Digital Marketing Strategy
Guidelines for a better performance
1. Social Media Marketing
Always monitor your pages and respond to user activity in both a positive and negative sense. High activity on your pages is a good thing and always try to maintain a consistent level of it.
Timing and schedule are important. Due to the continuity of social media, it's essential that you maintain a good posting schedule. Remember that different time zones exist and it's not the same in every country. Use analytic tools to determine when your peak posting times are and do not post too frequently within a small time frame. This can be considered as spam and can be irritating to users. Remember that moderation is always the key.
Use multiple social media platforms. Different people from different demographics are social media consumers. By restricting yourself to only one social media platform, you are only reaching a specific demographic of users. Using many different social media platforms increases your presence and increases the likelihood of your content going viral. A good example of this is the recent ice bucket challenge. This reached a phenomenal amount of users because it was spread across so many different platforms.
Having a strong social media presence goes hand in hand with creating great content. There is no use creating fantastic content if nobody is actually going to see it. Social media is the largest growing addiction on the internet to date, and there are currently endless opportunities to proliferate your content across a vast audience. This is why having a dynamic social media strategy is imperative.
With so many different social media platforms to choose from, it can be tempting to create a 'one size fits all' posture that is then distributed across a number of different platforms. This is not the way to go. Different people use different social media and their expectations for content vary. Twitter and Facebook are both very casual platforms, but users expect a higher frequency of posts on Twitter. LinkedIn is more business-oriented and Google+ is more SEO-oriented. Tailor your content to fit the specific nature of the social media platform that you are using. Always maintain a delicate balance between being professional and casual with your content.
Use different content formats. The majority of content that you put out there should be original and unique to your company. If it is not, you will blend in with hundreds of other companies. Video and image-oriented posts are the way of the future. Using infographics and other visual content will help users to understand and connect with your content more easily, and are also more likely to be shared.
Creative content is what makes you stand out from your competitors. It's about creating a message that is insightful and unique that your users can bond with. By doing this, you are giving your company a voice - something that users can identify with and something that sets you apart from the crowd.
1.1. Creating engaging content
Customized to reflect the community, the content is inspirational, aspirational, and lifestyle-oriented. It is important to take various cultural nuances into account when creating content for social media postings and developing marketing materials. A general trend is seen in the Middle East where content is often more celebratory compared to the West, and the audience would expect to see the personification of the celebrations in visual terms. This trend is more pronounced during festive periods when people from this region are in more of a holiday mood compared to the West. How and what messages are delivered creates a more personal engagement with the audience. To do this, judgments on educative elements are made to influence an audience in a particular way - to change stereotypes, to find a better way to do something, or to increase awareness of new trends and their impact. Digital media work is tailored to the needs of the target audience, taking into account the communication platform and the data on the product provided and prospects for the desired outcome.
1.2. Building a strong social media presence
The more consumers engage on social media, the easier it is to build a strong brand presence. Many successful brands are very good at creating engagement among their consumers on social media. One brand that is effective at engagement is Coca Cola. They use their timeline and cover to interact with consumers and are effective when they use visuals to tell stories that are related to Coca Cola. This, in turn, has increased their brand exposure and given them the edge on competitors. According to a study by The Social Habit, 53% of Americans who follow brands on social are more loyal to those brands. A brand can engage consumers through a variety of ways. This can depend on the resources available. One way is through great customer service. If a consumer has a positive interaction with a brand on social media, it can increase brand favorability. The brand can also get involved in current events and trends. People love to hear and talk about interesting things. The more a brand communicates, the easier it is for a brand to act as a personality. When a brand is personified, it is most likely that consumers can better relate and build an emotional connection with the brand. This can turn into increased brand loyalty from the consumer. A brand having social connectivity with the consumer can be successful in increasing awareness. When a consumer feels that they have a connection with a brand, they will want to stay updated with the latest news and events of the brand. This can turn the consumer into a brand advocate who will express their support to others, which in turn is free publicity and word of mouth marketing for the brand.
