To grow, modernize, and make your local business more efficient, you need to be using several digital marketing channels. This is true whether you’re an auto dealer, jewelry store owner, healthcare provider, or retail shop owner, and if you have an online store or a brick-and-mortar storefront.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is the set of tactics and campaigns you’ll use to market your products and services to consumers on digital channels such as your website, social media, email, and paid ads. It includes every aspect of marketing that takes place online, from email marketing to digital ads to social media marketing. (This is what differentiates your digital strategy from your traditional marketing strategy which uses channels such as direct mail, in-person events, and billboards.
If you’re looking to get inspired by some effective marketing strategy examples, you’ve come to the right place. After reading this article, you’ll have a full understanding of what a marketing strategy is. You’ll also have proven digital marketing strategy examples to guide you as you build one unique to your business and combine it with your marketing plan.
Benefits and Importance of Digital Marketing Strategies
Digital marketing helps you reach new and existing target audience members by reaching them across the platforms and channels that they spend their time on. Here are some more benefits of digital marketing.
1. Increase web traffic.
A digital marketing strategy leverages your website including your product pages, blog, pricing page, FAQ and online community, and more—all of which helps you increase traffic.
2. Improve brand awareness and presence.
When you have more eyes on your website, you see increased brand awareness. Sometimes marketing is a numbers game. The more eyes on your brand, the more potential customers you have.
3. More conversions.
With more eyes on your brand and traffic on your website and content, you increase the chances of conversions—which, as a result, means more sales and revenue.
4. Greater sales.
With an effective digital marketing, you’re able to push people down the sales funnel. By keeping your audience engaged and delighted throughout the buyer’s journey, you’re able to drive sales.
Marketing Strategy vs. Marketing Plan
The terms “marketing strategy” and “marketing plan” are often used synonymously. These two terms are closely related, and both are must-haves for your business.
The term “marketing strategy” is frequently used to define two different things. Some marketers define strategy as an analysis of your goals, taking into account your target customers and your competitive advantage.
“Marketing strategy” can also describe the overarching method you’ll use to achieve your marketing goals in the long term. This marketing strategy is accomplished through many highly actionable, short-term tactics. This is the definition that we’ll be using for marketing strategy in this article.
Regardless of which definition for “marketing strategy” you choose, it’s an integral part of your marketing plan.
Your marketing plan, on the other hand, takes a look at your company’s marketing at an even broader scale. It’s the entire game plan that outlines:
- The message you want to send about your product or service.
- Your market research.
- Your value proposition.
- Your target audience and how they think.
- Your company’s voice.
- Your marketing budget.
- Your marketing strategy and the measurable tactics you’ll use to achieve them.
Your marketing strategy is integral to the success of your marketing plan. Setting aside some dedicated time to brainstorm strategies specifically, instead of flying through the marketing plan in one go, can help your business in the long run. This will help you to create a defined timeline as well as set goals effectively. Creating a digital marketing strategy that follows a solid timeline has a better chance at being successful.
6 Tips & Steps to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
With any marketing strategy, the first thing you need to know is who you are marketing to. Successful digital marketing strategies are built around quality buyer personas. Your first objective is to create these buyer personas so your marketing and sales teams can do their jobs more efficiently.
These templates can help make your marketing stronger by organizing your audience into segments and detailing each segment’s unique needs. Be sure to include as much information as necessary in your personas, such as demographics, pain points, challenges, and goals.
2. Set your goals.
Your marketing goals should be tied to the fundamental business goals you have. If your business goals are to increase your revenue by 20%, then you need to create 50% more leads to reach this goal. Whatever your digital marketing goal is, you should be able to strategize along the way when you use the right digital marketing tools. Having all your marketing data in one platform allows you to easily assess what is working and what isn’t, so you can easily adjust and make improvements along the way.
Your goals should be S.M.A.R.T. goals. This means they should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals. Creating S.M.A.R.T. goals is essential to being able to track their success.
3. Research your audience.
To get a better understanding of your potential client you need to do some research. Learn more about factors like where they live, what their income is, what their pain points are, and where they prefer to be reached. This will give you a better idea of how your product and services match their needs. It also gives you talking points.
You will have already done some of this when creating your buyer personas, but you may need to take a more in-depth look at your audience for effective marketing. You want to know as much about your audience as possible. You can use a combination of sources to do this. Consider sending surveys to your potential customers or current ones. Or take advantage of data available within your industry.
