Digital marketing is essentially any type of marketing that is delivered digitally via mediums such as emails, social media, the internet, etc. In order to grow and scale an online business in an efficient way, digital marketing is essential. The issue is how do we master a digital marketing strategy without breaking the bank.

What is Digital Marketing?

If you can learn to master a digital marketing strategy, you, the business owner, reach potential customers or clients and build and foster relationships with an existing base.

In 2022, it is important to be able to communicate in places where the customers are, which is almost overwhelmingly online and on other internet platforms. A good digital marketing strategy will include a variety of tactics that are catered to each specific platform and tailored to each unique audience. 

While there are lots of programs and software that offer magical solutions, there are ways for beginners to master a digital marketing strategy without paying an arm and a leg.

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What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan that implements multiple digital platforms to achieve a business’ marketing goals. There are many different ways to market a product or service digitally and a good strategy will deliver advertisements and promotions across a wide array of platforms using different marketing tools. Different digital marketing campaigns are commonly used to complete a well-rounded digital marketing strategy.

Categories of Digital Marketing Strategies

While there are many different types of digital marketing strategies, they all tend to fall into six categories:

Content Marketing

Creating content online can be achieved in many different ways. Blogs, YouTube videos, and podcasts are all great ways to create searchable content that can be used to market a business. Offering value to your audience has been proven to be one of the best ways to warm up a cold audience. Interchanging value with marketing material through email marketing is a great way to make sales. 

It also makes it possible for you to do market research, polling your audience to see exactly what they need from you. What better way to sell than to provide the service or product you know your audience wants?

Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing is one of the most commonly used forms of marketing and gives businesses a great opportunity to reach customers in their inboxes. While it is not as easy as it used to be to obtain a prospect’s email address, once a business does obtain it, email marketing makes it possible to build an ongoing relationship. 

This relationship allows the business to regularly provide value and have the opportunity to advertise different products or services.

Organic Advertising

Organic or native advertising is the ideal way for a business to be found online. Rather than having to pay to be found on the internet, it is best to appear in search engine results. 

Most businesses benefit from having a website, one that is optimized with content, images, videos, and keywords that will allow it to be found by anyone searching for related information.

Pay Per Click Advertising

This type of advertising is exactly how it sounds. A business not willing to rely solely on organic advertising can pay to be found online. The business is only charged when someone clicks on the ad. The cost of the click is determined by the type of ad and the budget set by the business. 

If the business is only willing to spend a maximum of $1,000 per month on ads and a maximum of $10 per click, this will help determine how often the ad is shown. Also, different keywords cost more than others.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is an effort put forth by a business to ensure its website has the best chance to be found online organically. It is not necessarily a type of marketing that reaches out to grab potential customers or clients, but it is still important. 

No business wants to have to rely on paid advertising. In order to benefit from free, frequent, and qualified organic traffic, a business has to ensure that the content, images, and keywords are optimized in a way that will increase its chances of being found on search engines like Google. 

As a part of your SEO effort, you will also want to make sure your topic is one people are searching for, but is not so competitive that it will be almost impossible for anyone to find you.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are popular platforms. Millions of people use each of them on a daily basis, making them ideal for advertisements. Depending on the business type, paid social media marketing can be cost-prohibitive. Creating a social media presence is often the best way to master your digital marketing strategy and reach the masses on these platforms. Using graphics and engaging with followers can create a relationship that trumps paid ads on these platforms.

How to Master a Digital Marketing Strategy

Before a marketing strategy can be delivered there are eleven factors that must be taken into consideration:

Define Your Business Brand Identity

Before a business can determine what type of marketing strategy to implement, it has to create a business brand. This may seem obvious but branding is more than just the business name and logo. It’s the entire identity, including colors, mission, and voice. Once this has been determined the digital marketing campaigns can reflect this in a uniform way.

Define Your Niche/Create a Customer Avatar

If a business can pinpoint its ideal customer, that will help the business determine the best type of marketing to implement. Understanding the people who need your product or service will allow you to ensure that your marketing efforts are seen by the right people. Is your audience on social media? Do they read blogs? Do they listen to podcasts? It’s important to know these things during your digital marketing strategy planning so your efforts and money are not wasted. 

Create a customer avatar with as much specificity as possible. A customer avatar is a specific description of your ideal customer and allows you to keep that customer in mind when planning a wide array of strategies. 

An example of a customer avatar may be as follows: 35-year-old married woman, the mother of young children, working professional, enjoys working out, eating clean, and watching football. This avatar would give you a lot of information that can help you shape your marketing campaigns.

Set Marketing Goals

It’s important to set specific goals for your marketing campaigns. Placing ads and creating digital marketing campaigns on various platforms can be fruitless if they are being placed with no goals in mind and without any measurement. 

Which is better, an ad placed with the goal of making money or with the goal of increasing revenue in the first quarter by 20%? Clearly the latter would be easier to track and measure. If the goal isn’t met the campaign can be adjusted. With the former, you would just be throwing money out there, hoping it’s helping.

Determine the Best Places to Find Your Audience

A big part of a successful digital marketing campaign is targeting your audience where they are. If your customer avatar is a parent of young children, for example, and you sell children’s toys, would it be better to target platforms catering to toddlers or one catering to men who are losing their hair? It’s important to place your digital marketing efforts where your target audience is hanging out.

