A digital marketing strategy is part of your overall marketing plan. It focuses on all the components that help drive business growth in the form of leads and sales generated. This occurs mainly using online channels. While brand strategy aims at positioning your business, digital strategy determines the tools to get you there. Digital marketing has evolved from a simple advertising campaign to a much more interactive solution that helps you get more sales and brand awareness. It’s the most successful marketing strategy for small and growing businesses worldwide.
It can take 5 to 7 brand impressions before someone will remember your brand. What’s more, not all impressions are good ones. Having a solid brand building strategy is the key to being perceived the right way. New factors come in to that strategy every year. The main reason for these digital marketing strategies is to increase brand awareness and connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, we’re going to go through important digital marketing strategies to increase brand awareness in 2020. If you haven’t done these yet, get started on it as soon as possible if you own a business.
But first, the Keys to brand your Business
Every business needs to review their brand strategy, before attempting to create a digital marketing strategy. The sole purpose for this brand strategy is to learn what online channels are fundamental pieces to their business growth. These become your cornerstone qualities that guide your brand so that you can develop effective processes.
Ensure you have a good answer to the important questions aligned with each component of brand for business:
- Brand purpose
- Target audience
- Competitor analysis
- Brand voice
- Qualities and benefits
- Brand recognition
Brand Purpose
These is the part where I ask you a lot of questions of your business but really the most important question is “Why are you doing what you do?”. Because this answer will tell me how your brand should reflect to your audience and your goals. This helps me better design your website and the approach to your user persona along with their goals and how they match with your goals with them.
The exercise of determining your brand purpose can be an umbrella to also include:
- Mission
- Vision
- Values
- Tagline
Clearly define your goals
Your main goal is brand awareness, but how do you measure that? If your priority is building your company’s reputation, thought leadership tactics like PR should be given precedence. If increasing the volume of people learning about your brand is your main goal, then channels like PPC and SEO will help you reach bigger numbers.
Do audience research
Brand awareness campaigns aren’t one size fits all, because every brand has a distinct audience they need to reach. The channels you focus your time and money on should directly relate to how your audience spends their time online, and how they make their purchasing decisions. Use audience research to understand your customer’s online habits and the channels they use the most in learning about brands and deciding which ones to engage with.
Get an engaging website
Your website is an important tool for your digital marketing strategy. Your website should match with your branding strategy to get the most results and be successful online. Your website needs to be responsive to mobile devices and desktop otherwise google will penalize your website from ranking. A lot of people try to make a website that just looks good but is it actually useful? That’s an important key to your website longevity and online success. If your audience is on your website but they immediately leave because they don’t see anything that intrigues to the reason they visited your website and they’ll most likely to never come back. Your website needs to clearly communicate with your audience so you need to know your audience first and understand their goals to design a successful website.
SEO
SEO will help you get organic traffic to your website. Search Engine Optimazation (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to “rank” higher in the search engines, ultimately increasing the amount of traffic your website receives. What like to do is have your website go through a website audit to check how much traffic each keyword is getting and you position. You don’t want to challenge for a high traffic and high CPC keywords if you’re a small business because it’ll take investing months of time to see the real results you get from SEO. After we research which keywords we should focus on, we then optimize your content to appear better to the audience you’re looking for that’ll convert to a lead/sale.
Content Marketing
In addition, every piece of useful content that your audience will want to click on is something you can promote on social media and in your ads. If the only thing you have to promote on these channels is your products, then you’re hoping someone will convert the first time they hear about you. For B2B companies, that’s unrealistic. Buying cycles often take months or even years and involve multiple people. You should assume most people won’t be ready to buy the first time they learn about your brand.
You want your website to be engaging and interesting for your audience. Content marketing is a creative and very useful strategy for branding awareness, traffic growth, gaining leads and targeting customers. You can take photographs, text, graphics, and videos pre-made and scheduled for separate days of the week. What’s most important is consistency on your publishing. It helps keep the attention of your audience to come back learn more about you.
Content marketing gives you the chance to reach prospects with helpful content when they’re first asking questions that relate to your products. You can achieve that first point of brand awareness and use it to build trust, so you’re more likely to be top of mind later when they’re closer to making a purchasing decision.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a way of communicating with your audiences. You can use mailchimp to gain a list a categorize your contact list to promote new content, discounts and events, etc. this is very important for ecommerce because they gain the most out of it. Ecommerce websites you want to map out the emails throughout each process such as creating an account, submit forms, checkout process, receipts, and more. You can also try making a newsletter form that’ll help you gain for leads and have shareable content.
Social Media Marketing
A majority of people in the U.S. are on social media, and it’s the norm for social media users to visit a social media platform at least once a day. Social media has become a huge part of how people spend their time and where they get their information. Social media marketing is, therefore, another important digital marketing channel to include in any brand awareness strategy. Social media marketing is perfect if you want to advertise your brand and your content to increase branding awareness, drive traffic, and generating leads. For some social media is crucial to their business growth, regardless, it’s important for every business to be on social media networks where they’re looking to advertise on. Social media networks I would suggest is Facebook, twitter, instagram, linkedin, snapchat, and other social networks that are popular for your industry. If someone asks a comment, reply to them to have a more personal touch to your customer service. This may take a lot of time of your day so what we like to do is use publishing tools that help us manually or schedule post on all our social networks.
Pay-Per-Click (CPC)
Pay-per-click is a way to drive paid traffic to your website using Google Adwords and other publishing ad tools. You want to research what keywords you want to pay for, you don’t want something priced too high or volume too low. Google adwords wont show you all the reports for your selected keywords so you want to use a keyword analyzer like SEMrush. Your selected keywords should also match with your content marketing to get the best results. If you want to further analyze the results of your ads you should first make a landing page and create end goals. Google will read this and optimize your ad to cost less because it’s performing better because your landing page is dedicated to that specific audience so it’s more likely to convert to a conversion. PPC also provides some distinct benefits from SEO. Because you pay directly for those top spots, rather than having to work to earn them, PPC raises brand awareness much faster than SEO does.
Public Relations
Public relations is another powerful digital marketing channel and one that often gets less attention than the others on the list. A good PR strategy will earn you mentions in publications your audience is reading, which both increases brand awareness and can result in authoritative links that boost your SEO.
Modern PR also includes pitching guest posts and thought leadership articles on relevant websites around the web. By writing on topics your audience cares about in high-profile industry publications, you build trust in the voices that represent your brand, even if the content isn’t directly about your products.
Video
With more than 1.8 billion users, YouTube is one of the most popular websites on the internet, which goes to show just how much people like watching videos. Sure, some of that is cat videos, but consumers also partake in brand videos. Over one third of consumers said they prefer video to other types of brand content, and 53 percent have said they’re more likely to engage with a brand after viewing a video.
Video marketing overlaps with content marketing. It can be a useful form of content for providing helpful information and answers to common questions your customers have, and can be promoted on social media and in ads just like written content.
Track results and refine your strategy
The choices you make on Day 1 of your brand awareness strategy won’t be perfect because you’re working with limited information. Every day your brand awareness campaign runs, you’ll gain valuable data that tells you more about what works. Use that information to tweak your digital marketing mix as needed so you can improve the number of relevant people you reach over time.
This challenging but rewarding process will guarantee long-term gains for your business or personal brand. Having a digital marketing plan can help your business meet customers expectations online and maximize your marketing budget. If you want a unique digital marketing strategy that’ll drive visitors to your website and increase sales, contact us.