Building a strong social media presence can take a great deal of time and effort. One reason for a business to be on social media is to build on and increase brand awareness. One way in which a brand can increase awareness is by being consistent and frequent when posting. Research conducted has proved that the more a brand posts on social media, it is more likely that they will be remembered by the consumer. A consumer is most likely to purchase from the most familiar brands, hence high frequency and consistency of posts can increase brand recall which can build brand loyalty among consumers. One CFO came to the observation that "It's almost impossible to over-invest in social media because it's where the consumers are".
1.3. Leveraging influencers for brand promotion
During the Grammy's, Corden was signed specifically to present an award to Meghan Trainor, and the next segment ended with a Galaxy commercial featuring Corden using the Galaxy phone to call Meghan Trainor and leave a voicemail so that she would think he called the wrong number. This sort of segment can be a valuable tool if an influencer is involved in a similar situation.
A perfect example of this was seen back in 2016 at the Grammy Awards during the commercial break. Each commercial break was ended with an ad for the Samsung Galaxy phone, and the influencer of the product was host James Corden. Galaxy signed a deal with Corden for a 1-year contract where he would be seen using the product on his own show, and he would integrate the phone into his everyday life. With James Corden already being both a huge name and a likable figure in pop culture, he was seen as a wise investment to influence the general public to buy a Samsung Galaxy.
An influencer is someone who carries influence over others. Hence, a social media influencer is someone who wields that influence through social media. The form of an influencer can vary, and finding the right influencer to promote a brand is essential to leverage the strategy effectively. A brand is often best promoted when an influencer integrates the brand's product naturally into their own product, displaying a clear use of the product and the benefits of said product.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As an internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into website development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe website designs, menus, content management systems, URLs, and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the higher a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a website web presence.
2.1. Keyword research and optimization
Most of the time, numbers on search volumes of specific keywords will vary between different keyword tools. When estimating the potential traffic on a keyword, it is important to keep in mind the ratio of search volume to the amount of competitors on the same keyword. High search volume does not necessarily mean high traffic, as it could also mean that there are a lot of companies using the same keyword. Keyword competitive research is the next most important step. This will determine how many companies are optimizing for the same keyword and will provide a good indication of the amount of work needed to get to the first page SERP.
When developing the keyword, it is important to identify words that your potential customers are likely to use when searching for your products. For example, a computer retailer may want to be found for the keyword "cheap laptops". This is a good starting point, however, the scope of the number of companies providing the same or similar product may make this keyword too competitive. This is where long tail keyword phrases come into play. Long tail keyword phrases are 3-5 word phrases which are extremely specific to what you are selling. Using the same example, the company may want to look into optimizing for something like "student graphic design laptops in North Shore Auckland".
Keyword research is often the starting point for search engine optimization as it is the most important decision you will make. Dow Group will provide strategies to help promote improved keyword research and optimization as this is a continuous process which needs constant attention.
2.2. On-page SEO techniques
One of the main components of on-page SEO is to have powerful, informative, and/or useful content on your website that can be easily accessed by search engine crawlers. At first, a good website starts with having a good understanding of what keywords are important to the site. This includes identifying the keywords that are relevant and popular to your website, as well as identifying long-tail keywords that can further specify the site to a niche market. Once the keywords are identified, the pages of the site need to be written in a way that is relevant to the keywords. A good measure of relevance can be observed by looking at the search volume of the keywords and comparing it to the analytics of the site after the content has been indexed by search engines.
On-page SEO is one of our main focuses when implementing a digital marketing strategy for our clients at doweb. It is because we have direct control over all on-page elements, as well as the convenience of knowing that it will have a direct impact on the site's relevance to search engines if implemented in the proper way. While off-page search engine optimization can be extremely effective in increasing website traffic, the sincerity of our work will always make us advocates of on-page SEO strategies. In this best practice section, we cover the essential on-page SEO strategies that are pivotal to a successful digital marketing campaign.
