Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With millions of businesses out there all vying for the same eyeballs, it’s never been more important to advertise online, and search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote your products and grow your business.

Generally, “search engine marketing” refers to paid search marketing, a system where businesses pay Google to show their ads in the search results.

Today, the internet is used for pretty much everything—communication, learning, entertainment, shopping, and more.

Plus, there are currently 4.33 billion internet users worldwide—and this number is increasing every second.

For marketers, this presents an unbelievable opportunity. Never before could a single person reach so many other people, in so many ways, instantaneously, with such ease.

Internet marketing (also known as online marketing, e-marketing, or web marketing,) is an all-inclusive term used to describe marketing activities conducted online. For this reason, internet marketing encompasses a wide range of strategies and tactics, such as social media marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click, and search engine optimization.

• Is There a Difference Between Internet Marketing and Digital Marketing?
• What are Actionable Marketing Strategies?
• What are the 7 Steps of Internet Marketing Strategy?
• What are the 7 Critical Elements of Online Marketing?
• What are the 5 Key Components of Internet Marketing?
• What are the 7 P’s of Marketing?
• What is an Actionable Market Segment?
• How do you Create an Online Marketing Strategy?
• Which is the Best Online Marketing Strategy?
• What are the 4 Types of Marketing Strategies?
• What is an Example of a Marketing Strategy?
• What are the 8 Steps to Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy?
• What Should be Included in Social Media Strategy?
• What is the First Step in a Social Media Advertising Strategy?
• What is Social Media Strategy Cycle?
• What is the First Step in a Social Media Marketing Campaign?
• What are the Steps of Social Media Management?
• What are the 5 of Most Powerful Marketing Tips?
• What is a Marketing Strategy?
• What 5 Main Things are Needed in a Marketing Plan?
• What is an Internet Marketing Plan?
• Is an Internet Marketing Plan Important?
• How Can you Create an Internet Marketing Plan?
• What are Types of Online Marketing?

Is There a Difference Between Internet Marketing and Digital Marketing?

Although marketers often use these terms interchangeably, there are subtle differences between internet marketing and digital marketing. Essentially, digital marketing is a broad term for marketing strategies that leverage digital channels to promote products or services, from TV ads and billboards to social media platforms and pay-per-click campaigns. This indicates that digital marketing isn’t limited to the internet.

In contrast, internet marketing refers to a set of marketing strategies that are exclusively carried out via the internet. This makes it a subset of digital marketing, but it’s really a core factor since most digital marketing strategies fall within the boundaries of internet marketing.

What are Actionable Marketing Strategies?

Contrary to what some may think, actionable marketing has nothing to do with the law where actionable means bringing a legal suit. Rather, actionable refers to marketing’s ability to persuade prospects, customers, and the public to engage with your firm.

Actionable marketing focuses on getting prospects to engage with your brand and buy from your company in a transparent way that builds trust and relationships. It’s a hybrid of branding and direct marketing that works across different platforms and devices creating value for both the company and the customer.

Here are the twelve elements that define actionable marketing.

1. Is goal-oriented. Your marketing objectives should be aligned with those of your business. They can be sub-goals that lead to a higher-level purpose.
2. Targets a specific audience. Understand your audience’s demographics, psychographics and past actions to tailor your marketing to that segment. Use a set of marketing personas so that your team feels like its talking to a real person, not an amorphous group.
3. Meets customer needs. To entice prospects to take the next step in the purchase process, it’s critical that your offering provides solutions to their perceived problems.
4. Expands firm’s reach through stories. Since the sense of a company is ingrained in its history and experience, stories are critical to extend a firm’s brand and sense of approachability.
5. Builds brand through integration of brand attributes. Actionable marketing like other forms of marketing aims to enhance brand. Therefore, it’s critical to incorporate the brand into marketing.
6. Communicates and distributes messages in a variety of formats across an array of devices. Actionable marketing is format and device agnostic. Since the objective is to get customers to take action, it uses media and devices the audience favors.
7. Builds trust. For many businesses, customers feel that the trust is gone. Therefore, when taking an actionable approach, it’s important to have high ethical standards and a level of transparency in interacting with your customers.
8. Entices prospects to proceed to the next phase of your purchase process. Include a call-to-action to guide prospects to act. Tailor your call-to-action to the next step in the process. To aid tracking, use targeted landing pages and promotional codes.
9. Requires prospects to proactively connect with your firm. To this end, it’s critical to include a response channel, most frequently a direct one.
10. Provides value to prospects and customers. Actionable marketing aims to create a partnership and build relationships. Therefore, it doesn’t interrupt and shout at prospects. It works best when it supplies content, information and service of worth to customers.
11. Isn’t limited to the marketing department. Unlike other forms of marketing, actionable marketing is integrated across the organization to improve the customer experience.
12. Produces measurable results. Outcomes can be analyzed and fed back into your process to improve your efforts going forward. Through the use of a call-to-action, targeted promotional codes and tailored landing pages, actionable marketing generates trackable results that builds your brand and increases sales,

What are the 7 Steps of Internet Marketing Strategy?

A strategic Internet marketing strategy helps you get a broad view of what you want to accomplish when you’ll do it, and how you’ll do it. Even if your initial strategy changes over time, a plan will keep you focused on what you want to achieve over the long term. Without it, you don’t have a clear path to success.

Before you begin your next Internet marketing campaign, develop a strategy using these 7 tips.

1. Determine the Potential

The status quo has changed and digital is imperative to be current, competitive and attractive in the market. On which channels are your customers engaging with you? What are your competitors doing to be transformative in digital? How discoverable is your brand and how many inbound leads have been converted to sales? If you don’t know, you’re probably already behind.

2. Define the Role of Digital Marketing

How does digital marketing contribute to the business? This shouldn’t be a laundry list of marketing objectives, but instead a deliberate vision and series of intentional choices that indicate what digital marketing can and should do for the organization.

Ensure that you recognize the relationship digital marketing has with related elements in your ecosystem, which often include: brand, data, marketing, content, CX, UX, CRM, support/customer care, product innovation and media.

By simply writing out what is at stake and which opportunities are available, you can quickly clarify your focus. Based on this assessment, you can then develop key performance indicators (KPIs) that clearly communicate to your executive team how digital is impacting the business.

3. Understand Your Target Audiences

Create robust digital profiles (what they want, how they behave, how to engage with them and with whom else they interact), map the customer journey in detail and identify value exchanges all along with it. These profiles often start with traditional segmentation, but you need to go steps further to recognize behaviors, interactions and content, functionality and experience needs.

With many clients, especially in B2B, digital profiles aren’t necessarily built around precisely who the customers are, but rather which objectives the target audience is trying to solve. Goals versus roles. Doing this early on keeps you cognizant of customer needs and allows you to match your objectives to meet them.

4. Take a Multi-Channel Approach

Create a modern channel strategy by taking advantage of and activating key channels like search, web, social and email. Specific platforms and touchpoints may beg for unique ‘channel charters’, identify how to best use them for the brand and the business, and what’s needed internally to pull it off.

• View social as a sales driver, not just a media or customer care channel. How can social be used to meet your business objectives?
• Be clear about search. Can incorporating organic or paid search engine optimization (SEO) help build brand credibility, drive web traffic or fend off competitors?
• Think fresh about web. Is your website positioned to attract, obtain and convert leads?
• Do you nurture former, existing or potential clients effectively using email or marketing automation platforms.

5. Identify the Resources Needed

Use all of the information charts above to determine what you need to execute against this strategy – include headcount, budget and your marketing technology system (platforms, APIs, services and data integration points). As Mayur Gupta of Spotify said, “Technology is the interface of marketing” and “the pipes connecting the different pieces together.”

Governance is crucial – build guidelines and playbooks for people (roles, responsibilities and skills), processes and tools. Many companies don’t pay enough attention to governance, yet it’s needed so people know their role and how they contribute to the success of the program.

Plus, if you’re a global or complex organization, you’ll need to establish “market types” to help local leaders see where they are and understand what’s needed to grow in a new direction.

