SEO. Paid ads. Email marketing. When you build your brand’s digital marketing strategy, it can be difficult to know where to start. No matter your brand or industry, there are a few basic principles to keep in mind when building your marketing strategy. Here are some steps to consider:
1. Don’t Skip Out On The Technical
Not taking the time to work out the technical aspects of your website can leave you unprepared for the increased traffic that comes through their marketing efforts. To start, think through your CMS (Content Management System). This is the system that will host your website and will help you create and manage the content on your site. Choosing the right CMS is crucial to having a stable system that can easily scale with you as you grow. The wrong CMS can easily cripple your website in the long term. Additionally, many CMS hosts have huge technical barriers that can cause critical errors that will impact your visibility in Google search.
Next, consider the structure of your site’s content. Do extensive research on what Google prefers to see as it relates to your product offering. Often Google’s algorithm gives preference to category pages on a website, and many businesses haven’t thought this through. Think about which categories your website should have and how each of your products relate to those. See what types of pages Google is serving up for your product to help determine what types of categories you should have.
2. Know Your Audience
Another problem comes when businesses have great products, but no direction on how they’re going to reach potential customers. Growing a business takes more than just standout products, it takes strategy. To reach your customers you need to know who they are, what their needs are, and what platforms will help you connect with them. Understanding this information is the start to creating a buyer persona. With a clear buyer persona in mind, your marketing strategy will have direction and have the greatest potential to create a great impact.
3. Know How to Speak to Your Audience
Now that you’ve established who your audience is, what their needs are and where to find them, you need to know what to say to connect with them. How you deliver your message is just as important as what that message is, which is why keyword research is fundamental to the start of any marketing campaign. It shows you what your audience is searching for, what thought leadership opportunities there are in your industry, and what content will fit the needs of your audience.
You can use all that research to help you decide which pages you need to have on your site, and you can pair keywords with product pages. It’s a common mistake to try to have one URL rank #1 for fundamentally different keywords. Ultimately, this splits your strategy and results in stagnation rather than growth. Having a clear and focused strategy for the keywords on your product pages will help users have a better experience with your brand as well. You can learn more about SEO (search engine optimization) here: https://www.97thfloor.com/blog/what-is-seo-marketing.
4. Increase Visibility
With product pages optimized for keywords, you will then be prepared to create content utilizing your keyword research. Since the keyword research exposed the questions your audience is asking, you can use that understanding to create blog posts, graphics, videos, etc. to answer those questions. Great content will establish your site as topically relevant within your niche, paving the way for you to achieve higher rankings for more keywords within your industry and increasing your visibility. From here you can use paid ads, email marketing, and link building campaigns to help get more eyes on your content.
5. Test the Conversion Path
Now that you have your digital marketing strategy established, know that the best strategies are ones that are ever-evolving. Test out the path to conversion and see if there are changes you can make that will create a better experience for your audience. We were able to help one of our clients achieve a 29% increase in their revenue in less than a month by testing various optimizations to that page. You can read more about that process here: https://www.97thfloor.com/blog/cro-results-in-18-days.
At the end of the day, your number one concern should be staying informed about who your audience is and how you can best help them. Make sure their experience with you is a positive one from start to finish– the technical aspects all the way to the content you share with them. This will lead to a digital marketing strategy that is sure to make you stand out from the competition.