7 Best Practices for Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy That Delivers Results

When building your online marketing strategy, finding measurable data is critical. However, most of the time you will come across data that will provide a sense of what is happening but does not help meet business goals. It can be tough to stay focused on your goals when you are flooded with data and analytics.

Developing a marketing strategy demands lots of time and hard work. In order to ensure your efforts are fruitful, it is important to have a clear objective in mind. How can you identify which is the best strategy to grow revenue, improve brand awareness and generate leads? To help you identify and implement the right strategy, here are seven best practices to consider.

1. Define goals: Depending on whom you want to target and what you want to achieve, your business goals will influence various elements of your strategy. It is critical to set measurable goals, and it is equally important to measure the success of those goals. Your goals can focus on:

• Improving brand awareness
• Increasing leads and improving conversion rates
• Attracting new customers and growing engagement
• Developing customer relationships

2. Decide your target audience: Knowing your target audience enables you to provide them with the right message at the right time and to convert leads into customers. Your research should focus on uncovering key information that will help you understand who your target customers they are and how to communicate with them. In order to be successful, your digital marketing strategy must be customer-centric.
3. Leverage the power of social media: Social media is a critical digital marketing channel. You must boost and maximize your marketing efforts on social media as this is one of the channels where you can get the best results. You can consider social media for engaging and building relationships with potential and existing customers. You share content that is created specifically for your target customers to generate long-term engagement.
4. Focus on marketing automation: Why make marketing activities tougher if you can automate them? Marketing automation can simplify your digital marketing needs and generate desired results in a much shorter span of time. From automated email campaigns to website lead scoring, marketing automation helps attract new customers and increase leads.
5. Generate useful content: Creating and sharing valuable content can help your brand stand out and highlight its creative side. Content marketing delivers relevant information while keeping focused on customers’ interests. You can use social networks or your business website to tell a story that engages the customer and generates demand, rather than expecting a purchase.
6. Implement effective SEO tactics: While creating useful content for your customers is an integral part of your digital marketing strategy, you also have to make sure they can find this content online. Having a website or a blog that is not optimized for search engines can make it difficult for existing and potential customers to find your website and online content. If customers cannot find your website, then your online traffic will suffer. By optimizing your content and web pages with relevant keywords, the online visibility of your website will increase, and it will rank higher.
7. Lead scoring: After you have your content optimized for search engines, and you are regularly delivering relevant information to your target customers, you may want to implement a method for measuring the impact of your digital marketing strategies. Lead scoring allows you to monitor the extent of your customer engagement with your content. Be it a phone call or a direct email campaign open rate, lead scoring takes engagement measurement to the next level.

Finally, as a digital marketing professional, it is your responsibility to understand your customer’s journey and design touch points considering the key factors in mind. Start with an effective strategy and go for successful execution to achieve your business goals.