog posts, social media statements, and your website.
Structure does more than provide you with guidance about the best way to arrange your digital marketing plan, and it also allows you to direct customers to purchasing your products or services. Therefore, we recommend that you structure your content to focus on comments and links that steadily encourage customers to take action by making a purchase.
The structure you use throughout the digital marketing process varies based on the type of content you create. However, most blogs and articles can benefit from the following structure.
A strong introduction
Most visitors to websites today give a page about eight seconds to grab their attention. If they don’t see anything that interests them in this brief amount of time, they move on to a different page. Therefore, a strong introduction is a vital part of your marketing campaign.
The strongest introductions generally include three components: an agreement statement, acknowledging customer concerns, and a solution.
Your agreement statement
An agreement statement shows that you understand the position and feelings of your customers. You validate their concerns and indicate that you agree with them, increasing the comfort of your prospective clients.
An acknowledgment of customer concerns
Ideally, your product or service should address a problem or need felt by your potential customer. Make sure your introduction draws direct attention to the concern faced by your ideal customer.
A solution
Don’t leave your customers hanging in your introduction. Briefly introduce the solution your product or service offers them, encouraging them to learn more about how your company can help them address their needs.
You don’t need to design a long introduction. In fact, shorter introductions often work better, even for blog posts. Try to keep the introduction to around 150 words or less for the best results at snagging customers’ attention for lead generation.
The body of your content
Each article you create needs a body that contains most of the information you plan to share. In addition, the body should contain multiple headlines and even subheadlines, making it easy for visitors to read and absorb what you’ve created.
You may include bullet points and focus on short paragraphs throughout your content, making it easier for visitors to use mobile devices like phones or tablets. Also, make sure to back up the statements in your content with information or statistics provided by trusted sources.
Sharing reliable information about part of content marketing helps your potential clients develop a sense of trust about what you’re saying. It may also boost your conversion rates, allowing you to increase your sales.
A Solid conclusion
Each digital marketing article you write requires a good conclusion. We recommend keeping a conclusion to around three sentences and 75 words. Your conclusion allows you to re-engage your readers and provide satisfaction to anyone who simply scanned your article.
Make sure you include a call to action in your conclusion to improve your online marketing plan. For example, the call to action could consist of a request to call your company, fill out an online contact form, or make a purchase.
Work with your marketing team to decide on a call to action that aligns with your branding strategy. Depending on the business you operate, you may adjust the prompts you offer your clients.
Image usage in the digital marketing process
Images play a significant role in the digital marketing process, whether you operate a business-to-business (B2B) company or a business-to-customer (B2C) company. Images snag attention and encourage customers to stay on your website or social media page.
Content that contains images often gets far more views than content without, and you can further increase these benefits by making your own images. Creating your own images can take time, but it can also assist with brand awareness and avoid copyright issues.
Help with brand awareness for your company
Creating quality content matters. However, you want your customers to associate the content with your website, not someone else’s company. Using pre-made images found off of search engines like Google makes it much harder to personalize the look of your website.
We recommend taking time in the marketing process to create your own unique graphics that use your company’s color scheme, icons, and branding. That way, each time a customer finds you through a search engine, they recognize your company.
Avoid copyright infringement issues
It’s essential to respect the copyrights of other companies in both digital and traditional advertising. You can face thousands of dollars in fines if you misuse an image another organization created for their own usage.
While you can filter out copyrighted images while looking for digital assets, sometimes mistakes happen. You can avoid costly errors if you create your images while designing a unique look for your company’s products or services.
Reuse and rework during digital marketing
The digital marketing process does involve creating everything from scratch each time you want to reach out to your potential customers. In fact, reusing older pieces of content and marketing tools can help you save money during the content marketing process.
Tips on reusing content
Note that reusing content does not mean simply copying and pasting sections from old articles into new content. In fact, copy-pasting can negatively impact your position in search engine results, as Google could ding you for plagiarism even of your own articles.
However, you could draw ideas from past articles during content marketing. You can then link back to these older articles as part of the digital marketing process. Taking these steps can help you do well in new marketing channels.
You can use Google Analytics to assess the effectiveness of linking back to your old articles.
Rework your content into a different medium
As part of your digital marketing process, you may want to consider taking articles you wrote and adapting them to a new medium. For example, around half of internet users report a desire to see more videos.
