Use Of Digital Marketing Is Required
You’ll have to wear multiple hats as the founder of a startup. Project manager, bookkeeper, paralegal,and, perhaps most challenging of all, digital marketer are some of the positions you’ll play. Because there is such a vast array of digital marketing tools at your disposal, becoming a great digital marketer necessitates some strategic and technical abilities that may be unfamiliar to you. Choosing and integrating the correct set of digital marketing tools, from search engine optimization (SEO) management to ad builders to analytics packages, will be one of your first challenges.
Establishing and growing a well-executed digital presence cannot be stressed because the quality of your digital marketing will assist define the perception and ultimate success of your firm. Take a look at the following statistics to see how far your online presence can reach:
- According to Verisign, there were 369 million domain name registrations as of August 2020 across all top-level domains (.com, net,.org,.co, and so on), up 14 million (4.3 percent) from August 2019.
- According to Hubspot, there were 2.6 billion monthly active Facebook users in January 2020, and about two-thirds of U.S. people claim to be Facebook users.
- Instagram is expected to reach 121 million monthly active users in the United States in 2023, up from 107.2 million in 2019.
The problem is evident in an always-connected society with a large array of digital properties. How will your startup be able to cut through the clutter that currently exists on the internet? Furthermore, how can your company get clients when there are so many competing businesses online seeking for attention? Proper planning and perfect execution are the simple but difficult-to-achieve answer to digital marketing for entrepreneurs.
This article will take you through some of the most crucial phases in developing and implementing a successful digital marketing strategy for your firm. While the approaches described here are founded on years of research and practical experience, it’s crucial to keep in mind that this isn’t a complete guide to all of your digital marketing strategies. Each of the ideas presented here should be thoroughly studied, validated, and planned out. Dominate Digitally’s Digital Marketing Course in Ahmedabad includes deeper dives into these and other digital marketing Course.
Quick note: When discussing a concept that encompasses both websites and mobile applications, we’ll refer to it as a “digital property” rather than a “website.”
Overview Of The Marketing Funne
Let’s take a look at a basic marketing notion before we get started. Many individuals have heard the term “funnel” used in the context of business. A marketing funnel depicts how clients interact with your brand throughout their entire contact with you. A customer’s life cycle often begins with the discovery of a business, followed by the use of that business, and finally (ideally) the development of a repeat customer and brand advocate. The most successful marketing strategies are tailored to a certain stage of the marketing funnel. Make sure to focus on the precise section of the marketing funnel you’re planning campaigns for as your organisation and digital marketing evolve.
How To Go About Digital Marketing For Your Business
“When opportunity collides with forethought, good fortune emerges.”
– Thomas Edison is a famous inventor.
Your early marketing efforts as a startup will be concentrated in the top and middle sections of the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Begin your digital marketing strategy by determining which funnel part you want to target. While each digital marketing strategy should be carefully considered and planned, it is permissible, and even recommended, to use multiple tactics at the same time. In a moment, we’ll take a closer look at strategy planning and implementation.
We may think of your digital marketing programme as a structure at this point in our journey. What you build may appear to be beautiful, but if it isn’t constructed on a firm foundation, you may be squandering time and money on a structure that will eventually fail you. The three steps below provide a high-level overview of how to build a solid and effective digital marketing programme for your firm. We’ll start with the foundation, then go on to the framing, and finally to the wiring, walls, and decor.
1. The Base: Create Your Personality
Marketing is defined as “the activity, collection of institutions, and procedures for generating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large,” according to the Marketing Association. The methods by which we achieve this lofty goal put our skills, talents, and inventiveness to the test as digital marketers. Too frequently, aspiring digital marketers design campaigns by looking at their sector (or the globe) through their own eyes rather than through the eyes of their customers. Empathy, or the ability to understand another person’s situation or feelings, is a vital and fundamental quality for all marketers.
