3 Must-Have Elements of a Digital Marketing Strategy

If it’s well-crafted, a good digital marketing strategy can become your business’ playbook to finding success online. However, for many business owners, it’s often quite a challenge to decide exactly where to focus one’s effort, i.e. which specific activities are likely to yield the biggest gains, where should we place our limited budget. If this is the position you find yourself in, it can be helpful to focus on the three core areas that your digital marketing strategy must address.

For the majority of businesses, digital marketing ultimately boils down to driving more traffic to their website and achieving more online sales. Even if this isn’t necessarily the case, for instance if you sell a service that requires people to contact you directly, most new clients will probably take a look at your website at some critical point in research phase of their buying cycle.

For this reason, it’s so important to get your website right. And it’s not just about design and development either. You have to be confident that your content is of the highest possible quality, that it is targeting the right audience in precisely the right manner, and that this content is laid out in a manner that allows both you and your customers to achieve your intended goals quickly and efficiently.

So, if you want to improve your website’s performance by boosting conversion rates, your digital marketing strategy should set out how you intend to achieve this, what kind of boost you are hoping for, and in what kind of timescale.

One method of boosting traffic to your site is by targeting those who type relevant phrases into search engines. If you do your homework properly and implement your targeting correctly, you’ll be attracting people at the precise moment that they’re looking for your exact product or service.

A good digital marketing strategy will combine on-page optimisation – such as optimising for keywords, making the site easily-navigable to crawlers and regularly adding new content – with off-page tactics like building good-quality links.

Increasingly however, a good marketing strategy will also include a paid search element. It might take some time to get a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign running well, but most businesses find that when they do it is well worth the expenditure. Research by Google into Adwords user accounts has revealed that, even if your site is the first organic result for a given search, PPC ads still deliver traffic you would not get if the ad were absent.

For quite some time now, social media marketing has been an integral part of a good digital marketing strategy. This is because some media content operates on two key levels.

Firstly, social media content plays a increasingly prominent role in search engine optimisation. The reason search engines like sites with lots of high authority incoming links is because it suggests that the content being linked to is useful and relevant. Well, believe it or not, search engines believe the same is true of content gets shared on social media. People engage with it, and share it because it is relevant and useful.

The other reason social media content is an important component of a digital marketing strategy is because of its ability to drive continual customer engagement. Engaging with customers on social media keeps them conscious of your brand, makes them feel cared for, and allows you (the brand) to actively and publicly share the benefits of your products and show the quality of your customer service. Social media marketing, when done well, is timely, accessible, direct and effective.

So, if you’ve been wondering where to start with your digital marketing activities, start by taking a critical look at your company website, your position on search engine vis a vis your product keywords, and your presence on all of your social  platforms. How effectively are your using these channels – and are they really working as hard as they should for you?

If you’d like to have professional help putting together a complete and effective digital marketing strategy why not get in touch with one of our expert team members at Digital gold HQ – your digital marketing partners.