Investing in digital marketing is indispensable when starting a business. As a newcomer in the market, you have to work with sound marketing strategies to adapt to the times, rise above competitors, and, more importantly, connect to customers.
Digital marketing is serious business with many moving parts contributing to the success of each strategy. Get to know four major marketing strategies plus examples of tools to achieve desired outcomes when starting a business.
4 Key Digital Marketing Strategies and Tools for Starting a Business
1. Social Media Marketing
Social media sites can be marketing tools. They already have built (growing as we speak) audiences that you can tap for your business.
Here are some of the world’s most popular social media platforms based on the number of monthly active users as of October 2021:
● Facebook: 2.89 billion users
● YouTube: 2.29 billion users
● Instagram: 1.39 billion users
● TikTok: 1 billion users
● Twitter: 463 million users
There’s the opportunity to be seen and found on these platforms through promotional and informative content.
But one of the biggest advantages of using social media for business is to engage potential and existing customers directly. You can gather many insights and sentiments from those interactions to improve your business. Anyone can tag, mention, and talk about your brand online—this can be enlightening and cause you to be more circumspect with what you post.
It’s also through social media that you cultivate good customer service. Being a private message away is incredibly convenient for those on their mobile devices most of the time.
Having said that, you need to maintain each social media account to keep it up to date and engaging.
Top Tool: A unified social media management platform simplifies, if not automates, the daily handling of accounts across numerous platforms. Such tasks include the following:
● Creating, publishing, and scheduling content
● Social listening
● Tracking engagement rates and trends
● Responding to comments and messages
Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Buffer are examples of social media management tools. In choosing the most suitable tool, look into the following:
● Social media platforms supported
● Pricing (e.g., will the free plan suffice or what’s included in the standard plan)
● Integration with other tools
Handling your socials is manageable during the early days of business, but as more people interact with your accounts and thus require timely responses, using technology is key.
2. Email Marketing
With email addresses being required for online courses, e-commerce sites, social media networks, and virtually everything, emails retain relevance in digital marketing.
According to this report, it is projected that more than 319 billion business and consumer emails will have been sent and received daily in 2021. The same report notes that email users worldwide are expected to reach 4.1 billion in 2021.
Like social media marketing, email marketing is affordable to start and maintain. It’s your objective to get the recipient to do something when they read the email (e.g., click the link).
You can email about releases, discounts, deals, sales, and events. You can also notify customers of new contact information, app/website upgrades, and updated privacy statements.
With email marketing, you can generate leads, build your audience, and maintain the connection with customers.
If there’s one rule in email marketing, it’s not to annoy customers or subscribers. Another is to determine the best day to send them a message.
Top Tool: An email marketing tool is about sending emails strategically and efficiently. Find one that can help you accomplish the following:
● Setting up email campaigns
● Creating landing pages
● Having custom autoresponders
● Monitoring KPIs vis-a-vis industry benchmarks
Examples of email marketing software are GetResponse, MailChimp, and SendinBlue. You can take advantage of a free trial to test a platform’s user-friendliness and preview its functions.
While manually sending emails may suffice at the early stages of your business, the many processes involved in email marketing require a more streamlined approach. At some point, you may have to organize contacts and leverage data, such as open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, and other metrics, to build successful campaigns.
3. Content Strategy
Content encompasses what you put out in your ads, social media posts, videos, emails, blog posts and website content, and many more.
Even when it’s not promotional, content is a powerful marketing tool because it helps build brand awareness, attract new customers, educate the public, and engage existing customers.
While producing high-quality content is the long-term goal, search engine optimization techniques help enhance its visibility and position on Google’s results.
Guided by customer insights and trends, you can develop and distribute content online. Examples are podcasts, press releases, infographics, Instagram reels, tweets, vlogs, and TikTok videos.
Top Tool: Think of an arsenal of tools for planning, writing, and managing content assets. Here are a few:
● Keyword or topic research: Google, Answer the Public
● Spell check and plagiarism checker: Grammarly
● Web analytics: Google Analytics, Crazy Egg
● Content management system: WordPress, Wix
4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Digital marketing is incomplete without PPC. This kind of online advertising primarily aims to drive traffic to your website. It is cost-effective because you only pay when someone clicks your ad leading to your site.
Pay-per-click advertising allows granularity to create accurate ads. For one, you can target the people in your audience with online ads that are made for them. You can also time, variate, test, and leverage what’s working based on data collected from the ads.
Google offers PPC focusing on advertisements appearing on the search engine’s results pages. Landing on the first page of Google’s SERPs can take time with organic content, but ads can expedite the process of getting exposure for your brand.
Using the right keywords is crucial in Google ads, but your keywords must be relevant to a user’s search query and your business as well. You can explore Google’s Keyword Planner to find the appropriate keywords and bid estimates.
Also, Facebook and Twitter have their PPC advertising models, which can be part of your social media marketing strategy. While a particular search triggers a Google ad, which makes it less intrusive, a social media ad can show up based on your activity (e.g., interests and information that may have fit the audience for the ad).
Top Tool: Start with the Google Ads platform. From targeting (or remarketing) to tracking their performance, these settings allow the creation of ads that can convert clicks to sales or leads.
It all boils down to making your money work for you. There may be gaps in your Google Ads strategy or opportunities for the ads to perform better. Find out how Grow My Ads can help you.
All Set to Start Your Business
You don’t have to be intimidated by digital marketing because scalable, adaptable, and affordable strategies, as shown above, exist. It’s essential to have a plan every time, but some trends require playing by ear and seeing how it goes.
Because the digital marketing world is ever-changing, stay tuned for updates and revisit your strategies accordingly.
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