Creating personas allows you to step outside of yourself and imagine yourself as a normal consumer with whom you can interact. Personas can be created in a variety of methods. Most personas are based on the demographics, activities, and attitudes of some of your most common consumers, and may contain a photograph to add to the realism of the subject. Free tools offers a free online template to help you create personas. Create a set of personas that represent the many aspects of your business when it comes to digital marketing.
EMPATHY MAPS
Creating empathy maps, which help you see how a consumer thinks and feels about the industry in which your company operates, is a particularly powerful technique for developing personas. Empathy maps are created using data gathered from both qualitative and quantitative research (such as surveys and interviews) (like web analytics or testing tools). UX Booth offers a great guide for creating empathy maps, which you can use to create your personas.
2. Create Marketing Strategies
Marketing strategies define how you intend to carry out your digital marketing. However, before you begin planning your marketing tactics, you must first have a clear vision of your business and marketing objectives, which are the measurable goals you have set for your company over a specified time period. Business objectives are the goals you have for your company, and they may encompass areas other than digital marketing. A few instances of measurable and time-based corporate objectives are listed below:
- In the third quarter, our business goal is to sell 20 new software licences.
- During the month of November, our business goal is to boost bespoke t-shirt sales by 10%.
- This year, our business goal is to obtain ten new clients.
Marketing objectives are goals that help to achieve the company’s aims. Your objectives are the road maps for your digital marketing, so be sure they are practical before you embark on this journey. The durations will be the same, but the metrics will be determined by the digital marketing activities you participate in. To support the above business objectives, here are some marketing objective examples:
- In the third quarter, our marketing goal is to attract 1000 visitors to our website.
- Our marketing goal is to get 2500 people to visit our bespoke t-shirt landing page.
- Our marketing goal is to double the number of visitors that fill out our contact form by the end of the year.
In order to determine what goals are attainable and practical, data is needed to define marketing objectives. We can use industry standards to establish our marketing objectives because most companies don’t yet have a statistically meaningful dataset of their own. We know that for every 100 visitors to our website, we may anticipate to sell two licences based on industry averages (more about conversion rates later). This means that in the third quarter, we’ll need at least 1000 visitors to our website to sell the 20 software licences we’ll require. Granted, this is a simplified example, but the idea is that you’ll need to apply investigative and math abilities to come up with marketing goals. Knowing your goals is essential for using the campaign-building tools in social media and Google Ads.
Remember that your business objectives inform your marketing objectives, and your marketing objectives inform your marketing strategies when putting objectives and strategies together.
Selecting Strategies To Apply
Prioritizing your efforts is critical when developing a digital marketing plan. You can use the 80/20 rule to define your marketing strategy, with conversion techniques accounting for 80% of your efforts and awareness and consideration initiatives accounting for 20%. Over time, the digital marketing analytics you collect will disclose the specific strategies that work best for your company.
Strategies For Awareness And Consideration
Awareness and consideration are two tactics for spreading the word about your company and, more especially, its value proposition. To build what are known as love brands, well-established organisations frequently employ awareness and consideration techniques.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO, also known as Organic Search) is the process of improving the ranking of web pages on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google considers over 200 factors when ranking pages, and its algorithms are constantly updated. Keeping up with these changes might be difficult, but the importance of a good Google ranking cannot be overstated. Prioritize optimising your SEO for branded searches (i.e., searches for your company’s name) before focusing on relevant keywords for your website. Tools like Google’s Search Console can assist you in ensuring that your digital sites adhere to SEO best practises.
While search engine optimization is undoubtedly a valid top-of-funnel strategy, organic search should be a routine and continuous activity for every firm. Your Google ranking not only boosts the visibility and reach of your brand, but it also builds trust and confidence in it. Five compelling reasons why SEO is so crucial are outlined by SEO:
- Websites that are user-friendly and result in pages that are faster and more responsive.
- More customers as a result of your improved visibility.