On-page SEO encompasses all the adjustments you make to your website pages to facilitate an increase in the website positioning of your website. It entails methods of including certain elements in your website pages so that search engines can easily read and assess the relevance of your website to certain search terms.
2.3. Off-page SEO strategies
Social Media Search engines are starting to learn how to use social media to rank their search results. Therefore, it is very important to have a good presence on social media. There are a few methods to use social media in off-page optimization. You can also add social page sharing links to your web content. This is a good way to gain some links to your content. If the content is good, it can get a number of links in a very short time. Content voting and sharing it with friends is also a good way to get traffic. Always write quality content so that it has a chance of getting many votes. Using more and more social media can give you a chance to viral marketing of your content.
Link building is the most important and challenging SEO skill. Actually, it is the combination of all the SEO skills you have learned. There are a number of ways to get links. The easier ways include directory submission and article submission. You have to be very careful while using these methods, as the pitfall of these methods is that the links they generate are of pretty low quality and it is also a time-consuming process. These links also do not generate much traffic. If you have some budget for SEO, it is recommended that you give the work of link building to a quality site that generates good traffic. Remember to calculate your ROI. One-way linking is always better than reciprocal link building.
3. Paid Advertising
Facebook pay-per-click advertising has become a very popular method of online advertising. It is a very effective way to target potential customers who may not know about your product or service. Ads can be targeted in many ways, including by age, gender, geographical location, workplace, or whether the user is a member of a certain group. Ads appear on the side of users' home pages and also on 100 million active users' mobile devices. Pricing is flexible with the choice of CPC, CPM, or daily budget. Ads can also be stopped at any time and do not require a long-term commitment.
Google Ads is an essential channel for paid advertising. Your ads will appear in Google search results as well as other web pages' partners. This is a very effective way to target potential customers who are looking for a supplier but are not aware of your brand. Google partner websites vary from large portals such as MSN to niche specialist websites. You can also select the industry your customers are most likely to be found in. For example, if you are selling car parts, you may select auto-related websites. Ads are a highly effective way to generate traffic to your website.
3.1. Google Ads campaign management
A campaign is a set of ad groups (ads, keywords, and bids) that share a budget, location targeting, and other settings. This is where most users start and may potentially be the biggest area of AdWords that businesses fail with. AdWords is set with a default campaign setting in which ads will show on Google search and search partners' websites. In many cases, this is not what businesses want, as it has proven to be less effective than targeted text ads in the Display Network and often results in a lot of budget being wasted.
Google AdWords has proven to be a highly effective paid channel for many businesses and consistently provides a positive return on investment. But to benefit from its advantages, advertisers need to invest time in creating and managing their campaigns. This is something many businesses fail to do, but without the proper management, one can quickly eat a large chunk of your budget, often with little or no return. This makes it extremely important to manage campaigns correctly with the most professional methods available, which is where dowgroup comes in.
3.2. Facebook Ads targeting and optimization
A lookalike audience is another effective way to reach potential customers. Creating a lookalike audience will find Facebook users similar to those of an existing custom audience. This is an easy way to reach new prospects with an ad that is still effective because it's targeting a similar audience to an already established customer base. Product demand can still be created effectively with a lookalike audience by using sponsored posts, which will be covered later.
One effective way of doing this is to create a custom audience. Custom audiences are built from customer lists you already have in your database of phone numbers or emails. You can also create a custom audience based on website traffic using a data tracking pixel. This will match the visitors of your site to Facebook user data, showing them ads related to products they viewed on your site. The data layer targeting is the most powerful feature when using custom audiences to create demand with Facebook ads. An example of this would be a user visiting a specific product page and then later seeing an ad for that specific product on their Facebook news feed.