6. Create a Roadmap for Execution

Organize and prioritize initiatives into a roadmap that takes you from strategy to execution, even if it’s paced and phased over six, twelve and 24 months. Don’t be too slow or too cautious, don’t wait for annual planning cycles; be ready and agile with alternative scenarios available. Organizational digital transformation may take time, but marketing should be the nimblest driver and ready to act on available opportunities.

7. Support Your Digital Transformation Strategy

Identify how digital marketing can go beyond doing its day job efficiently and act as a powerful lever in this new era of digital transformation. It could be by using creativity in storytelling, innovating digital services or allowing the customer voice to influence media spend, uncover engagement opportunities and discover new audiences.

Embracing digital in your marketing function can serve as a catalyst internally, as your culture becomes more comfortable and emboldened by the opportunities of digital transformation.

What are the 7 Critical Elements of Online Marketing?

On their own, digital marketing strategies are powerful. Combined in the perfect proportions?

A recipe for success. Typically, digital marketing elements include:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

The foundation for successful digital marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a number of strategies designed to boost your rankings in online search results. Why do you want to achieve top rankings? A staggering 75 percent of people don’t look past the first page of search results.

You can have the best-designed website in the world, but if it doesn’t rank on the first page, most people will never find it. When your website ranks at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), more qualified leads will find and contact you when searching for products or services related to your business. In other words, higher search rankings translate into more leads, phone calls, and revenue for your company.

  How do you rank in search results? You can use numerous SEO strategies for your business including:

• Create quality content that answers searchers’ questions
• Clean up your site’s code and increase page speed
• Streamline your site’s design and navigation to improve user experience (UX)
• Earn backlinks from reputable sites
• And more

It’s important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy, so don’t expect to see results overnight. While SEO requires regular upkeep to maintain top rankings, the results are well worth the investment for your business.

2. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an excellent strategy for maintaining a presence in search results while you establish organic rankings with SEO. If you’re looking to boost your rankings quickly, PPC can start driving qualified leads to your site the minute your ads go live — and it’s an affordable option for businesses in most industries. One of the best parts of PPC advertising?

You only pay when people click your ads. This means you’ll avoid wasting money trying to reach people who aren’t interested in your products or services. In addition, PPC offers advanced targeting options that allow you to hone in on your target customers.

With PPC, you can target people based on demographics, location, and even the type of device they use. These targeting options, coupled with the budget-friendliness of PPC, make PPC a valuable component of successful digital marketing.

3. Web design

Ultimately, the digital marketing components you use drive leads back to your website — and you want your site to leave a positive impression on potential customers. Nearly 95 percent of a person’s first impression relates to web design, so it’s a crucial factor in your online marketing plan. If your site looks like it’s straight outta the ‘90s or takes forever to load, it will likely send visitors searching for the back button.

To keep people interested and engaged on your site, you need to implement a custom design that reflects your brand and makes it easy for people to find the information they need. In addition to ensuring your site loads at top speeds, you also want to streamline your navigation to improve the user experience and make it easier for leads to contact you.

4. Content marketing

In order to boost your search rankings and help potential customers learn more about your business, you need to incorporate content into your digital marketing strategy. If you’re looking to earn more leads and revenue, content marketing is a great strategy, considering it generates 3x more leads than traditional marketing.   Quality content is a key component of content marketing.

Quality content allows you to target keywords related to your business and address searchers’ questions, which in turn helps you achieve higher rankings. When creating content, it’s important to think about quality and depth. Does your content effectively answer searchers’ questions, or does it leave them with unanswered questions?

Do you include calls to action (CTAs) that clearly direct readers to take the next step? Thinking through these questions will help you create content that not only ranks at the top of search results, but also provides site visitors with the info they need to take the next steps with your company.

5. Social media marketing

A whopping 2.3 billion people use social media, making it a valuable digital marketing component. Social media allows you to connect with current and potential customers — and develop relationships with them. If they have questions about your products and services, they can connect and ask you directly on social media.

In addition, social media listening allows you to uncover key trends and insights into consumers’ thoughts and opinions related to your brand, industry, products, services, and even competitors. You can use this information to inform other strategies.

For example, if you’re a medical device equipment manufacturer and receive a lot of questions or notice frequent conversations about how a specific product works, you can create content on your website (perhaps, even a how-to video) to address that concern.

Most social platforms also allow you to run paid ads to target and reach your ideal customers. Social media is also a valuable customer service tool. Today, 70 percent of people have used social media for customer service, whether that be to ask a question or voice concerns about a product or service.

Maximize your social media effectiveness by responding to social media comments in a timely manner and in a way that makes your followers feel seen and valued. Ultimately, this will help you establish trust with your audience and encourage them to become loyal customers.

6. Email marketing

Another component of successful digital marketing, email marketing can earn you $44 for every $1 invested — an ROI of 4400 percent.   Since people opt-in to receive your emails, you know they are interested in the products and services you offer. A great lead-nurturing strategy, email marketing allows you to follow up with potential customers and send custom information about products or services that interest them.

Using segmentation, you can personalize your emails based on subscribers’ needs and interests and deliver content that resonates with them.

You can automate your email strategy to email customers when they subscribe, after they purchase, or when they take a specific action on your site. This is a great way to make your marketing work smarter and allow you to focus on running your business.

What are the 5 Key Components of Internet Marketing?

These key components are often referred to as The Five C’s. Individually, they are Company Strategy, Customer Experience, Content Creation, Channel Promotions, and Check-back Analysis. Below is a description of what’s involved with each of these five major components.

1. Company Strategy 

In order to successfully conduct Internet marketing in Michigan, you’ll need to start by properly identifying your company’s business objectives. This means you’ll need to figure out exactly what you’re trying to achieve and how you can make that happen.

One of the most important aspects of this component is that you need to get the attention of your target audience. Especially given the fact that many other companies will be competing for the attention of that same audience.

Everything you consider in this vein should be related to your business model and your company brand. Whatever your eventual marketing strategy is, it must align fully with your brand and your business model. This is a time when you can begin to think about specific digital marketing campaigns that you may want to conduct, and what tools you will need to carry out those campaigns.

This is where team members can begin to think about what you will do to convert leads into customers. And what it will take to get potential customers off the fence and in a purchasing frame of mind.

2. Customer Experience

A big part of your digital marketing strategy should be to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience for a while and try to have an understanding of what they are thinking and feeling when they interact with your company brand.

During this phase, it’s important to identify exactly who’s your target audience, and how your products or services can serve them. In order to do this, you’ll need to collect and analyze a significant amount of data about your customers.

Identify the target audience member’s characteristics using the collected data, and create a generic persona of your ideal customer. Then you should try and relate to the journey a potential customer will take from being interested in your product to actually making a purchase.

At this time, it will also be beneficial to begin thinking about developing content that will appeal to potential customers. The caveat is to satisfy a need or desire that they have.

3. Content Creation

The creation of high-quality content is critical to the success of Internet marketing in Michigan. Now is the time to give serious consideration to how you will create appealing content, who in your organization will be responsible for content creation, and what that content might be. You’ll need to develop a formal plan for marketing your content so that it will effectively reach your target audience.

Make sure you take advantage of the different types of content which can be effective. That should include visual content, curated content, and long and short-form content. If at all possible, you should incorporate storytelling into your overall strategy, because this has been shown to connect with audiences better than almost any other strategy.

It’s also worthwhile to consider the creation of a resource library. This will help your customers, who can access on their own, without your intervention.

4. Channel Promotions

In order for your content to make maximum impact with your target audience, you’ll need to decide how to distribute that content most effectively. This will include identifying exactly which channels to use, which social media platforms to include in your efforts, and how you will make use of each of these possibilities.

To maximize your reach, you want to use organic searches as well as paid advertising, and you want to make use of earned, shared, and owned media so that you can have the best possible coverage with your audience.

By making the most of all the different media types available to you, you’ll have the best chance for your message to reach a huge portion of your target audience. Search marketing is a major asset in this area, even if it’s constantly shifting and changing in usage.

If you can develop shareable content, that will effectively increase the power of your advertising, because it will enlist the aid of a number of users to promote your content on your behalf.

When users discover content that appeals to them, they literally have the power to make it go viral on the Internet and have it seen by millions of others. Consider the role of email marketing in your overall strategy, because whether you love it or hate it, it can still be very effective at reaching a great number of potential customers.

