Unleashing Your Digital Potential: 5 Key Tips for a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy

Be honest, how many hours per day do you spend on digital screens (be it on your phone, laptop, tablet, or any other)? (I can quite confidently say that I’m probably not the only one who averages over 6 hours per day).

In today’s highly interconnected world, it is no longer a bonus but a necessity for firms to have an online/ digital presence to survive. With 6.92 billion smartphone users worldwide as of 2023 (86.29% of the world population), people globally are, now more than ever, not just tech-savvy but tech addicted.

To reach such large audiences, which traditional marketing efforts could not, it’s crucial that firms create effective digital marketing strategies. Before we dive deeper, let’s start with formal definitions.

• Digital Marketing (a.k.a. Online Marketing): All marketing efforts that occur on the internet. Here, firms leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and websites to connect with current and prospective customers.
• Digital Marketing Strategy: A plan for establishing an internet presence through online channels such as organic search, social media, paid ads, and other web-based mediums such as your website.

Some Channels of Digital Marketing (Source: Milia Marketing)

The Tips…

To unleash your digital potential, here are 5 key tips for a strong digital marketing strategy:

1. Identify & Understand Business Objectives
   Before all else, firms need to clearly understand what they hope to achieve through their digital marketing efforts. Looking to increase sales? Build brand awareness? Increase customer loyalty? Whatever it is, it’s an important starting point as it will inform the rest of their strategy. While in an ideal world, firms would have unlimited funds and resources to execute many digital marketing strategies to fix all their problems, in reality, they don’t and hence can’t do so. With finite resources, it is hence crucial to make a conscious effort to regularly keep the strategy aligned with the goals, creating more meaningful work that will positively impact growth.
2. Know the Target Audience
   With the power to unveil more than just the targets’ demographics (e.g., psychographics, behaviors, geographics, etc.), digital marketing offers firms the opportunity to execute campaigns with very precise targeting. Customers are not everywhere all at once. They have preferences on which social platforms they use, types of brands they’ll be loyal to, and times of the day they’re online, for example. As such, investing in digital marketing tools, that provide reports on consumer behavior, and creating personas, that clearly outline what an ideal customer looks like (an example shown below), would be useful in guiding a firm’s digital marketing strategy.
3. Incorporate Both Paid & Organic Digital Channels
   According to Sprout Social, a top-tier digital marketing strategy relies on a healthy mix of paid, owned, and earned media to sustain long-term results. This is because paid and organic channels complement one another, allowing for the possibility of one driving better results for the other and vice versa. Let’s take social media and search engine marketing, for example. As a firm, you see that your social media engagements have slowed. A well-thought-out paid search campaign incentivizing customer engagement can rejuvenate your Instagram tags and pick performance back up. Alternatively, you see that your SEO performance is quite low. A well-targeted paid social campaign may convince consumers to directly visit your website and spend a long time searching through multiple pages while there. This helps signal to Google that your domain has high authority and value as there is an indicator of engaging content and clear website navigation, overall allowing for an improved SEO.
4. Focus on Consistent, High-Quality Content
   Content is the core of digital marketing. Without it, firms have nothing to share on any of the aforementioned channels. In fact, according to HubSpot, content creation has become a top priority for 80% of marketers. High-quality content is beneficial as it may allow for higher visibility on SEO, stronger consumer trust and brand reputation, better traction on social media, more leads, improved conversions, and so on. Consistently producing relevant, timely, easy-to-read, compelling, and meaningful content that aligns with a firm’s brand personality is hence essential for success in this digital age.
5. Listen, Measure, Adjust
   To gauge progress, firms should one, listen to what the public is saying about their brand (e.g., through social listening) and two, measure the results of their digital marketing efforts using specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) key performance indicators (KPIs). Ideally, to avoid being overwhelmed by an excessive amount of data, it’s best to keep track of just two to four KPIs per objective. Overall, if the public’s reaction to current efforts is negative or nonexistent, or if KPI results are disappointing, firms shouldn’t be afraid to adjust tactics. For example, let’s say your firm is running a paid social campaign to promote its new product but notices low click-through and conversion rates and negative consumer comments about product usability. In this case, your firm could respond by creating more video content that clearly showcases how the product works.

Example of a Customer Persona for Tip 2 (Source: Clever Tap)

The Conclusion…

While we may not know what the future of digital looks like, as long as firms follow by these tips, they should be well on their way to unleashing their full digital potential.

Do you have any additional tips to add? Please feel free to comment below!