In order to understand Facebook ad targeting, we need to understand the Facebook user. A Facebook user is not searching for something specific like they are on Google. They are on Facebook to consume media, whether it's chatting with friends, looking at pictures, or reading content in their news feed. Because users are not proactively seeking anything out, it is important to create demand for our product once we place it in front of them.
The audience targeting potential on Facebook is staggering, and a strong understanding of Facebook's data layers is the key to running successful ads on the world's largest social network. Our Social Media team at Promodo often spends the most time of any advertising channel with our Facebook ad campaigns because of the huge reach and low cost.
3.3. Display advertising for brand visibility
It has been observed that simple text ads often perform better than flashy, vibrant image ads. Many people mistakenly believe that they need to create a container-type ad space for image advertisements. However, the truth is that text ads are very effective and you can easily sell the space just through email. Ultimately, the decision is yours. The ad networks can help you maintain your campaigns and ads, or they can provide you with login rights to show you the campaign data, including where the ads are running, how much they are paying for each ad, and, equally important, how much they are earning from the ad spot.
On millions of websites across the globe, you may find display ads. They are extremely important when you are searching for brand visibility. You can hire the services of an ad network like Tribalfusion or Advertising.com. These companies will visit your site to get a feel for your content and offer you an idea of how much revenue your blog can generate and how much it would cost to show their ads. You may prefer something simple that loads quickly and can be seen clearly on a slow internet connection.
3.4. Remarketing to target potential customers
Remarketing is a tactic to target potential customers who are visiting the site but did not convert. It works by placing a cookie on the user's browser, and then following them around the web and serving ads on the 3 million sites that display Google ads as well as on Facebook. Recently, Twitter and LinkedIn have also released their remarketing ad services. The strategy is really simple: it targets the audience that already knows about your brand, and therefore the ads should result in much higher conversion rates with lower cost per click and far higher ROI. Visitors who are retargeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website. In addition, you can create specific ads to target users who have gone through a specific process on your site. For example, targeting users who did comparison shopping, you can serve them ads that show the compared products with a strong call to action, further increasing conversion rates of those who see the ad. Advertisers utilizing AdWords will have a variety of options available to them in creating a remarketing campaign. Standard remarketing will involve the use of display ads that are served using cookie data to previous visitors. This will allow ads to follow visitors while they browse other websites, which will in turn keep the brand of what they were viewing fresh in their minds. Ads are priced using the CPC model, with pricing being the same as it is for regular display ads.
4. Other Digital Marketing Tactics
Email shots and email marketing are very quick and relatively simple ways to keep in touch with your customers. When a customer feels it's the right time to buy a service from our company, it might be a few weeks to a few months, but anything longer than a month, the customer may forget the company and initiate a search for something similar. Any search close to the sale will always be converted into a sale, and email marketing helps us keep track of customers and initiate sales at the right time.
Email marketing, as most know, is a direct marketing strategy that targets a specific segment or customer type who are already buying your product. An automated email for website inquiries or even a newsletter is the quickest way to generate leads into sales. How Dow Group performs this strategy is by sending automated newsletters and email shots to existing and potential customers, especially those who are close to making a sale for a website or looking for web solutions. This can be evident when a customer tries a particular service for web development and within the next week, they receive an email that properly defines services and showcases the success of previous projects of the company they are interested in.
Dow Group is an industry expert in the realm of digital marketing. Going through the chapters above, you have finished understanding the A-Z of digital marketing and social media marketing tactics. Now it's time to understand how Dow Group utilizes some other lesser-known but very effective digital marketing tactics. This will sharpshoot to aim bull's eye when it comes to reaching the right target market and achieving better results.
4.1. Email marketing for customer engagement
Engagement with the customer after they have shown interest is very important. At times, customers visit a particular service or "about us" page and then leave. In this case, we use the "retargeting" tool through the customer's email ID. This is done by a small tracking code placed in the customer's system, which captures the page visit. When a person logs into their email, they receive an automatic email generated from the website about the service they checked and a few more related services. This tool has proven results, and customers usually tend to click and visit the page again, thus creating interest and often leading to a sale. We have been successful in implementing this, and our clients are happy with the results they get.
