Digital marketing was still optional until the late 2010s. With smartphones becoming more common and technologies such as 4G and a fast internet connection becoming widely available, marketers started focusing on Digital Marketing.
It wasn’t until the pandemic hit and almost all consumers were pushed onto the online world that digital marketing became a necessity.
There are a lot of advantages that digital marketing offers. Being more effective and having a significantly higher ROI are just the starters.
Entrepreneurs and marketers have realized the importance of digital marketing. Everyone wants to succeed but here is the problem.
Digital marketing has a lot of components and people don’t know which ones will work for them. Choosing the most suitable ones among so many components is a challenge in itself.
With this blog, I will address the issue and help you choose and focus on 10 components of digital marketing that will yield the best results.
Let’s start with understanding the benefits of digital marketing first.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
1. Low Cost.
Traditional forms of marketing were expensive. A lot of investment was needed to yield justifiable results. While this wasn’t an issue for big corporations, SMEs couldn’t compete on their level.
Digital marketing not only lowered the cost of marketing substantially but leveled the playing field through and through. Any SME with a good digital marketing strategy can compete on equal terms with any MNC on a global scale.
2. Higher Return on Investment.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is still the top option for business advertisements and the B2B sector. But Facebook has lost its appeal to younger people. They even lost half a million daily active users recently.
The majority of Facebook’s active users are aged above 40 now. So, unless your products are targeted to that demographic, Facebook isn’t the best option for you.
3. Easy to Measure.
For traditional forms of marketing, you had to wait for weeks if not months to see the results of a campaign. This, however, isn’t the case with digital marketing.
You can measure views, likes, evaluate comments to gauge market sentiment, measure positive and negative impressions, etc. This makes it easier to make adjustments on the fly to correct course deviations.
4. Effective Targeting
Targeting was not possible using traditional forms of marketing. Marketing campaigns were blanket campaigns, targeting everyone and as a result, highly inefficient.
Digital marketing allows for targeting. Only the people who are interested in the types of products you sell will see your posts and adverts. This reduces costs and raises the conversion rate by a huge margin.
5. Automation.
This is the biggest marketing game-changer. The ability to automate all non-critical marketing tasks is perhaps the biggest benefit of digital marketing.
Not only will you be able to run big campaigns with a small team but you’ll minimize the risks associated with human errors and operational costs.
With these benefits being apparent, every marketing aspires to create a digital marketing strategy that delivers on every business objective.
With these things being cleared out, we can now head on to learning about the 10 key components of a successful digital marketing strategy.
Top 10 Components of a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Search Engine Optimization.
We all know the drill. Every time we want something or need to know about something we search on google or ask Alexa or Siri.
All activities undertaken to boost your rankings on various search engines are under search engines optimization.
Why should it be a component of your digital marketing strategy? 63,000 searches are made every second just on Google. 75% of people don’t look past the first page of results.
That’s a lot of traffic you can gain with just SEO. Combined with other to be mentioned components, you’ll generate a lot of high-quality leads all day long.
2. Content Marketing.
Content marketing itself is quite an effective component. It generates 3 times more leads compared to traditional marketing. Moreover, the leads you attract with content marketing are usually high-value and high-quality leads.
This is a result of you being able to assert your expertise in the field you operate in. A consistent display of expertise and thought leadership enable you to establish yourself as an authority of the said subject matter.
You’ll end up as the first choice for anyone in your industry looking to avail the type of solutions that your business provides.
Content marketing and SEO complement each other well. Good content gains you a higher rank and a higher rank gets you more traffic. This is the holy grail of positive feedback loops in the marketing world.
3. Social Media Marketing.
No digital marketing strategy is complete without social media marketing. With almost 2.3 billion users on various social media platforms, there are a lot of opportunities your business can capitalize upon.
Creating brand awareness, providing customer service, direct selling, marketing, customer retention, market research, feedback collection, etc. are all possible using social media marketing.
Social media marketing allows you to create a targeted set of audiences, connect and engage with them on a regular basis. This builds a relationship and trust between them.
With a strong and trusty relationship with your audience, you’ll be able to sell your products easily and directly. Other benefits of this are that your customer base becomes loyal to your brand and is easy to retain.
4. Email Marketing.
The oldest and yet the most effective form of digital marketing. Email marketing is known to yield $42 for every $1 invested. ROIs don’t get any better than this!