4. Evaluate your existing strategies.
You want to regularly review your existing digital channels to see if your strategies are working or if they need to be optimized further. Evaluate your strategies on a regular timeline and measure them against the goals you laid out. This will help you decide whether your digital marketing strategies are effective.
From there, consider focusing more effort on the strategies that are working well. For those that aren’t working, decide whether you want to change them or completely eliminate that strategy. You can even look at your successful strategies for ideas of how to adjust the unsuccessful ones.
5. Choose the strategies that fit your brand best.
Pick the best strategies and digital marketing channels for your business. Make sure to consider the best techniques that offer most value for your industry and business, as well as your buyer personas. For example, your persona research may show that your audience is always on the move and has very busy schedules—so, a text campaign may make perfect sense for your customers.
Your best bet is to be prepared to adapt and to learn about different types of digital marketing until you find the one that works best for your company.
6. Track your impact.
You won’t know how well you’re doing unless you track your results. Monitor your performance and measure how well you’re doing. Use digital marketing tools such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Search Console to keep a close watch on your ROI or return on investment and other key metrics such as conversion rate and website bounce rate.
This is also the time to go back to your S.M.A.R.T. goals and look at the “measurable” part of them. Pay close attention to the relevant metrics in your chosen analytic programs and go back to point four as frequently as necessary. Importantly, you need to be ready to adapt your digital marketing strategies if necessary.
9 Effective Digital Marketing Strategy Examples
There are many effective digital marketing channels and methods that you can use and experiment with—here are some examples to inspire your local business.
1. Social Media Marketing
By creating a social media marketing strategy on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube, you can connect with thousands of potential customers daily without having to use a lot of your budget.
Social media marketing can increase brand awareness and serve as an effective channel for interacting with your audience. Plus, if you do have the budget, you can promote your other marketing materials (e.g. e-books) by creating paid ads. Social media also gives you the chance to increase loyalty, as users can engage directly with you and get a human response.
While you may think of social media as a platform to reach buyers for consumer products, social media marketing can also be a great strategy for B2B brands, too. LinkedIn is one of the best online platforms for B2B marketers. In fact, LinkedIn InMail has a 300% higher response rate than email.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Example
- Business type: An eco-friendly makeup retailer that wants to cater to a young millennial and Gen Z audience
- Platform: Instagram
- Strategy: This company may build their Instagram presence focused on beauty, skincare, and sustainability. They may also partner with influencers who share similar values and target their loyal followers. Altogether, this strategy can help the brand grow a distinct audience backed by credible voices.
2. Content Marketing
If you want to focus on providing as much value to your potential customers as possible during the marketing process, content marketing—specifically, marketing with long-form articles and blogs—is a great strategy.
While blogging and writing articles may not immediately lead to sales, it’s a highly effective way to draw your target audience into your sales funnel. By providing the information they want as they search for solutions similar to yours, you optimize for search and can increase web traffic and brand awareness. Because of this, content marketing can actually generate three-times the leads per dollar spent than paid search marketing.
At the same time, content marketing is effective in turning new customers into loyal customers by developing trust in your expertise over time. By slowly inserting your brand into your content, you can display why your products or services are a necessity.
Content Marketing Strategy Example
- Business type: Local graphic design agency that wants to cater to retail brands
- Platform: Business website
- Strategy: The small graphic design agency can target their target customers by writing about what makes for excellent retail design. This shows readers how to make the most of their digital content and that they can trust and lean on the design agency for support.
3. Word of Mouth Marketing
Now that online reviews are the new word of mouth, this type of marketing strategy isn’t the same as it used to be. However, digital referrals still pack the same power as in-person referrals. People trust people—so much so that 68% of consumers will form an opinion after reading as little as one-to-six reviews.
A word-of-mouth marketing strategy can give your brand instant credibility as real people vouch for your brand after a real experience. Your current customer base is one of your most effective marketing tools, not to mention one that’s completely free. All you need to do is ask.
Your digital word-of-mouth marketing strategy can be taken to the next level through the use of Podium Reviews, a tool that automates your review invites, to multiply the amount of online referrals you get. Getting more reviews has a snowball effect. As your online reviews rack up on trusted review sites, like Facebook and Google, thousands of people can be influenced by each review, rather than just the few people your reviewer may refer to you in-person. As you start responding to reviews, you can prove your commitment to your customers even before your potential leads reach out.