5. Check-back Analysis

In this phase of Internet marketing, you will be evaluating the success or failure of your most recent digital marketing campaign. At this time, it becomes appropriate to ask whether or not you have met the goals you established originally when devising your campaign.

If you should determine that the campaign has fallen short of expectations, it may be necessary to tweak your approach or to modify it altogether. One part of this may be to assess whether or not the campaign has remained true to your business model and brand.

If you established some key performance indicators at the outset, now is the time to assess how those KPIs have performed. There are also a number of tests you can use in order to gauge the success of your internet marketing, for instance, split testing and page speeds, but all of these should help determine what your ROI was for your marketing campaign.

Based on your analysis of the campaign, you can make adjustments for your next marketing campaign, or if necessary, you can take a completely different approach next time.

What are the 7 P’s of Marketing?

The seven Ps of marketing include product, price, promotion, place, people, process, and physical evidence.

Here’s how the 7 Ps of marketing can be applied to everything in your marketing mix:

1. Product

It goes without saying that the service or product you’re selling should be at the center of every element of the marketing mix.

Fundamentally, it allows you to address the questions key to sales conversion: what problem or issue does the product solve for customers? Why is your product the best one to solve it?

The digital marketing mix is perfect for showcasing your products, through SEO, blogs or articles, paid advertising, influencer marketing, and viral video campaigns, for example.

2. Price

The strategy behind the pricing of your product needs to be based on what your customers are prepared to pay, costs such as retail mark-up and manufacturing, as well as other considerations.

Your marketing mix can include subscription and membership discounting programs, or email marketing of promotions and sales.

3. Promotion

Successful marketing strategies include all the promotional activities across the marketing mix, including advertising, direct marketing, and in-store promotional activities.

The possibilities of digital promotion are limited only by your imagination and can include online events, chats, social media groups, and livestreams.

4. Place

Where and how your product is displayed and sold should be directly informed by your customers.

A deep understanding of their purchasing patterns – and targeting them at the right stage in their buying cycle – will make it clear where you should promote and sell your products and how that fits into your online and real-world marketing mix.

5. People

Excellent customer service not only converts to sales but can increase your customer base by referrals. Acquiring these referrals by people who love your brand can also be a great example of how your marketing efforts can support your sales process.

It’s important that everyone who represents your brand or deals with customers – including the non-human chat bot variety! – are fully trained sales professionals with an intimate knowledge of your product and how it will improve the lives or solve the problems of your customers.

6. Process

The process of delivering your product to the consumer should be designed for maximum efficiency and reliability, but may also include features that are in line with your brand, such as being environmentally or sustainably focused.

With the rise in online shopping, digital partnerships and logistics have become an essential part of the marketing mix.

7. Physical evidence

Physical evidence incorporates aspects that prove your brand exists and that a purchase took place.

Examples of proof that your brand exists can include things like a physical store or office for your business, a website if your business operates solely online, and printed business cards that you exchange when meeting people. Examples of proof of purchases can include physical or digital receipts, invoices, or follow-up email newsletters that you send to customers as a retention exercise.

Your marketing mix must also take into consideration all the things your customer sees, hears – sometimes even smells – in relation to your product or service.

This, of course, includes packaging and branding, but should also bring in the ways products are displayed in stores, where they are placed, and the context in which they sit, as well as digital placement, including on your website and social media.

What is an Actionable Market Segment?

Market segmentation is a marketing technique that almost all companies practice. The process provides marketing strategists with data for a better understanding of their market, allowing them to create more personalized and profitable strategies. This practice is important for companies because it minimizes the amount of time, money, and effort marketing strategists put in certain campaigns.  

So what are the requirements for effective market segmentation? Effective segmentation should be measurable, accessible, substantial, differentiable, and actionable. When a company has segmented their market accordingly, there is a higher chance that it will become more profitable and successful in the long run. 

Identifying the requirements for effective market segmentation allows companies to create marketing campaigns that are essential for their growth and development. Here are the five criteria for effective market segmentation:  

1. Measurable

The size and purchasing power profiles of your market should be measurable, meaning there is quantifiable data available about it. A consumer’s profiles and data provides marketing strategists with the necessary information on how to carry out their campaigns. 

It would be difficult to create advertisements for markets that have little to no data or for audiences that can’t be measured. Always ask whether there is a market for the kind of product or service that your business wants to produce then define how many possible customers and consumers are in that market. 

2. Accessible

Accessibility means that customers and consumers are easily reached at an affordable cost. This helps determine how certain ads can reach different target markets and how to make ads more profitable. 

A good question to ask is whether it’s more practical to place ads online, on print, or out of house. For example, gather data on the websites a specific target market usually visits so you can place more advertisements on those websites instead. 

3. Substantial

The market a brand should want to penetrate should be a substantial number. You should clearly define a consumer’s profiles by gathering data on their age, gender, job, socio-economic status, and purchasing power.  

It doesn’t make sense to try and reach an unjustifiable number of people — you’re just wasting resources. However, you also don’t want to market the brand to a group too small that the business doesn’t become profitable. 

4. Differentiable

When segmenting the market, you should make sure that different target markets respond differently to different marketing strategies. If a business is only targeting one segment, then this might not be as much of an issue. 

But for example, if your target market is college students, then it’s essential to create a marketing strategy that both freshman students and senior students react to in the same positive way. This process ensures that you are creating strategies that are more efficient and cost-effective.

5. Actionable

Lastly, your market segments need to be actionable, meaning that they have practical value. A market segment should be able to respond to a certain marketing strategy or program and have outcomes that are easily quantifiable. 

As a business owner, it’s important to identify what kind of marketing strategies work for a certain segment. Once those strategies have been identified, ask yourself if the business is capable of carrying out that strategy. 

How do you Create an Online Marketing Strategy?

From personas to the right tools, there are plenty of things that can help or hinder the success of your digital marketing strategy. Here’s the foundational work you need to make sure your strategy works well, including our favorite tools and software.

Step 1: Create a customer persona

Previously, digital marketers collected qualitative and quantitative information about the target audience that included age, gender, occupation, interests, and location. The definition of the potential customer has been taken to another level recently, with buyer personas taking over. Now, the best digital marketing strategies are incomplete without them.

Buyer personas are a term used to describe the ideal customer that can be defined by surveying and contacting the pre-defined target group. The latest digital marketing strategies begin with defining your own unique buyer personas. You can search for many free templates online to get started.

Step 2: Identify your goals and tools

Every professional marketer knows how important this stage is. Without goals, a digital marketing strategy simply will not work, so defining them is your main task. Make sure that the goals you developed are suitable, and make them measurable.

Example of a weak marketing goal:

Increase the conversions on the website next year and create two promotional offers.

What is wrong with this goal? Right, it is non-measurable! How do you measure your progress using this goal?

Here is how it should have been formulated:

Increase the conversions on the website by 20 percent in the first quarter of 2022, and create two promotional offers: free marketing report and a marketing book. Have them online by February and March respectively.

There, measuring the progress becomes possible now. It’s how to create a digital marketing strategy that actually delivers.

Step 3: Focus on blogging

Blogging has been around since the 90s, and yet the latest digital marketing strategies still include blogs. Why? Because blogging is one way to create quality content for a site and expand your reach, and creating high-quality content is important for any digital marketing strategy.

Blogging performs some critical functions, including bringing more traffic to your website, reinforcing social media presence, positioning against other companies, and ranking all those long-tail search queries and keywords.

If you have a regularly updated blog that the visitors find useful, it means that your website will be easily found through search engines and can be used as a platform for your online advertising strategies and marketing campaigns. If you don’t have the capacity to tackle blogs in-house you can look into blog writing services for support.

Step 4:  Evaluate existing digital marketing channels

Analyze the digital assets and channels that you are already using, including website, blog content, social media account, word-of-mouth, native advertising, Google Adwords, paid advertising, and so on. Ask yourself: how effective were they and how can they be used next year? Which online advertising strategies can be refined or dropped?

It is okay if your future digital marketing strategy process does not incorporate all of these elements, but it sure should use those that were the most effective in the previous year. For example, if a landing page you recently created has been effective in generating leads, use it again but improve it as much as possible. The same applies to other assets and channels.

