5 Steps to a Cohesive Digital Marketing Strategy

No points for guessing that digital marketing is a necessity in today’s age. Every business has its share of customers, clients and competitors browsing around and buying online. So how does an organization create and boost its presence across the internet? The answer to this is digital marketing. No matter how big or small an organization; digital marketing is a must for survival and growth.

It may seem complex at first, but to make things easy for you, here is a list of steps that business owners should understand and follow as part of their digital marketing solutions.

1. Set a Goal – If you seek to expand your business and expect higher recognition, more customer sand wish to outdo competition, you need to set a goal in mind. Devising a strategy and moving forward without having a target will be futile. A lot of planning and precision goes into digital marketing so having a goal to achieve helps you focus your time and energies.

2. Create a Marketing Funnel –All successful businesses are driven by effective marketing funnels. It helps you map out your customer’s journey from being a stranger to becoming a lead, and implementing certain strategies to encourage them to move through the planned funnel. Elements like lead magnets, opt-ins, offers and calls to action are all effective parts of a funnel. A marketing funnel can be divided in four different parts

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

An effective marketing funnel not only brings in more leads, it also help you convert these leads to repeat buyers.

3. Drive Traffic – For you to draw people to through to your marketing funnel, you first need to have traffic on your app or website. There are various ways using which you can drive more traffic to your site.

• Quality Content –Content still remains king. You can post articles, blog posts and press releases on websites with high domain authority. Within the content, insert links to various pages on your website to drive traffic to your domain and build a brand name using exposure.

• Keyword Strategy - Inserting popular and contextual keywords into the content help your website rank higher in search engine results, leading to more web traffic.

• Website Optimization – Ensuring that your website has been optimized for the search engine and its traffic is essential. Your site’s landing pages, meta tags and descriptions must all be optimized on your website so it offers maximum functionality.

• Social Media –Make use of engaging and unique social media posts to draw more traffic to the website. You can use videos, pictures, news and other relevant media to prompt comments, likes, shares and follow.

4. Develop a call-to-action – The call to action or CTA is a button, text or image that prompts the site/app visitors to take an action, like subscribing to feeds, newsletters, requesting s quote, viewing a product demo, making calls etc. The main aim of CTAs is to re-direct people to the right landing pages, so you can gather visitors’ contact information against a valuable marketing offer.

Effective CTAs can result in higher lead generation and conversions for you and your website. A good CTA must grab attention and inspire the potential customer to voluntarily walk into your marketing funnel.

5. Create an Effective Lead Magnet –This can be used individually or can be accompanied by a CTA. Give your potential customers something relevant and contextual to your service or product. Offers are a good way to collect more information about potential buyer while simultaneously pulling them further into the funnel. This draws them closer to becoming quality leadsthat will spend their money on your offering. The prime idea behind keeping lead magnets is to exchange useful information. For instance, the visitoris allowed a free download, but to do so s/he must fill out a basic asking about contact details or sometimes even feedback.

Optimize this information to intelligently interact with them as they progress through the funnel.