You may explore new marketing channels by taking the time to record videos of your articles and then posting the videos on your social medical platforms, encouraging more engagement from your clients.
Using the right keywords to advertise your videos can also help you with search engine optimization. Link back to your original article to drive more traffic towards your website, or share links to other videos to encourage visitors to spend more time on your webpage as part of your digital marketing strategy.
Always look for digital marketing feedback
Feedback allows you to improve your digital marketing process. You can get some feedback about your work through apps like Grammarly or Hemmingway. We also recommend using the Spellcheck feature if you have Microsoft Word.
Polished pieces of content generally perform better than articles containing spelling and grammatical errors. Many people can see the difference when looking at statistics and feedback offered by Google Analytics.
As part of the digital marketing process, you may also want to work with professional editors. Sometimes, nothing beats another set of eyes as you look for errors or identify other places you can strengthen your writing for search engine marketing.
Look to industry insiders for help
Part of the marketing process involves building relationships with insiders throughout your industry. For instance, you could reach out to insiders and offer them an early look at new articles or videos you’ve produced.
Accept the feedback these insiders offer and ask them to share links to your content after posting it to increase your readership. You can consider this option as part of your standard digital marketing process.
Focus on automating your digital marketing process
Marketing automation can take a lot of the stress out of the digital marketing process while helping you reach new marketing channels. Technological advances and new pieces of software make it easier than ever for your company to automate processes like:
- Sending out emails
- Generating leads
- Posting content to your website
You have several options for marketing automation for your digital marketing strategy. First, we recommend that you look into automation platforms that can connect with your sales CRM, making it easier to handle customer transactions for your company.
Many companies start small with marketing automation, focusing on sending out automatic emails to everyone on a mailing list. However, as you see results from the automated processes, you may decide to put more funds into other options as well.
Explore new channels for digital marketing
You don’t have to stick to one or two digital marketing channels when planning out your strategy. In fact, we recommend looking at all the channels you currently use and considering the possibility of expanding into new areas. Marketing channels can include:
- Your website
- Content on your blog
- Your social media accounts
- Native advertising
- Paid advertising
- Word of mouth from your customers
Google Adwords also provides you with a digital marketing channel that may allow you to reach more clients. You can assess the effectiveness of each channel you currently use to see if they give you the returns you want. When reviewing the effects of your marketing strategy, make sure you consider factors like:
- Traffic flow from different sources
- Pageviews on your blog or website
- Offer response rates
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- Clickthrough rates
- Opt-in and lead generation
You do not need to maintain every channel as part of your digital marketing process. Instead, feel free to stop using channels that don’t seem to click for your company. You may rework the channels you currently use or explore more possibilities to continue building your online business.
Consider placing your content on display networks
Display networks represent an emerging option for digital marketing strategists. Google’s Display Network, for example, allows you to place ads on many different websites, including YouTube, Google Finance, and Blogger.
You may place video, image, or text ads onto the display networks, allowing your ads to reach new people who may be interested in your products or services. While Google maintains one of the largest display networks, you have other digital marketing options as well, including:
- Apple Advertising
- Airpush
- Epom
- Leadbolt
Reviewing the sites reached by each display network can help you decide which one (or ones) to use in your digital marketing process. Note that it takes more than simply placing your ads on a display network to see an impact on your conversion rate.
You need to optimize your ads before placing them on a display network for best results in digital marketing. Ensure that you include all pertinent information in your ads, craft it to reflect your brand values, and have a call to action to direct customers towards your website.
Take steps to optimize for mobile devices
Digital marketing works best when your clients feel comfortable navigating your pages. More and more people do their web browsing from phones and other mobile devices. Therefore, optimizing all your content for individuals using various devices is essential.
Optimizing your site for mobile users often involves:
- Focusing on page speed
- Designing your site for smaller screens
- Making it easy to navigate from a mobile device
Keep all these factors in mind when you handle digital marketing for your company. For example, ensuring everyone feels comfortable viewing your page can increase your conversion rates, leading to more sales for your products or services.
You can speak with the professionals if you have questions about optimizing your site for mobile users. Our team focuses on reactive pages that adjust to fit the needs of all visitors. We design adaptive websites that shift based on the browser or device used to access them.
Reach out to us for help with digital marketing
Want to learn more about digital marketing? You can reach out to our team at Connective Web Design to get professional assistance with all your needs.
Contact us through our online contact form.