Step 5: Automate marketing

Marketing automation is huge, and it’s only getting better with the new technology and software being incorporated into the latest digital marketing strategies.

Today’s leading marketing automation platforms can do wonders for your digital marketing strategy, making it easy for you to automate activities such as content marketing, email marketing, lead generation, and more. Plus, it’s easy to find marketing automation platforms that are integrated with your company’s sales CRM, which improves the entire sales process.

If your company is still not on board with automated lead generation, make sure you add it to your digital marketing strategy this year.

Step 6: Nail mobile optimization

If you want to know how to create a digital marketing strategy that is fully optimized for 2022, the answer is to take mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets into account. It’s a mobile-first era, and there’s no excuse for not improving your site for a wonderful mobile experience.

Mobile optimization includes page speed, site design, and various other search engine optimization practices to ensure that people who come to your site using a mobile device have a good experience.

Review your mobile responsive design and email templates to ensure that you are using the latest methods and provide only relevant and latest data.

Step 7: Make it easy for customers to reach you

Online business is all about connecting with potential customers, so traffic on your website should be high to ensure positive outcomes. Your digital marketing strategy therefore should ensure that your leads and visitors are not exerting unnecessary effort to connect with you. Engaging with your customers is invaluable for your business.

To eliminate unnecessary effort, you should ensure that landing pages do not ask for irrelevant data. Make CTAs clearly visible on the landing page and other pages on the website.

Step 8: Use the right technology

A marketing effort is wasted if an ineffective or inappropriate technology is used.

The best digital marketing strategies include tools such as marketing automation software as well as sales intelligence tools such as the Snapshot Report by Vendasta. There are tools that can help you during every stage of your strategic process, including ones that help you identify your goals and help you track where your visitors are coming from.

Step 9: Confirm your differentiators

If your company is not different from your competitors, you should not expect high profits. Make sure you change (or reinforce) your difference from the others by talking to your customers and asking them why they selected your company.

Every company has a unique selling proposition, an attribute that sets you apart from the competition. A key part of your digital marketing strategy includes doing the research and working to find out what that is. Then, fix your existing differentiators if needed. Incorporate this message into your digital marketing roadmap.

Confirming differentiators is how to create a digital marketing strategy that is truly custom-tailored to your offering.

Step 10: Track your process

Constant monitoring should be provided to ensure that your digital marketing strategy is working effectively. This is done by assigning teams that would deliver this task. Remember to learn from your mistakes and always find improvement opportunities!

There is a lot of work involved in designing a digital marketing strategy process, but an effective and well-thought-out plan will make it much easier.

Which is the Best Online Marketing Strategy?

Internet marketing can seem quite daunting and complicated. There are so many possibilities. But which strategies should you start with? To help answer that, we’ve dissected internet marketing into its most basic strategies.

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is an umbrella term used to describe a number of strategies that boost your rankings in search results for keywords and phrases related to your business.

SEO can be broken into two categories: On-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO refers to any optimization you perform on your website. It can include:

1. Improving your site’s speed
2. Adding keywords to your URLs, page titles, and headings
3. Creating and updating content about your products and services

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to optimization that occurs away from your website. This primarily involves earning backlinks to your website from other reputable sites.

Both on-page and off-page SEO can help your site rank higher in search results and ultimately allow you to reach more customers and earn more revenue online.

2. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a popular online advertising model. With PPC, marketers bid for placement in a search engine’s sponsored links for specific keywords and phrases. If your bid is among the highest for any given keyword, your ad will appear above organic search results when users type that keyword into the search bar.

One of the benefits of PPC as an Internet marketing strategy is that your ads can begin sending relevant, qualified traffic to your site the minute they are clicked to go live.

PPC is also cost-effective and you’ll only pay when people click your ads. This means that you will avoid wasting money trying to reach people who aren’t interested in your products and services.

With PPC, you can also create remarketing ads to reach people who have displayed an interest in your products and remind them of what they looked at on your site.

For example, if someone places a product in their online shopping cart and leaves without purchasing, you can use remarketing to show them ads as they browse other sites and encourage them to return and make a purchase.

3. Content marketing

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate new leads online. It involves creating infographics, blog posts, ebooks, guides, and other original content. You can also use visual content like photos and videos to give people an inside look at your business.

Content marketing positions your company as an authority in your field, and people will be more likely to want to learn about your products after reading a helpful piece of content you created.

Instead of using your content as a sales pitch, look for ways to engage your readers, help them learn more about your business, and provide them with valuable information.

You can then reach out to reporters, bloggers, and industry influencers to see if they will share your content on their sites. The more links your business earns from other reputable sites, the more powerful your site will become, ultimately ranking higher in search engine results.

4. Social media

Maintaining a presence on social media platforms can help your company connect with current and potential customers, making it a must-use online marketing strategy.

You can use social media to engage users, provide them with helpful information about your business, and develop relationships that encourage them to purchase. If anyone has questions about your business, they can contact you directly on social media, and you can help them take the next steps with your company.

5. Email marketing

Email marketing allows you to connect with people right in their inboxes. And it can earn you an incredible ROI — in fact, you have the potential to earn $44 for every $1 you spend.

Email platforms like EmailMarketingFX offer easy-to-use templates that you can easily customize to fit the needs of your business. You can also segment your email lists and personalize your emails based on a user’s behavior on your site.

For example, if someone downloads a guide about SEO, you can follow up with additional resources and helpful information to help them learn more about your services.

Email is a great way to keep in contact with current and potential customers and provide them with updates so they can stay in the know about your business.

What are the 4 Types of Marketing Strategies?

These four strategies also identify four basic types of marketing plans and the types of investments and activities associated with each. The strategies are defined by whether the focus is on new or existing products and new or existing markets.

1. Market Penetration Strategy

When a firm focuses on selling its current products to existing customers, it is pursuing a market penetration strategy. The marketing activities that will dominate in this type of marketing plan are those that emphasize increasing the loyalty of existing customers so that they are not vulnerable to loss to competitors, attracting competitors’ customers, increasing the frequency of product use, and converting nonusers into users.

Increasing awareness through marketing communications and increasing availability through expanded distribution are common marketing activities in this type of plan. Identifying new use occasions and new uses for a product may increase usage frequency or convert current nonusers into users. For example, the advertising campaign for orange juice that has the tagline “It’s not just for breakfast anymore” was an effort to expand usage.

Price promotions might be used to encourage competitors’ customers to try the firm’s product if there is reason to believe that such a trial will result in repeat purchases. Loyalty programs can be very effective in retaining existing customers.

This strategy reduces risk by relying on what the firm already knows well—its existing products and existing customers. It is also a strategy where investments in marketing should pay back more quickly because the firm is building on an existing foundation of customer relationships and product knowledge.

2. Market Development Strategy

The efforts to expand sales by selling current products in new markets are referred to as a market development strategy. Such efforts may involve entering new geographic markets, such as international markets. Creating product awareness and developing distribution channels are key marketing activities. Some product modification may be required to better match the needs of the local market.

For example, as fast food restaurants have moved into international markets, they have often changed their menus to better match the food preferences of customers in local markets. Expanding into a new market with an existing product carries some risk because the new market is not well known to the firm and the firm and its products are not well known in the market.

The return on marketing investments in such a strategy is likely to be longer than for a market penetration strategy because of the time required to build awareness, distribution, and product trial.

3. Product Development Strategy

Creating new products to sell to existing customers, a product development strategy, is a common marketing strategy among firms that can leverage their relationships with existing customers. For example, American Express has been able to leverage its relationships with its credit card customers to also sell travel-related services.

Similarly, cable television companies have expanded their offerings into Internet and telephone services. Research and development activities play a dominant role in this strategy. The time required to develop and test new products may be long, but once a product is developed, creating awareness, interest, and availability should be relatively rapid because the firm already has a relationship with customers.

A product development strategy is also riskier than a market penetration strategy because the necessary product may not be possible to develop, at least at a cost acceptable to customers, or the product developed does not match the needs of customers.