Word of Mouth Marketing Strategy Example
- Business type: A doctor who wants to promote her practice to local customers
- Platform: Online review sites
- Strategy: This doctor can put her efforts into building her presence on industry-specific review sites, where leads with high potential are already looking, using Podium Reviews to accelerate the growth of her review count. For example, she may focus on increasing and improving her HealthGrades reviews, while also creating a business listing on other reviews sites, like Google and Facebook.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
One of the most effective digital marketing strategies available today is search engine optimization or SEO. This is the process of getting your content to rank highly for phrases and keywords related to your industry. The more keywords you rank for, the higher your placing will be in Google search results, putting you in front of more potential clients.
Over 25% of people click the first Google search result—meaning, your ranking matters. The goal of SEO is to funnel more traffic to your site and get you in front of more eyes. It uses terms that people are using to search for answers to their questions or problems.
SEO Marketing Strategy Example
- Business type: Pet groomer looking to increase business
- Platform: Business Website
- Strategy: The pet grooming business owner can put efforts into optimizing the content on their website around important key terms to get more traffic to their site.
5. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
This is another cost-effective and powerful marketing strategy many people use when advertising their business. It is a paid form of advertising that uses an auction-based system. With this form, you bid on keywords that you need your ad to appear for. Your ad will show to people who search the keyword. Your ad then comes above the organic listings. If a user clicks on the advertisement, you pay for the click. You don’t actually pay for the space of the ad but pay for the result.
One path of digital marketing includes text marketing. Text marketing allows your business to reach more customers quickly and efficiently (e.g., bulk messages allow you to target a list of customers all at once). Text marketing makes it easy to share marketing updates, review requests, appointments reminders, payment collection reminders, and more. Get started with 500 texting templates.
7. Email Marketing
One of the most cost-effective online marketing strategies you can use is email marketing. This type of marketing focuses on keeping your current customers, while getting new ones. It works well when building brand awareness, encouraging return visits and keeping your brand at the top of mind.
8. Video Marketing
This is a great digital marketing strategy for those businesses that are looking to get revenue to increase but have a limited budget to work with. You can expand operations, grow revenue, and increase your reach through video marketing. Using content and email marketing, you can create valuable information videos for your target clients. Some types of videos to consider are:
- Announcement
- Instructional
- Event
- Behind the scenes
9. Blogging
Creating excellent blogs that your followers can glean useful information from is an excellent digital marketing strategy. This is one that doesn’t cost you a ton of money but will take some time. You need to develop topics that your customers will find useful and provide relevant information for them. The added bonus here is that blogging can drastically improve your search engine ranking.
4 Inspiring and Real Digital Marketing Strategies
There are many methods of digital marketing strategies. What works for one business may not work as well for another company. For this reason, it’s a good idea to look at successful examples to gauge what you may want to try for your business.
This online tool for design is made to help you create logos, videos, social media posts, and everything in between. It uses a variety of digital marketing strategies for new customers, but SEO is one of its main channels. This is where they use content tailored around keywords to get on the top of search engine results.
Canva’s website is also a good example of an intuitive, engaging user interface. The website is easy to navigate and full of quality content developed around relevant keywords. Making your website a definitive stopping point to learn as much as possible about your industry is one way to help get it in front of a larger audience.
Apple uses social media to get its large audience involved with their events, such as product launches. You can use social media as a paid advertisement venue, or you can use it organically. When you pay for it, you use tools like Facebook Ads. Otherwise, you can use promotional tactics to get your content in front of audiences.
One way they did this was to use the #ShotoniPhone hashtag to get its customers involved with shooting pictures on their phones and sharing them on social media. The company also offered prizes and recognition, which made more people want to share their photos. This is one way you can use digital marketing for your business.
Airbnb used paid social media marketing advertising to generate more sales. They use pay-per-click advertising that targets potential new hosts and potential travelers. They also make use of retargeting, which means advertising to people that have already visited your site and left. If sales revenue is your goal, then paid social media advertising may be the ticket.
Affiliate marketing is one form of performance-based marketing that has worked well for Elementor. With this type of marketing, you partner with affiliate marketers and pay a commission on sales, and they help to generate leads for your business. It can be a very cost-effective way of getting your brand in front of more people. It is an excellent method for outsourcing your marketing to reach a larger client base.
Digital Marketing Solutions for Business Growth
Regardless of where you are at with your business, it can benefit from a digital marketing plan. Make sure you lay a foundation of learning about the different types of digital marketing available to your company and then plan on working with the type that suits you best. Evaluate your marketing plan regularly and measure it against your goals.