The content of the email is always designed and aligned with the company's website and the message they would like to convey. The email creative, designed by our graphic design team, is aligned with the website to give it a corporate look. We at Dow Group are also experts in designing emailers in HTML, which render the same in most email clients.
Email marketing is one of the successful and oldest tools used by digital marketing companies. At Dow Group, we plan the newsletters in such a way that they can reach our targeted audience and generate the desired actions, such as clicks and visits to a particular page. We do a lot of segmentation in our database to run successful campaigns; we send different emails to customers and different ones to new inquiries.
4.2. Content marketing to attract and retain audience
During this stage, it is important to focus on SEO so that content is easily accessed by search engines. To do this, create themed keywords for each service that are based on what potential clients would likely search. We can then create content based on these keywords and over time, the content will gain traffic from SEO. We can measure effectiveness for this stage by observing an increase in relevant traffic to the website.
Step one will be to build content about the various services in DOW Group. This content will help the website inform its visitors and serve as a resource for all related future content. A suggested method would be to integrate a service description into a blog post and include a link in the description. The link will lead to a more detailed description in the blog post. This is an opportunity to inform and to funnel visitors to relevant calls to action. An example would be a description and post about social media marketing that funnels to a page offering social media marketing services and contact information.
By content, we mean specifically creating and distributing custom articles, blog posts, press releases, and media (landing pages, infographics, PDFs, etc.) that the consumer finds interesting and valuable. This can be done by having an online marketing manager that coordinates the content or having a hired writer from an agency. An effective article will include keyword optimization, inbound and outbound links, and meta tags. Rich media can provide easy information to the user and can also be optimized for SEO.
The idea is that if an organization delivers consistent, ongoing valuable information to a defined audience, then that audience will ultimately drive profitable customer action. The goal for DOW Group is to build a content strategy that can be integrated into all its services. Through content marketing, DOW Group has a chance to build its brand and get ahead of the competition.
Content marketing involves the creation of valuable content in the form of text, images, audio, or video and sharing it on various platforms to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Content can be in the form of webpage copy for an e-commerce website, a how-to video for a local business, a promotional offer for a chain business, or an entertaining article for viral marketing. The essence of content remains the same: provide an offering that has intrinsic value to the consumer.
Content is the core of digital marketing. It is the reason the audience visits a website or a social media page. It is extremely important for all kinds of digital marketing – SEM, SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, e-commerce, etc.
4.3. Conversion rate optimization for better results
There are a number of changes that CRO can make on a website that will have a positive impact on conversion rates. These can be: more effective use of call to action, use of colors and contrast to create more attention, the layout of the page, and changes to the design functionality and user experience.
Multivariate testing involves testing more elements of a page, however, it needs much more traffic than A/B testing to create accurate results. This involves creating variations of the page and using a tool to combine them all into a page with all the different variations, so it's essentially testing all combinations of the variations. Again, the effectiveness of each page is measured.
A/B testing a page involves creating a separate page that will have just one different variable from the original page. This could be the layout, image, call to action, or anything that you are trying to test. Sessions to the website are then split between the two pages, and analytics are measured to see which page is more effective. This can be a continuous method to make little changes on a page to improve the conversion rate continually.
The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what's stopping them from completing your goals. This involves the use of methods such as on-page surveys, web analytics analysis, and user testing to answer questions and make improvements. The testing methods can involve either A/B testing a single page of the website or multivariate testing many areas of the site.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers or take the desired action. It involves testing and modifying a website to consistently increase the chances of conversion. CRO is particularly important to businesses with low volumes of web traffic, where a boost in conversion rate can have a bigger impact on their bottom line.