4. Diversification Strategy

A diversification strategy involves taking new products into new markets. This is really the creation of a completely new business. This is the riskiest of strategies and the strategy likely to require the most patience in waiting for a return on investment.

What is an Example of a Marketing Strategy?

These examples of marketing strategies of a business will provide you with plenty of inspiration for your own campaigns and help you ace the advertising industry.

1. Spotify: offering an alternative user experience

Spotify is the go-to music streaming service for most people around the world, but what is it that makes them stand out?

Spotify’s key marketing efforts focus on how the brand is different from other services, providing users with the chance to discover new music with ease and even lets you filter tracks by mood as well as genre. The artificial intelligence in Spotify’s algorithms provides users with carefully curated, bespoke playlists that actually suit their tastes and manages to turn playing music or listening to a podcast into a whole new experience.

2. Nordstrom: Retargeting campaigns

Nordstrom is well-known for dominating when it comes to marketing, and this campaign was remarkably successful. Employing the latest retargeting technology and tactics, Nordstrom was able to dramatically boost its bottom line and reduce cart abandonment. This campaign primarily utilized abandoned cart emails alongside social media ads that were activated following a website visit from the user.   

3. GoPro: User-generated content

GoPro certainly isn’t the first – or the last – company to achieve success with a user-generated-content-led marketing strategy, but that doesn’t make it any less effective or worthy of inclusion in our list! As a brand dedicated to creating on-the-go, fast content, the product lends itself nicely to this marketing tactic, so GoPro can benefit from a “spectacular” Instagram feed without needing a huge budget to take the images itself. And what’s more, each user-generated image that ends up on the feed motivates others to snap pics and share their experiences.

4. Sephora: Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are a bit of a tale as old as time for maximizing customer retention, but that doesn’t mean all loyalty programs are created equal. Sephora discovered the trick to innovative, inspiring loyalty programs with its tiered approach and generous rewards. These rewards provide plenty of incentive for users to buy and are a fantastic way of increasing word-of-mouth marketing.

5. Rainforest alliance: “Follow the Frog.”

These days, the top online stores all offer information about how they engage in sustainable practices, have cruelty-free manufacturing, and/or how they support charities and initiatives around the world. Rainforest Alliance’s “Follow the Frog” campaign tapped into this priority by offering B2B and B2C organizations the chance to demonstrate their commitment to the environment and sustainability with a green frog seal on their products and website. This became a well-known symbol that’s highly desirable to other brands in all industries.

6. Twitch: Niche-specific marketing

Many brands make the mistake of trying to market their product or service to a target audience that’s simply too broad. But that only leads to a confusing message and few real customers. Instead, follow the lead of the social streaming service, Twitch.

This company wasted no time or money advertising to people who won’t be interested in what makes the brand unique… Instead, all its efforts went into establishing precisely who the niche market is and how to attract them.

7. Nike: “Just Do It” – promoting values

We are all familiar with Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan, but have you ever given the marketing plan behind it any thought? Well, Nike used to be a brand dedicated to providing athleticwear to athletes… But they changed their model to appeal to the masses and put values first. The “Just Do It” and “*If you have a body, you’re an athlete” campaigns have been instrumental in Nike’s prolonged success by making everyone feel included and welcomed.

What are the 8 Steps to Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy?

A well-thought-out social media plan is crucial to the success of any brand’s social media marketing. Establishing a solid social media marketing plan allows you to gauge how effective your posts are, and measure them against your overall digital marketing goals. Not only that, but it’ll make your job much easier! 

Below are 8 Strategies that can help you create a very effective social media strategy.

1. Set Goals for Your Presence in Social Networks

Why do you want your brand to be on social media? The first step to building a solid marketing plan is to clearly define your goals. This step is crucial because if you never set any goals, you’ll never know if your strategy is successful or not. Without goals, you have nothing to work towards, like taking a shot in the dark.

To set effective goals remember to make them “SMART:”

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Within social media marketing, the “M” of SMART goals is especially crucial in determining the success of a campaign. 

But it’s important to measure the right metrics. Instead of focusing on “likes” or comments, think in terms of KPIs that have a real impact on the business. You may measure each network differently, since you may desire to achieve different goals through each one.

2. Learn About Your Audience

The second step of your plan is to develop a comprehensive understanding of your potential audience. If you understand your audience in-depth, you’ll be able to create content that is more relevant to them. Creating messages or content that attracts or brings value to your customers is a great inbound method.

But how do you understand your audience before you even have one? Start by creating a profile of your ideal follower. Search for real data about the profile of users of different networks and the analytics of your page. This will help you refine your strategy and also be more effective when launching social ads.

3. Take a Look at the Competition

Most likely, your competition already has some sort of a social presence. Don’t be afraid to take a peek at their different channels and draw some inspiration for your marketing plan.

A competition analysis helps you understand what your competitors are doing and what works (and doesn’t work). Looking at their pages helps paint a broad picture of how your sector treats social media marketing.

This analysis will also help you find market opportunities and gaps. For example, maybe your direct competition has dedicated a major part of their strategy to Facebook. This means that Instagram could be an area to explore for your own brand. Instead of competing directly with them, you can cultivate a strong and unique presence on a different platform. 

When analyzing the competition, social listening is your ally. Keep track of competing brands and industry keywords and constantly monitor their results.

4. Do a Social Media Audit

If you’re already on social media, a social media audit will analyze your effectiveness. Try to answer these questions:

• What’s working and what’s not?
• Who is connecting with your brand?
• What social networks is your target audience on?
• How does your presence compare to your competition? 

The social network audit is also a good time to resolve other issues:

• Check if you have any old accounts that have been inactive or that are unnecessary. If they don’t align with your goals don’t be afraid to delete those accounts. Remember, it is better to have an active presence focused on a few channels rather than haphazardly trying to be on everything.
• Look for possible imposter accounts. If you can, verify your profiles on each social network so that your audience knows that you are a legitimate account.

5. Create Profiles on Social Networks and Improve the Previous Ones

So, you’ve mapped out your strategy and have a clear plan. Now it’s time to decide which social channels you want to include in your marketing strategy and how you will use each of them. 

For example, maybe you’ve decided to use Twitter as a customer service channel, and Instagram as a place for tutorials for your products. 

To further focus your network presence, try writing a mission for each channel summarized in a single sentence.

Once you’ve decided which networks to join, create your profiles or optimize the ones you already have. When you can, use keywords adapted to users’ search habits to make it as easy as possible to find your account. 

6. Create a Content Calendar

Because social media is such a fast-paced and topical medium, it may initially seem counter-intuitive to plan out your content in advance. But a content calendar can free you up to stay on top of trends and news, while also ensuring that you’re regularly sharing high-quality content.

You can find several different examples of social media calendars online. In general, I recommend including the date, time, copy, any additional elements (links, videos, gifs, etc.), and the network in which the content will be posted in the calendar. Having a calendar ensures that you’re taking advantage of the “peak hours” to post. 

Content calendars also help to determine how to distribute your content. For example, you can decide that 50% of your content will be focused on directing traffic to your blog, 25% will be from other sources, 20% will be aimed at objectives such as lead generation or conversion and 5% remaining will refer to the culture of your company.

In general, I recommend you follow the 80:20 rule. 80% of your posts should be entertaining, informative, or educational, and only about 20% should include direct promotion. 

7. Get Inspired!

Let’s be real – social media marketing is a lot harder than it looks! Sometimes, you need to step outside of your brand and get a little inspiration and take a peek at what other brands are doing.

Every social network has case studies or success stories that show how different brands are using their tools. You can usually find these in the business information sections on each social network’s website.

Another way to generate some ideas is to look at different digital marketing awards, like The Shorty Awards. See what the winners are doing, and ask yourself how you can apply their tactics to your own brand and voice.

Finally, you can also ask your followers directly what they would like to see on your social channels. After all, they’re following you for a reason! You can also use social listening to see what their online behaviors are and how you can take advantage of them in your social media marketing plan. 

8. Test, Measure, and Adjust the Strategy

Developing a marketing plan is an essential first step, but likely the first method you use won’t always be the most successful. Include periodic checks and tests in your plan to analyze what’s working and what’s not. And remember, social networks are a changing environment, so you will have to adapt to the habits of users.