- Increased exposure leads to higher conversion rates.
- With better rankings, there is a greater awareness of the brand.
- Ability to get ahead of the competition by having a higher ranking.
Content Marketing
Content marketing entails the creation of social media and blog postings that assist you promote yourself as an industry authority or thought leader. Focusing content on specific issues and capitalising on niche keywords is one of the best methods for companies to break through the pack in their market. Writing for the web and generating social media postings integrate strategy and purpose in this way. Your postings should always include the keywords you’re after while maintaining the appropriate tone and language for your target audience. If you’re measuring your digital efforts using Google Analytics, make sure to include UTM codes in your social media posts so you can track the effectiveness of the traffic that arrives to your website. You can use a tool like Google Keyword Planner to help you figure out which keywords will work best for your posts.
Social Media Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a relatively new concept among digital marketing methods, and as a result, there are many differing viewpoints on how to approach it and how effective it is. Nearly 39% of firms boosted their influencer marketing expenses.
People who utilise false — or even paid for — followers to try to pass themselves off as influencers are one of the big hazards to watch out for. Startups must also be cautious about partnering with genuine influencers. Not every influencer is a good representative of every brand. Ascertain that having a single influencer promote your brand does not jeopardise your brand’s reputation. If you’re thinking about using influencer marketing, think about the type of influencer that would best fit your business and marketing budget, and then investigate the influencers in that area thoroughly.
The classification of social media influencers is not an exact science, and there is no regulation surrounding these criteria, however there is a generally accepted hierarchy of social media influencers as follows:
- Influencers of the highest calibre
While top-tier celebrity personalities with more than 50 million followers have the biggest reach and perhaps the most influence over customers, celebrity endorsements are also the most difficult and expensive for a business to get. Personality in the media has over millions of Instagram followers and earns an incredible $1.2 million each sponsored post, according to Business Insider. While $1.2 million is out of most startups’ budgets, huge established businesses value top-tier influencer endorsements, especially when a single post from someone may attract tens of millions of views.
- Mega-Affiliates
Most entrepreneurs aspire to be mega influencers with more than 5 million followers. Some youtube celebrities channel has over 12 million subscribers, and he frequently demos things like drones for brands with broad appeal. If your product or service has a high price point, you might want to hunt for a mega-influencer.
- Influencers at the macro level
While Macro Influencers (those with more than 50,000 followers) can still be costly, they can be strong prospective matches for influencers that match your brand’s identity or speciality.
- Micro-influencers are people who have a small amount of power
With the appropriate fit, local musicians, community activists, regional figures, and content providers can generate outstanding endorsements. Partnering with a celebrity who has over more than 10k followers and millions of likes on social media sites, could be extremely beneficial to your company.
- Loyalists
These are people who have progressed all the way through the marketing sales funnel and are now completely committed to your brand. When your firm has enough traction to consider bottom-of-the-funnel techniques, promoting advocacy campaigns with these individuals can be extremely beneficial.
Strategies For Conversion
Every digital property should have a conversion point (sales, downloads, contact us, etc. ), and conversion marketing strategies should be focused on getting users to that conversion point as quickly as feasible. A Facebook ad featuring a product, for example, should connect users to a product page where the item may be purchased directly. Similarly, a Google Search Ad for a service firm should take users to a website with details about the service as well as a contact page where they can sign up or request more information.
The number of conversions divided by the number of entries to your digital property is your conversion rate. So, if 1000 people visited your website and 100 of them made a purchase, your website’s conversion rate is 10%. Conversion rates vary greatly per site, so a 1% conversion rate may be fantastic for certain sites while 50% may be ideal for others.
SEM
While SEO is a method for getting free SERP placement, Search Engine Marketing (SEM, often known as Paid Search) is a strategy for getting paid SERP placement. SEM still uses strategies like keyword research, but your SERP ranking is also based on outbidding competitors for page real estate. Because SEM for popular and generic (“wide”) keywords might be costly, it’s critical to focus on the specialty keywords listed before to achieve the greatest results. Due to the fact that SEM is frequently a conversion technique, paid advertising should nearly always link viewers to a landing page where they may complete the conversion.