Emails are the main form of communication for businesses. This makes emails the best channel of marketing communication with businesses as well as individuals.
There are 4.3 Billion email users who regularly opt-in for newsletters and marketing programs. With a good lead nurturing strategy in place, you can generate leads or convert a significant amount of leads into customers by just using emails.
Using segmentation you can offer a higher degree of personalization and combined with automation, you can run large scale marketing, brand awareness, outreach campaigns quite effortlessly.
5. Mobile Marketing.
The Internet was only used widely on Blackberrys until Apple came out with iPhones and changed the entire handheld smart device market. Fast forward to 2022 and almost 84% of people globally use a smartphone. That’s 6.64 billion smartphone users!
SEO, social media, email and content marketing are still effective on smartphones once optimized for the smaller screens and touch inputs. However, there are multiple device-specific marketing options available too.
There is SMS marketing, In-App advertisements, local SEO, Google Business, Google Maps and other equivalents, push notification marketing, etc. that are native only to mobile devices.
The massive number of users and a direct line of communication with them means a tremendous marketing potential, this warrants mobile marketing a fixed spot in your digital marketing strategy.
6. Online Advertising.
Leveraging online advertisements is a must for any business that has a sufficient budget to opt for the option. There are a lot of benefits to online advertisements and the most impactful is how quickly you can generate results using them.
The most common forms of online advertisements are Google AdWords Ads, Pay Per Click (PPC) ads, Display ads, Video ads, etc.
Additionally, you can advertise on social media platforms, in-app advertisements within apps such as YouTube, Spotify, etc. There are direct ways of advertising on mobile devices such as SMS marketing, push notification marketing, etc.
You have a higher degree of control over the ad targeting parameters, advanced delivery options and assured views. This necessitates having online advertisements as a component of your digital marketing strategy.
7. Video Marketing.
The last couple of years has seen a dramatic rise in the consumption of video content on the internet, especially short-form videos. Within two years, the Tik Tok user base grew from 381 million to over a billion.
Smartphones and access to high-speed internet connections have enabled this change in media consumption patterns. Knowing this, you need to reconsider your digital marketing strategy and leverage video for marketing.
A recent survey found out that over 80% of the customers purchase from a brand because they found their marketing video impressive and convincing.
Videos are an important form of communication and exceptionally effective for marketing purposes. Considering how vastly videos can improve your conversion rate, you need to shift your focus towards video marketing.
8. Design and UX.
The importance of design and UX cannot be understated in the digital world. While design decisions have always been important even for traditional marketing, the user experience these designs provide has become important in digital marketing.
Around 95% of users say that their first impression depends on the design and user experience that the marketing content provides.
So websites looking clean, well designed and easy to navigate are a must. Social media posts should have a good mix of colors, crisp and clear text, and well-placed components. Ads should have strong CTAs, catchy design and colors.
Use AB testing to test and experiment with designs and various components of UI, ads, webpages, etc. Gather feedback from users and constantly improve on these areas to make your digital marketing more effective.
9. Online Reputation Management.
Consumers have access to a lot of information these days and make full use of it. They will check multiple sites for product reviews before making a purchase decision.
This means you need to look out for any negative mentions about your business online and take efforts to mend the situation.
Why exactly?
Over 85% of the people reported that they would reconsider buying from a brand with many negative reviews. Now that is a big proportion of consumers.
Your digital marketing strategy must include online reputation management. You need to scout various review sites and the internet for negative reviews and manage the grievances. Otherwise, it will drastically affect your business.
10. Marketing Analysis.
Data is the most valuable resource of the 21st century as its analysis generates a lot of actionable insights. These insights can be used to improve and make informed decisions that can benefit your business in multiple ways.
Analysis of collected data can point out the shortcomings in your marketing strategy, identify weaknesses in marketing material and pinpoint areas that can be tweaked to yield better performance.
Marketing analysis helps unlock the potential of improvements of various functional areas that go unnoticed otherwise.
With these insights, you can optimize performance, reduce costs and attain many more benefits. This is why your digital marketing strategy needs marketing analysis as its core component.
To Conclude With
There is a lot of confusion about what components one must have in their digital marketing strategy. There are so many choices that they can overwhelm decision-makers and leave them with choice paralysis.
You can start with the components that I shortlisted above. Make an addition to these according to your unique business requirements.
Experiment and find a mix that works best for accomplishing your objectives!