What Should be Included in Social Media Strategy?

1. Social Media Audits

A great social media strategy is built on big-picture mentality – beyond thinking about what you want each individual post to do, you need to look at the overall state of your social media presence before you can move forward.

Make a habit of conducting regular social media audits on your channels. A self-audit can help you catch inconsistencies, learn more about what campaigns worked (or not), review benchmarks, and maybe even set new goals, enabling you to consistently improve your social media strategy. 

2. Clear Goals

Defining clear goals before you begin any campaign or building a strategy can help you keep track of progress, and identify points at which you may need to ramp up efforts.

Focusing on clear goals will give you and your team direction on where to concentrate your energy, and it’s key to have a defined focus to unite your overall efforts.

3. Clear Understanding of the Brand’s Audience

Getting to know your audience in the most in-depth way possible is also essential to creating social media content that truly resonates with your potential followers and customers. 

Ask your audience what their pain points are, find out what publications they read, and where they hang out, how much they make. The more you know, and the clearer the picture of your target audience, the better.

Figuring out these details will help you come up with ways to connect with and build a more engaged community.

4. The Right Platforms

Here, we are referring to the right social media network(s) for your business, and becoming well versed in how those platforms work.

You should also know that just because a network is popular, that doesn’t mean it’ll be a good fit for your target audience, or your internal capabilities.

5. A Content Bank and Social Media Schedule

At the core of every successful social media strategy is a solid plan and editorial calendar.

Knowing what tasks and important dates are coming up will help keep your team on the same page, and give you the freedom to spend more time engaging with your audience, conducting social listening or taking advantage of spontaneous opportunities to push your initiative.

Your schedule should be based on supporting your social media objectives, and any offline marketing efforts as well.

Creating a content bank is the second part of having a social media strategy and schedule set in place – an organized content bank will help you keep an inventory of older content you can repurpose when you find content gaps.

6. Social Tools

Without tools, all of us social media marketers would be going nuts.

Effective social media strategies are built on using a mix of automation and timely engagement.

Tools can also refer to network-specific tools (like Instagram Stories, Facebook Live etc.) which you can integrate to increase your growth on each social media channel.

7. Analysis and Measurement

Every social media strategy should include the measurement and analysis of your efforts.

Not every part of your strategy will be a winner, but analyzing and measuring will enable you to stop doing what’s not working – and to double-down on the parts that are producing results.

8. Time for Engagement

We’re at a point in social media where engagement with your audience has become a key element in growing your network.

With so many accounts, posts, and messages being thrown at us every day, we have to make the extra effort to truly become part of the community and put social into social media.

What is the First Step in a Social Media Advertising Strategy?

A social media strategy is critical to stand out from your competition and make a mark on social media. Here are the steps you can follow to create the ultimate social media marketing plan that will help you reach your business goals.

1. Define Your Goals

The first and most important step of creating a social media strategy is of setting your goals. Without a goal in mind, it will be difficult to channel your efforts to reach it. 

That’s why you must define achievable goals which are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) too. 

Some of your goals can be: 

• Increase your reach
• Increase the number of leads
• Improve your revenues
• Drive more traffic to your website

2. Define Your Target Audience

It is critical to figure out your target audience before starting your social media marketing campaigns. If you don’t know who your target customer is, you won’t know who to advertise to. Define your target audience based on their demographics, location, and interests. 

Try to find out their pain points so that you can create marketing campaigns that show how your product can solve their problems. You should also know what sort of content they consume regularly. This will help you plan your content in a better manner. 

3. Choose the Social Media Platform

Once you’ve defined your audience, you need to figure out which social media platform to use to reach them. 

For that, you need to determine which social media platform is used by your target audience the most. Find out the top 1-2 social media platforms and ensure that you make your presence felt on those platforms. Make sure to cater your content to naturally fit in their feed.

4. Audit Your Performance

Once you’ve started posting content regularly on social media, you should start analyzing performance. See what sort of content works and what doesn’t. 

Find out the engagement on different forms of content as well. You should also figure out the time when your audience is the most active on social media so that you can schedule your posts for that time. 

Lastly, you should audit your performance against that of your competitors as well. Compare their follower bases, engagement, reach, etc. with yours. 

What is Social Media Strategy Cycle?

The social media planning cycle is a 9-step process to develop your SMM plan by following a continually evolving process. In going through each of these 9 steps, you can set, adjust, and modify goals along with their related actions.

Step 1: Listen and Observe

In the first step of the cycle, you listen to what your customers are saying about your company. By listening to your customer base, you can enable your organization to set achievable social media goals.

Listening also involves taking note of what people are saying about your competitors, the industry, and the tone of your community. You’ll find that different social media platforms return various results, so observing each one individually can be helpful. 

Step 2: Setting Goals

To set goals, you must precisely determine several details about your target audience. This includes defining the location, tastes, needs, and behaviors of your target audience that you discovered in the previous step.

It’s also a good idea to conduct a SWOT analysis to determine Strengths and Weaknesses in your organization, followed by further analysis of Opportunities and Threats that exist in the current environment. Use your findings to set your goals.

Step 3: Defining Strategies

Defining strategies is done case by case. Each strategy will be determined by the available information surrounding your specific goal. Start by thinking about the social media strategy like a blueprint or a roadmap.

As you define your strategy, you need to consider how your audience’s needs align with your goals. From there, you need to decide how you can encourage them to engage with your business. Consider your brand’s personality, the content you’ll be sharing, and the platforms you’re thinking about using in defining your strategies.

Step 4: Identifying the Target Audience

By identifying the target audience, you can organize your marketing strategies to connect to people that are most likely to respond. Ideally, these people will become your customers as well as loyal brand advocates.

In this step, you also develop your buyer persona by defining the ideal customer, the inherent value of your content, where they can be reached, their demographics, and day-to-day routines. You want to find what connects your perfect client to your organization.

Step 5: Selecting Tools

The tools you select will be used on various social media platforms you’ll be focusing on. Each tool has a different impact depending on the platform you’ll be using. For example, hashtags work well on Instagram and Twitter, but are not always as effective on Facebook.

Examples of tools include, but are not limited to:

• SEO
• Hashtags
• Short links
• Images

Step 6: Selecting Platforms and Channels

Selecting platforms refers to choosing which path you’ll be using to transmit your content to your target audience. Examples include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

“Channels” refers to the different technologies, such as mobile devices or desktop computers, that your target audience uses to access your chosen platforms. 

Your plan should include multiple platforms and channels to achieve the greatest outreach. Consider your preferred platforms and channels as you complete each step, so you can get the most out of your SMM plan. Remember, you can’t treat each platform the same way. It won’t work.

Step 7: Implementation

Goals, the target audience, strategies, and appropriate tools are brought together to create actionable marketing strategies that are specific to each social media platform. You’ll launch your carefully planned tactics and march full-steam ahead.

Many companies mistakenly begin with implementation without thinking critically about the other steps. Then they’ll wonder why they’re not getting the results they wanted. The biggest reason their efforts don’t work is that they didn’t formulate a strategic plan of attack. Instead, they just started throwing things at the wall to see what would stick.

Step 8: Monitoring

In this step, you are tracking and measuring your social media marketing initiatives. By reviewing that data, you can evaluate the success of the strategies you’re using.

As the information comes back to you, you’ll need to recognize when you need to tweak your methods because, over time, you’ll discover that things change. You’ll have to continuously monitor, so you’ll be ready to make adjustments as needed as your audience evolves.

Step 9: Tuning

It’s a good idea to consider the fact that social media is a dynamic mode of communication. Because of these constant changes, it is critical that you recognize tuning as a continual process of evaluation. 

You can’t create a single post for Facebook or upload just one photo to Instagram and expect a consistent flow of positive results. Any success in doing so would be short-lived. Instead, you must continuously adjust and improve existing elements of your strategic plan to maximize your success.

What is the First Step in a Social Media Marketing Campaign?

A social media marketing plan is a road map to achieving your business goals through social media platforms. Whether you like social media or not, being active on social media is a must if you are trying to market your business.

What easier way to reach your target market for free, personally and conveniently? It seems that everyone has at least one favored social media platform that they use. Leveraging the power of social media is vital in today’s digital world.

