Digital marketing is the key to speeding up your business’ growth because it covers many different channels, including search engines, social media, email, and websites.
There are dozens of other factors that you need to optimize for a robust digital marketing strategy.
Learning new methods and implementing them is a great choice for a newly open startup. Although for big startups and brands a digital marketing company plays a vital role to lead the market and audience as per the service and products.
You’re probably unsure where or how to start optimizing your marketing channels for a better digital strategy.
If you are, then you’re in the right place. This article will cover the five most essential strategies that can get your business started with digital marketing.
Let’s dive right in.
There are certainly more aspects of digital marketing that you’ll have to learn along the way. These are the four most powerful strategies to build your first digital marketing campaign to get you started.
1. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website to put it higher in search results for relevant keywords and search queries.
SEO aims to get more traffic to your website, ideally from visitors who fit the ideal customer profile for your business.
If you’re a gardener, you may build your website and optimize it to rank for keywords such as “gardening service” or “how to trim hedges.”
Those two keywords have different intentions.
- If someone is looking up “gardening service,” they might be looking for professional help with their garden – these types of queries are called transactional keywords.
- When someone looks up “how to trim hedges,” they might be looking for information or tips to do it themselves – these types of queries are called informational keywords.
There are fine details to SEO that you can only learn from experience. You can create the most impressive and comprehensive content on your website, but you won’t get any result from it when you don’t fit Google’s criteria for a high-quality website.
But if your site meets all the ‘good website’ criteria, your pages can appear as the top results for relevant queries like this:
You should get yourself started with SEO by reading up on Brian Dean’s 200 Google ranking factors.
Once you’ve read up and understood a little bit more about SEO, you can start using additional WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO or dedicated tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to help your site rank higher in search engines.
2. Leverage Social Media Videos for Marketing
Social media is a no-brainer place for building a digital marketing campaign. There are three reasons that make social media a great place to get started with digital marketing:
- Your target audience is already using at least one social media platform.
- There is built-in analytics with each platform.
- Most social media support native targeted advertising.
Whether you want to promote your business organically or through paid ads, social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even TikTok have everything you need.
There are also several formats that you can use on those social media platforms – but explainer video provide the best results for digital marketing.
While videos generally perform better, each social media platform has a unique user profile and content preference.
Instagram, for example, prefers vertical videos since their app aims to provide seamless and immersive content consumption on mobile devices.
YouTube, on the other hand, aims to reach both desktop and mobile users alike. You can tailor your videos to match your target audience.
If your business is still fresh and does not have many followers on social media, you can kickstart your progress by using influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is essentially collaborating with other accounts with a significant number of followers to promote your business.
3. Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is a form of paid advertising that utilizes an auction and per-click pricing system. With PPC, you’ll have to bid to display your ads on specific keywords cleverly.
Once you’ve placed your bid, your ads will start appearing in every search query that includes your target keyword. However, you won’t have to pay anything unless someone clicks on your ads.
In other words, you don’t pay for ad space, just the results.
PPC is an excellent budget investment that can provide a high return on investment if you know what keywords to bid.
PPC is one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing. Check out the best PPC guide for beginners, it’s an excellent solution for businesses just getting started with digital marketing or looking for a quick sales boost.
Generally, you’ll want to bid for transactional keywords with a higher chance to drive more sales. But that’s not the only element of PPC you should focus on.
When visitors click your ads, you pay for the click, but that doesn’t guarantee visitors’ purchase from your website.
This is where you’ll have to build an optimized landing page with a solid call-to-action to ensure everyone who ends up there will always make a purchase.
PPC is one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing. It’s an excellent solution for businesses just getting started with digital marketing or looking for a quick sales boost.
4. Develop a Content Marketing Funnel
Content development can help your business reach, engage, and connect with its target audience through videos, blog posts, infographics, and other forms of digital content.
Unlike conventional marketing strategies, content marketing relies on offering valuable information or assets for your audience.
There is nothing transactional about content marketing – everything revolves around information and value for the audience.