There are numerous bidding tactics for running SEM advertising, but the cost per click (CPC) method is the most frequent. You pay according to the current pricing for a keyword when someone clicks on your ad using the CPC approach. This rate varies during the day, so the number of times your ad is shown and the cost when someone clicks on it are both determined by the algorithms of a search engine. The ad budget you specify for the ad is subsequently deducted for each click.
Paid Advertising on Social Media
Paid ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and now even TikTok are similar to SEM. Ad placement on social media, like SEM, necessitates keyword research, ad design, and bidding. The ability to focus ads on a much more granular audience than SEM is one of the benefits of social media advertising. Social media advertising allow you to limit your target audience by demographics like marital status and ethnicity, as well as sociographics like gender identity, religion, and political affiliations, in addition to the places and keywords you can target with SEM. The huge volumes of data collected by social media sites are used to create these targeted audiences. People contribute data points to the campaigns we build when they connect with social media.
The most typical bid technique for social media is cost per click (CPC), similar to Google Ads; however, some firms prefer the cost per mille (CPM) method, in which you pay for the number of impressions (views) your ad receives. For brand recognition efforts, the CPM approach might be beneficial. When creating social media marketing campaigns, you can investigate the impact of various bidding tactics.
Retargeting and remarketing are two terms for the same thing.
Retargeting methods can be as simple as using social media ads, email marketing, or display ads. Retargeting is a marketing strategy that involves launching a campaign based on a user’s previous actions. You can, for example, create Facebook advertising for specific users based on what they did on your site. If a customer comes to your site and adds an item to their basket but does not complete the transaction, you can have a Facebook ad for that product run and/or send the visitor a personalised reminder email to come back and finish the transaction.
While the phrases “retargeting” and “remarketing” are commonly interchanged, the major difference is that retargeting is mostly concerned with delivering ads to potential customers based on cookies, whereas remarketing is primarily concerned with email.
3. Take Measurements And Optimize
There are various methods you may integrate into your digital assets to measure success, which is one of the most crucial components of digital marketing. While premium options such as Adobe Analytics, Chartbeat, and Decibel are excellent, Google Analytics is a free digital analytics solution and the most widely used analytics package on the planet. According to Nerdy Data, Google Analytics is used by 3.4 million people on the internet.
The ability to measure the efficiency of your marketing channels is one of the most crucial features of a digital analytics tool like Google Analytics. The numerous methods people arrive at your digital domain are referred to as marketing channels (SEO, SEM, social, etc). You can monitor social media channels to their conversion points, for example, using the UTM codes discussed previously, and see how different social media messages lead to different online actions. You may also use Google Analytics to track other crucial online behaviours for your properties, such as,
- How many times specific pages were accessed.
- What was the average amount of time spent on each page?
- How many times did visitors leave a page without engaging with the rest of the site?
Finishing Up
Proper planning and implementation of top and mid funnel marketing strategies are critical to your startup’s digital marketing success. Create empathy maps and personas to depict your target customers as the first step in your marketing strategy. Understand your business goals and use them to guide your marketing goals. Your marketing strategies should be guided by your marketing objectives.
Search engine optimization, content marketing, influencer marketing, and display advertising were among the top of funnel (awareness and consideration) marketing tactics we discussed. Search engine marketing, social media advertising, and retargeting were among the mid-funnel (conversion) marketing methods we discussed.
Remember that accurate measuring is an essential component of any marketing campaign. Measurement tells you how well your present marketing initiatives are working and how to proceed with future marketing strategies.
Finally, companies require a method for selecting and integrating the digital marketing tools they will require. A marketing technology stack is created by combining all of your marketing products into one package (or martech stack).