The first step to a successful social media marketing plan is to establish what you want to achieve. With any good marketing plan, you need to assess your current situation and establish your goals. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.

Establishing SMART goals is the first step in making them a reality. Are you goals to increase brand awareness, generate leads, inform and educate, drive traffic to your site, retain customers, or increase sales by 10%? No matter what your goals are, big or small, set realistic deadlines for reaching them so that you’re always able to measure and readjust.

What are the Steps of Social Media Management?

Managing your firm’s social media can be a daunting responsibility with a lot of moving pieces. But by breaking down the process into basic components, you can successfully manage your social media without getting overwhelmed.

1. Set up a content calendar

A content calendar is a social media plan scheduled out over a few weeks or months. It can be housed on a Google calendar or doc or on a project management tool like Slack, Trello, or Asana.

Start by populating your calendar with national holidays, corporate anniversaries, as well as company conferences and industry events (once they resume). Then fill in the calendar with a mix of promotional, educational, light-hearted, and thought-provoking content.

Planning ahead will save you time and allow you to prepare quality content instead of posting in an off-the-cuff and reactive manner. At the same time, allow for some flexibility because something unexpected will always come up.

2. Create content

Now that you have a framework set up on your content calendar, think about your audiences and what will resonate with them.

Content can be inspired by frequently asked questions or concerns. Your content should be simple, easy to understand, and sharable.

Allow members of your team to contribute. When conferences resume, if someone from your firm is attending one on behalf of the company, encourage them to live Tweet the conference or share photos to Instagram stories. Key takeaways can be shared as a blog post and/or as several successive social media posts.

3. Create graphics templates

For graphic elements, customize pre-designed templates on a graphic design platform like Canva or create your own templates in Photoshop. Templates allow you to:

• Create images in a batch, saving you time
• Maintain a consistent look for your brand
• Share the image creation responsibility with someone else
• Move quickly if a certain topic needs to be addressed urgently

4. Write engaging captions

Your captions should be brief, well-written (no grammatical or spelling errors), and conversational. They should encourage your audience to engage with you further by clicking a link to read more, by responding to a question that you ask, or by visiting your website for more information on your services.

5. Choose effective hashtags

Hashtags are key to your social media strategy.  Each platform has a search bar for you to browse possible hashtags for your content and choose ones with either high or niche followers. You can also utilize third-party tools like Rite Tag or Hashtagify to search for the most popular hashtags.

If you are only using one or two hashtags, you’ll want them to be as targeted as possible to your post content.  You may also choose to use a branded hashtag to build your own community.

Tip: Save a list of your favorite industry hashtags for quick and easy reference when you post.

6. Schedule social media posts

Use a social media scheduling tool such as Hootsuite, Buffer, or Later to automatically post at optimal times.

The ideal scenario is to batch schedule several posts every few weeks or months, which saves you from scrambling to post at the last minute. But even if you can’t batch schedule, these tools also allow you to analyze the effectiveness of your content and the days/times you post.

7. Encourage sharing

Encourage employees at your firm to share your posts on their own social media accounts, thereby increasing your overall social media reach.

If you have encouraged others to contribute content (see point 2), they will be even more likely to share posts with their audience in an organic way.

8. Interact with followers

After your post goes live, your work is not over. Pay attention to who likes and comments on your post and respond. These small interactions will make a huge impact and help to build your audience and your community.

Social listening also helps you address PR disasters before they get out of hand. If the general feeling about your company or industry is down, you can quickly identify the cause and react quickly.

9. Keep up with updates on social media platforms

From algorithm updates to new features, social media platforms are constantly changing. To keep up with the latest news, sign up for newsletters or follow companies who make social media marketing their business. Some suggestions:

• Social Media Today
• Sprout Social
• Later blog

What are the 5 of Most Powerful Marketing Tips?

Marketing made a huge shift in the last 15 years, from direct mail to email marketing and classified ads to social media ads, but what is working best in 2023 and how can you get the absolute best performance from your campaigns?

We will now discuss the five most powerful marketing tips you can use, to get the most from your marketing budget!

Pixel It!

Ok, so every business is now using Facebook in some way, shape or form.

You have the businesses that use the ‘boost post’ button from time to time, then you have the businesses that simply use the organic social media feed, and then the hardcore advertisers who use ad manager and all the extra features that offers.

What do all of these businesses have in common?

They can ALL benefit from the Facebook pixel.

If you haven’t heard of the Facebook pixel, it is a small piece of code that is inserted into your website, and it tracks how users from Facebook use your website.

This is probably the most powerful tool at your disposal today. Why? Well, even if you’re not using Facebook ads right now, adding them to your site will allow Facebook to get to know the kinds of people that visit your website, so if you ever do decide to boost a post or run a more, it’s going to have a great idea who it should be targeting to get you results, and let’s face it, they want you to get results so you keep paying them to show your ads!

The artificial intelligence at work here is insane!

If you are running ads already, but you don’t yet have the pixel installed, then you’re missing out!

Using this combined with ads manager will allow you to target ads to people who have visited specific pages of your website and therefore create ads that speak directly to them. For example, if someone visits your checkout page, but not your ‘thank you’ page, you know they have abandoned their cart, and you can serve them an ad offering a money-saving code to complete their purchase.

On top of this, the Facebook pixel is now on so many websites that they know the kinds of people that visit your site and what other sites you visit. This allows you to use a feature called a ‘lookalike’ audience.’ This is essentially Facebook doing your targeting for you, based on the kinds of people who have visited similar websites.

It’s an amazing tool that no business should be without!

Track it!

As well as the pixel, there is another way to track your traffic and see what they are doing on your site, and this is using Google Analytics.

Analytics is a fantastic tool because not only is it easy to install and free of charge, it also tracks exactly where your traffic comes from and what it does when it gets there.

With this in mind, you can see which of your pages are performing best, and perhaps work towards promoting those pages more, but on top of this, it’s going to provide insight into which kinds of traffic sources work best for your individual business and where you should concentrate your marketing budget.

Email Rapport

Most companies do some level of email marketing, but very few do it well.

The majority of businesses will throw out an offer from time to time via email, but this is the least productive way of using your email list, which is actually very valuable to you.

You should keep in touch with your audience regularly, and only sparingly offer them products. It sounds counterproductive, but the aim should always be to provide value and build a relationship with your audience base first. Promotions should come later once you have that in place.

Send pieces of content that will be useful to them, or tips / how-to guides, or anything that is relevant to your business that your audience will enjoy. From there, start to offer the odd promotion on occasion, and ideally make those promotions relevant to the email content.

For example, if you’re a kitchen tools seller, you might offer free recipes every week. One week you have a recipe that requires a mixer, a relevant promotion would be to offer the mixer at a discounted rate.

The best thing about email marketing is it’s very cheap to do in comparison to other advertising methods, and it’s like printing money once you get it right. You know you can simply put out an email and gain some sales!

YouTube

YouTube is an underrated marketing source, and that is generally because not many businesses utilize it. It’s full of hip youngsters and influencers, but you will notice the channels that focus on real solutions actually get a lot of followers you can then promote to.

You’re also proving value from the moment someone finds you, so YouTube should definitely be part of your marketing plan if you have something to educate on.

For example, a skincare brand may create videos on skincare routines and how to keep your skin looking great, then sell products off the back of that as they gain subscribers.

Beware though, YouTube is a slow burner as a channel takes time to grow, but it’s also free so it’s a no loss situation.

Back To Basics

This isn’t suitable for every business, but if you are offering services to local businesses such as accountancy or marketing then this is a great tip.

Most companies receive hundreds of marketing emails every month, and most either end up in the spam folder or deleted unopened. However, traditional snail mail is making a comeback because if you write a handwritten letter and send it direct to the person you want the attention of, you are much more likely to get a response than via email, mainly because letters are now only used for official purposes and it gives you a chance to stand out from the crowd.

What is a Marketing Strategy?

According to Aha, you need a precise marketing strategy to ensure the success of your business. It’s essential to create a long-term plan to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage in a predefined market. It includes aligning your organization around how you will reach your target audience, explaining the benefits of your products and services, and encouraging the audience to become your customers.

