The Six Pillars of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing can be segmented into six core disciplines:
Content Marketing: This entails creating, publishing, and distributing valuable, informative, and high-quality content strategically crafted to educate, engage, retain, and convert your target audience.
Native Advertising: This involves using paid advertisements that seamlessly blend with the visual style of the media platform they appear on. Native ads are commonly found in social media feeds or presented as recommended content on web pages.
Pay Per Click (PPC): This is a paid marketing tactic where online ads are displayed, and a fee is incurred each time a user clicks on the advertisement.
Search Engine Optimization: Also known as SEO, this practice involves optimizing a website to make it more search engine friendly and visible in search results.
Social Media Marketing: This encompasses promoting a business through various social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Snapchat.
Email Marketing: This encompasses promoting a business through various social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Snapchat.
Comprehending each pillar and assessing its relevance to your business will aid in shaping your digital marketing strategy. The following 10 steps will establish the groundwork for your strategy:
Step 1 – Understand Your Audience
In the early days of digital marketing, marketers collected both quantitative and qualitative data about their target audience, encompassing factors such as age, interests, occupation, and location. However, with the advent of social media, audience targeting has reached new levels of sophistication, allowing for a deeper understanding of the “buyer persona.” Every marketing strategy should commence by comprehending your buyer persona and effectively reaching them.
The buyer persona delineates the ideal customer for a business and embodies a user-centric approach to digital marketing. For instance, marketers create a fictional character that epitomizes a type of buyer likely to engage with a website, product, or brand. Marketers employ personas alongside market segmentation, crafting personas to represent specific segments.
Step 2 – Define Your Digital Marketing Objectives
Undoubtedly, this stage stands as the most crucial aspect of the digital marketing process. Without a clear grasp of a business’s goals and objectives, a strategy risks faltering and failing to achieve the desired results. It’s imperative to ensure that the goals established for the digital strategy align with the business’s needs and are always measurable to track progress toward objectives.
Step 3 – Content Creation and Blogging
Top-notch content is indispensable for every digital marketing campaign, ensuring that every piece of content on your website serves to educate and assist your audience. Blogging emerges as a cornerstone content marketing strategy, serving several essential functions. These include driving increased traffic to your site, solidifying your brand presence, furnishing content for your social media platforms, establishing you as a thought leader in your industry ahead of competitors, and improving your search engine rankings, ultimately resulting in more sales.
Step 4 – Assess Your Current Digital Marketing Channels
Evaluate the digital channels and online assets you currently utilize, including your social media platforms, website, native advertising, or blog. Determine their effectiveness for your business and explore ways to optimize them for broader reach..
For instance, if your social media platforms exhibit high engagement, capitalize on this by enhancing your social media content to align with your objectives—essentially, magnify what is already proving successful for you!
Step 5 – Implement Automation in Your Processes
You’ve likely encountered discussions about digital marketing automation, and there’s good reason for it—it’s effective, and it works seamlessly. With advancements in technology, today’s top digital marketing automation platforms, such as HubSpot, offer remarkable capabilities for your strategy. These platforms simplify automating your content, lead generation, email marketing campaigns, and social media marketing efforts.
An additional benefit is that such software can be seamlessly integrated with your sales CRM, enhancing your sales process and boosting your bottom line.
Step 6 – Prioritize Mobile Optimization
Chances are, you’re reading this blog on your phone, highlighting the importance of ensuring your digital marketing campaign caters to mobile as well as desktop users. It’s crucial to optimize your website for mobile devices, ensuring users have a seamless experience with your brand across all platforms. Be sure to review your mobile responsive design, from your website to your email templates, as you wouldn’t want to alienate your target audience simply because they’re using a different device.
Step 7 – Facilitate Customer Engagement with Your Business
The effectiveness of digital marketing lies in its ability to connect with your target audience on a more personalized level. Therefore, your strategy should prioritize making it easy for leads and website visitors to reach out to your business.
For instance, incorporating lead forms on your page, implementing chat pop-ups, and ensuring your contact details are readily available are essential (this underscores the importance of strong calls to action). Additionally, responding promptly to clients via social media is imperative. We currently live in an era of instant gratification, and your target audience will expect timely responses from you.
Step 8 – Harness the Power of Technology
Your digital marketing endeavours can only reach their full potential if you leverage the right technology. This includes automation software and analytical tools like HubSpot, which can aid you at every stage of your marketing process. Such platforms help you assess whether your campaign is effectively achieving its intended goals.
Step 9 – Understand Your Competitors and Stand Out
It’s crucial to analyse what your competitors offer on their online platforms and distinguish yourself from them, positioning yourself as an industry leader. Emphasize what sets you apart in your content and devise unique lead generation tactics and selling points that will captivate your target audience’s attention. Achieving this requires investing time and effort into research, and it’s essential to incorporate this differentiation into all your content and marketing strategies moving forward.
Step 10 – Monitor Your Progress
It’s essential to track your campaign from inception to assess what’s effective and what can be adjusted. This can be achieved by assigning teams to report on your strategy’s performance. Ensure you have the means to measure all your campaigns, whether they involve SEO, PPC, or social media marketing. All aspects can be measured using the platforms themselves, through Google, or via platforms like HubSpot.
