The greatest minds of mankind are sure: we are living in the age of digitalization, when things are shifted to the internet realm. And marketing too!
No wonder, for as of April 2023 the number of internet users reached 5.18 billion, reports Statista. And a decent share of these people can be easily reached and turned into your first-time visitors, then customers, then repeated buyers, and even your brand ambassadors. In this article, we'll explain how to get started correctly with digital marketing.
Table of Contents
Strategy
First of all, you need a strategy, i.e. a long-term plan that leads to the achievement of your goal. Lack of strategy leads to chaotic and unsystematic spending, so don't neglect it, don't be lazy. Here are three steps to develop a marketing strategy:
1. Study Your Customers and Understand What They Want
You need to know what issues your customers want to solve. This knowledge will allow you to come up with a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) — an offer that the customer cannot refuse because it can solve their trouble.
Conduct market research, surveys, and interviews to identify pain points and challenges your target audience experiences. Engage in social listening by monitoring online conversations, reviews, and feedback on social media platforms, forums, and review websites.
Together with that, analyze your customers' demographics, income levels, and spending habits. In the end, your study should get you a detailed portrait of the customer.
2. Study Your Competitors
To stand out of a crowd, or to set your brand apart, you need to know your competitors. By analyzing their marketing efforts you can learn from their successes and mistakes and get valuable insights into the target audience. Yes, probably your competitors know the audience better than you. Take note of these things:
- Target audience. Observe how they communicate with their customers, and use this information to refine your own messaging.
- Content strategy. Evaluate the quality, frequency, and variety of content your competitors produce. Identify any content gaps or opportunities that you can capitalize on to set your brand apart.
- Social Media Presence. Assess your competitors' engagement on various social media platforms. Analyze their posting frequency, types of content shared, and the level of interaction they receive from their followers.
- SEO. Research the keywords your competitors are targeting and their search engine rankings.
- Email Marketing. Subscribe to your competitors' email newsletters to gain insights into their email marketing strategies. Notice how frequently they send emails, the type of content shared, and the overall design and tone of their email campaigns.
As a result, you will receive a lot of data that will help you develop your own unique marketing strategy.
3. Define Your Goals
Last, but not least. It would be nice to know what you're up to. For example, you may want to boost primary and secondary sales, launch a new product on the market, increase brand awareness, and so on.
Now that you know what a marketing strategy is and how to develop one, let's take a look at the toolset.
Social Media
It is best to start with the simplest tools that will teach you how to interact with the audience and create interesting, valuable, and shareable content. We mean social networks. They will help you to be closer to the target audience, communicate with it directly and get loyal customers.
Moreover, social networks allow you to collaborate with influencers in your industry to reach a broader audience and gain credibility.
Website
When the presence in social networks is not enough, you should deploy your own website or landing page. It is where you will route your prospects and customers from social media.
A landing page is a small one-page website with a presentation of a product or service. It always contains a call to action: buy, register, subscribe to the newsletter, and so on.
However, if your company provides a wide range of products, a landing page may not be enough, since your customers will want more information to make a decision. In such a case, a full-fledged multi page website is more suitable.
Both the landing page and the website should be simple and with clear navigation. Do not overload them with different fonts and a lot of media content. And make sure they are mobile-friendly.
To make your website more effective, deploy a chatbot for lead generation, 24/7 customer support, and data collection.
Also: Chatbots Are Now Easy To Build
Blog
Every self-respecting business has a blog. Well, almost. Because blogging allows you to build an expert reputation which over time can lead to increased trust and credibility among your audience, making them more likely to choose your products or services.
Also, a blog can drive organic traffic from search engines. By optimizing your blog posts for SEO with relevant keywords and meta tags, you can improve your search engine rankings and increase your website's visibility.
Finally, a blog allows you to connect with your audience on a deeper level by sharing stories, insights, and behind-the-scenes glimpses into your business. By fostering a sense of community and encouraging conversation in the comments section, you can strengthen relationships with your customers and increase their loyalty.
Also: Are You Planning On Your Blog To Help Create Sales?
Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way to share your new blog posts. But this is not the only benefit. When done right, email marketing allows you to communicate directly with your customers, providing personalized content and offers that are tailored to their interests and needs. Promote special offers, discounts, or new product launches through email campaigns.
Also: How Can We Do Email Marketing: 13 Tips To Make It Perfect
Paid Advertising
Have some money? Spend it on ads! It is best to start promotion with contextual advertising from Google Ads which implies showing an ad depending on the context of the page or query that the user entered into the search engine. It is a great tool to attract the attention of the target audience, increase sales, promote goods and services, and increase awareness.
You can launch contextual advertising with a minimum budget — and increase it only if the campaign yields results.
Online Marketing Best Practices
Don't sell, help buy. The key to successful marketing is shifting your perspective from solely selling your product or service to genuinely helping your customers make informed purchasing decisions. Come up with a USP, and describe the benefits your customers can expect from using your product or service.
Get buyers close to you. Be honest, demonstrate knowledge about the product, and speak the same language to customers. Thus you can create meaningful connections with your audience and ultimately drive more sales and long-term customer loyalty.
Test, track progress, and make timely changes. Do A/B testing, keep an eye on metrics and be ready to change things when you don't like the results.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is a powerful thing that allows you to reach a much larger audience than traditional offline marketing. This audience can be segmented for targeting which makes your marketing efforts more effective. However, to establish a successful online business, you need to have proper software.
Our TruVISIBILITY Suite is an all-in-one platform that combines several great tools for digital marketing.
TruVISIBILITY Suite is:
Chat — for building chatbots of any complexity. You can build simple rule-based chatbots, hybrid AI-powered chatbots, and set up a live chat.
Messaging — for automating welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, newsletters, promotional emails, and first emails in response to a customer’s question or complaint.
Sites — for creating websites and landing pages. You can boost your website's functionality by adding a contact form, payment gateway, or even an SEO-friendly blog.
CRM — for tracking and optimizing every interaction and opportunity with every contact for pre- and post-sales activity.
Email — for securing private information sent through email. It supports compliance regulations in multiple industries and guidelines, such as HIPAA, CFPB, FINRA, and ESIGN.
All the TruVISIBILITY applications are part of one platform, and therefore they are easily integrated with each other literally in one click. You can also use them on their own with third-party applications. And all this without a line of code!
Register a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and get unlimited access to fully functional marketing software free of cost!
As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract. A freemium TruVISIBILITY account allows you to:
- Create a chatbot that can conduct up to 100 conversations per month
- Launch email blasts, start drip campaign, etc with 1000 free emails sent monthly
- Send 1000 SMS texts per month
- Build 1 website including a blog
- 1 GB of storage usage
- 1 SSL certificate
- Unlimited API usage
The pricing is based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for small to medium businesses. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!
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