Marketing is exceptionally crucial for the survival and growth of your business. These are the two significant aspects of a successful strategic marketing plan:

A. The selection of the best marketing techniques
B. The knowledge of how you can implement these techniques for marketing your business

What 5 Main Things are Needed in a Marketing Plan?

Developing an effective marketing strategy is crucial for any business that wants to have success. Every accomplished businessperson has heard about these important elements of a marketing plan. Sadly, many small business owners don’t take marketing seriously despite knowing how important it is for the growth of their company.

We have seen many smaller companies do their marketing in a chaotic manner – doing a little bit of branding, advertising, and sales here and there, but not having much of an idea about the impact of their activities.

Not having your marketing plan elements set up properly could lead to a waste of resources and money in the future. In marketing (and in business generally) it’s a good idea to have set goals, activities and ways of measuring your efforts.

When you are just starting to write a marketing plan, it is important to first focus on the main elements you want to address. Some of the marketing elements can be situational, but most of them are usually derived from standard marketing principles. Those principles stay true to any business, from a hair salon to an international logistics business.

Conducting market research can be one of the most tedious tasks at first, but it will pay dividends for years after. This part should take up the biggest chunk of your planning – sure, too much research and not enough action can be harmful, but in most cases, we see people not going in-depth enough and ending up paying expensive marketing companies to do their homework for them.

Here are the 5 main things you need in your marketing plan

1. Market Research
   1. Market Size
   2. Industry Standards
   3. Market dynamics/seasonality
   4. Competition analysis
   5. Product/service analysis
2. Target market
3. Goals Business goals
   Marketing goals
4. Marketing strategy
5. Budget

What is an Internet Marketing Plan?

An internet marketing plan provides a road map for a company’s marketing efforts and is an essential part of the larger business strategy. An internet marketing plan strikes a balance between the company’s strengths and its desired market position. Having a solid plan gives you a chance to direct and monitor your marketing resources and strategy, and in turn, reach your business goals.

Is an Internet Marketing Plan Important?

People with a plan outperform those without a plan ー the same is true for businesses. Having no specific internet marketing plan for your business means leaving money on the table. Without one, you may forget about an expected return on investment (ROI) and lose opportunities for growth.
A business needs this sort of plan to know its targets and find the right path to hit them. A correctly composed internet marketing plan helps achieve lower marketing costs, measurable outcomes, global reach, competitive advantages, and increased sales. Among the top reasons to formulate one are the following:

• most contemporary consumers are online;
• it’s an opportunity for two-way communication;
• it personalizes user experience;
• such a plan allows you to drive quality traffic;
• it raises market presence and visibility.

Almost all companies operate online even if they have physical offices. Various types of online marketing bring different results. For example, 49% of online users share that they would love to receive promotional emails and offers from their favorite brands every week. This is a win-win for users and brands because increased communication not only builds stronger relationships with clients but increases revenue significantly.

How Can you Create an Internet Marketing Plan?

The process of creating an internet marketing plan can be time-consuming if you do it on your own. When it comes to email marketing, you can rely on SendPulse. The service helps you send bulk emails, automate campaigns, and analyze statistics.

With the help of statistics from your email campaigns, you can discover valuable insights and create a killer internet marketing plan. Anyway, here are some steps to consider while developing an internet marketing plan:

Set objectives

To have a clear picture of your path to achieving your goals, make sure to lay out clear and attainable business objectives. Are you launching a new product or entering a new field? Are you pursuing the goal of increasing your audience and brand awareness or focusing on converting existing leads into clients?

Anyway, each of these goals requires reaching some other objectives. To increase your brand awareness, you need to reinforce your SEO strategy, invest more in advertising, start guest blogging, create viral content. Having a clear picture in mind, you’ll efficiently do the groundwork that will make your business prosper.

Detect your target audience

Create a buyer persona. To whom do you plan to sell your product or service? Both B2B and B2C companies should define their audiences properly. A buyer persona is a representation of your customer. If properly built, it will help you speak the same language to your clients.

To create a buyer persona, use surveys, polls, quizzes, subscription forms, analyze customer feedback, and ask them to share their personal information with you.

SendPulse free subscription forms are an effective tool to grow your mailing list. You can create a unique form or choose a pre-designed one to save time. There’s no need to have any technical skills as you should just drag the necessary elements to your form.

Armed with this data, you’ll be able to create highly personalized offers, adapt your products and services to meet the needs of your audience, and get useful insights into the improvements.

With SendPulse, you can create multichannel subscription forms. They will help you collect not only users’ email addresses and phone numbers, but let them contact your brand via chatbots in Facebook Messenger and Telegram. All you need is to add links to your chatbots.

Evaluate your competition

Analyzing your competitor’s strategy will do the trick for you. You’ll manage to learn from other people’s mistakes and eliminate failures, discover the most effective tactics and methods.

In particular, start with your SEO strategy. Organic search is the core channel to consider when launching a new product. Study the content that performs well in your field, find relevant keywords, examine how your competitors use them and do it better.

Get to know which type of content brings more conversions and which increases user engagement. Services like Serpstat, BuzzSumo, Moz, Ahrefs will help you cope with this task. Then, do your best to create content that will answer all of your users’ questions efficiently.

Choose the right channels

The channels that you use predetermine the success of your strategy. Each channel helps achieve different long and short-term goals. Thus, you’ll need to pick up different tactics. It’s important for you to know where your audience lives and why they prefer a given channel.

For example, if your plan is to increase brand awareness in the long-term, you can choose organic search, PPC and content marketing. If your purpose is audience growth, go for guest blogging and influencer marketing. If you often lose clients before they make a purchase, try email marketing.

Internet marketing strategies include:

• search engine optimization (SEO);
• email marketing;
• social media marketing;
• PPC;
• content marketing;
• remarketing
• influencer marketing;
• mobile marketing;
• affiliate marketing;
• marketing automation.

All of these strategies are effective when performed correctly but stay away from trying to cover as many goals as possible via all available channels. Focus on one long-term goal and remember that each channel requires you to hire a specialist in a particular field to ensure that you are using the optimal approach.

Set up proper KPIs

Measuring the success of your strategy paves the way for big improvements. Before putting your plan into practice, make sure that your goals are achievable and the KPIs are measurable, otherwise, you won’t be able to assess your efforts.

Create the list of the important KPIs, set the desired metrics for each strategy, and work out a plan if you fail to achieve them.

Most metrics are available to track directly in the service you use to put your plan into action. SendPulse provides reports and campaign analytics after sending your email. So, you may improve your tactics on the go.

What are Types of Online Marketing?

In the past decade, digital marketing or online markting has become a vital component in an organization’s overall marketing strategy. It allows companies to tailor messages to reach a specific audience, making it possible to market directly to people who are likely to be interested in their product.

Digital marketing encompasses a wide variety of marketing tactics and technologies used to reach consumers online. As a form of online marketing, it allows organizations to establish a brand identity and has revolutionized the marketing industry.

A senior associate dean of business programs, Dr. Mark Hobson, said although digital marketing seems like a new world, in fact, it is based on many of the principles familiar to traditional marketers and requires both foundational marketing knowledge and technical know-how.

• Digital marketing can be broadly broken into 8 main categories including:
• Search Engine Optimization,
• Pay-per-Click,
• Social Media Marketing,
• Content Marketing,
• Email Marketing,
• Mobile Marketing,
• Marketing Analytics,
• Affiliate Marketing,

Finally

Some digital marketing amateurs dive into search engine marketing methods believing these are a lazier version of SEO practices. But don’t get the wrong idea: While setting up an SEM campaign is hardly ever as challenging as working on your SEO, it’s no child’s play either.

For starters, money is not the only factor that comes into play in an ad auction. It’s also critical to display top-performing ads and have relevant and user-friendly landing pages. Needless to say, it takes time and effort to get those aspects right.

And let’s not forget about search engine marketing analysis! This practice is crucial for creating cost-effective campaigns for the long run – doubly so when your SEM ads grow! It can be difficult to manage several campaigns at the same time, but you must keep testing your keywords and measuring your ads’ performance regularly so you can ensure excellent results.