Despite its non-transactional aspect, content marketing generates 54% more leads than the traditional form of marketing. But with that said, it requires a long-term and ongoing effort before you can see significant results.
How much time did you spend watching YouTube videos in the past 24 hours?
Your answer is likely to be more than an hour.
Today’s digital space revolves around content consumption – which is among the reasons content marketing is hyper-efficient.
In fact, more than 60% of internet users prefer companies that offer valuable content to those who are just straight-up selling products.
The majority of content marketers have heard this demand, and that’s why 90% of content marketers prioritize giving information over pitching sales.
5. Hop on the Viral Trends Bandwagon
If you build a digital presence for a newly launched business, there’s no better way to generate a buzz than going viral on the internet.
While the word ‘viral’ itself is often thrown around as a buzzword for getting millions of views, it doesn’t always mean the same when it comes to marketing.
Getting viral content for a business means nothing if it doesn’t reach and engage the right audience. That’s why you should pick the right trend to jump into before you start promoting your products in a TikTok dance challenge.
There is no formula for a viral marketing campaign – sometimes, you just have to try one unorthodox idea after another. A great example of a successful viral marketing campaign was Blendtec’s infamous “Will it blend?” video series.
It hits all the right spots for a great marketing campaign:
- Showcases the quality of their products
- Generates a ton of brand awareness
- Increase their revenue (monetized YouTube videos)
- Engages people who are looking to buy high-quality blenders
Dollar Shave Club’s nonchalant promotional video is another excellent example of a viral marketing campaign.
They did not put their product the focus. Instead, Dollar Shave Club presents its concept in an engaging, funny, and humane way that makes viewers more eager to share the video with their friends.
6. Collaborate with Influencers in the Industry
Influencer marketing is a trend that catches up rapidly with the ‘old’ digital marketing strategies. The fast-growing network of influential creators on the internet makes influencer marketing a potent strategy for companies looking to broaden their audience reach.
A survey by Milkwhale found that 94% of top-tier marketers believe in influencer marketing as an effective strategy to grow their business.
While partnerships with A-list celebrities are still viable for fortune-500 companies, small businesses don’t have the luxury of having a massive marketing budget for simple product placement.
That’s where influencer marketing comes in. Influencer marketing has several advantages for startups and growing companies:
- It is less expensive than ad spots and celebrity endorsements.
- It has the word-of-mouth aspect to build a brand’s authority.
- It Is authentic – if your product is good, you will get organic engagements.
- It doesn’t require a complex CRM or ROI tracking system to execute.
While mainstream influencers have mind-boggling rate cards for brand collaborations, you can engage micro-influencers with a more segmented audience to get a better ROI.
For example, you have a startup that sells software that can help with task management, increasing productivity.
Instead of working with mainstream influencers with a diverse audience profile, you can work with productivity video creators to reach more engaged viewers who might be interested in your product.
Collaborating with influencers who have the same audience profile will benefit you in several ways:
- Your product reaches its intended users.
- It offers an incentive to the influencer as content material.
- You get a more reasonable ROI compared to endorsing mainstream influencers.
Today’s creator market also makes it easy to find micro-influencers who produce content in a specific niche – it’s almost guaranteed that regardless of your niche, there will be relevant micro-influencers that you can collaborate with.
Ready to Start Your Digital Marketing Campaign?
Now that you’ve learned the powerful strategies to build a solid digital marketing campaign, it’s time to put your knowledge into action.
But one of the most challenging aspects of creating a solid digital marketing strategy is consistently producing engaging content.
It can take days to film a single video, write an in-depth blog post, or create a truly engaging post for your social media accounts.
Author Bio
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).
Twitter: @breadnbeyond
Email: andre@breadnbeyond.com
LinkedIn: Andre Oentoro
PRmention is a digital PR agency for startups & SaaS businesses. Occasionally, we accept high quality contributed content and we’d love to hear any ideas you may have. Feel free to email us on guestcolumn@prmention.com if you are interested in contributing.