Create Content as a Part of Your Strategy

Content can come in different forms, podcasts, blogs, and YouTube videos, and they are all effective. They can all be used to reach and grow your audience. They can also be used to market your product or services. Regular content allows you to create a relationship with the audience and serve as a way to reach a more receptive pool of potential customers. 

It can be difficult to convert strangers to customers, but offering your products to a group of people who have been following you and are familiar with you gives you a better chance of making sales.

Set a Budget for Your Marketing Campaigns

Setting a budget allows you to monitor your finances and ensure your business remains profitable. Executing marketing strategies that are cost-prohibitive and result in the business losing money should be examined.

Audit Existing Assets

If your business already has any websites and a social media presence, it is important to conduct an audit. What is working, what is not. If there are assets that are not benefitting the business or that are doing more harm than good, it may be time to give them more attention or abandon them. There is no harm in changing direction if a current asset no longer represents or serves your business well.

Optimize Your Website to Boost Your Marketing Efforts

In 2020 it is hard to imagine a business that would not benefit from a website or some type of online presence. Once you have that in place be sure to make sure it represents your business in the best possible light and that it has been improved by SEO. I would even venture to say it’s better to have no website than to have one that is of poor quality and that does not represent your brand in a way that benefits your business. 

Your website does not have to be perfect, but if you have broken links that take people to pages that no longer exist and pages containing typos, it’s best to not have one at all. Be sure to put your best face forward! It doesn’t have to be award-winning, just a good representation of your business and what you have to offer. 

If you are able to create an eye-catching website with images, graphics, blog posts, that’s awesome too. You still have to be sure the website is not all frills and really gets across the message it needs to convey to your potential audience.

Create Digital Marketing Campaigns

Now that you have everything else in place you are ready to create and launch your digital marketing campaigns. Each campaign will come together to create an overall marketing strategy. Start slow in the beginning and make sure each piece is working well before adding to the first campaign. 

Launching too many campaigns at one time without evaluating the first one can lead to a string of campaigns based on the wrong assumptions. Be sure you are targeting the right audience with the right content before building and scaling your efforts to a larger, broader strategy.

Automation Makes Digital Marketing Easier

Sending out multiple emails and posting on social media manually is time-consuming. In the beginning, there is nothing wrong with doing this on your own or using the free versions of automation software. If you don’t have the funds, you should definitely try not to spend too much money on staff or virtual assistants before your business brings in any revenue. 

Be careful not to incur too much debt if you’re just starting out. If you can afford the help to implement your marketing strategies, that’s awesome and you’re ahead of the game. There are many tools (as you will see below) that can help you automate your marketing efforts. In many cases, you can set them up once and eventually let them go on auto-pilot. 

If you are just starting out, automation is not likely to happen right away, but as you become more comfortable with marketing you will get to the point where you will want an easier way to handle these tasks.

Evaluate Your Marketing Campaigns Regularly

Trial and error is the name of the game. Test out each marketing campaign, evaluate, and make changes where necessary. It’s really as simple as that. If you are not getting any traffic 

 Are you offering a lead magnet to get email addresses? If you are getting lots of traffic but no sales, could your product or offer be better presented? Do you get a better response with a different price point? Do your graphics need work? It all deserves careful attention. Document your efforts and you will eventually find something that works better.

Digital Marketing Tools 2020

There are many digital marketing tools that a business can use to create digital marketing campaigns in 2020. Depending on the type of business and the type of customer they are trying to attract, a variety of available tools can be implemented. There are so many to choose from that there is certainly a tool out there to cater to just about any audience. Some of these are free and some are paid.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Biteable.com is one tool that will allow you to create videos for social media posts, trailers, ads, and more. There is a free plan but the Biteable watermark remains in the video with this plan. The next higher plan is $19 per month. This may be something you want to add later when you’re more certain that your marketing efforts are paying dividends.

Invideo also allows you to create videos using awesome-looking templates. For $20 per month, you can export up to 60 videos per month. If you create videos for Youtube or for other purposes, one of the best features of Invideo is that you can use this tool to edit videos. Crop videos and images, text, and graphics with Invideo

Manychat.com offers you the ability to build relationships with potential customers using Messenger. You can even offer promotions and accept payments. This site uses bots to drive leads using funnels. The website provides you with templates for your bot or you use its drag and drop feature to create your own. 

The good news is there is a free plan available. There is visible branding but a free trial will allow you to test it out. (If you decide to try out Manychat using this link you will get 30 days of the pro plan free! See my affiliate disclaimer below).

Content Creation Tool

Tailwind allows you to easily create and schedule social media posts on Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest. Having the ability to schedule posts to IG and pins to Pinterest is a huge timesaver. If you are able to invest in a content creation tool, I would definitely recommend this one, but only if you plan to post on Pinterest and social media. 

If you’re unfamiliar with Pinterest, it is a search engine that allows you to post posts called “pins”. These pins are 1000×1500 px graphics featuring your product or services. You can add links to your website so anyone interested in your pins can click and arrive on your website.

Email Marketing Can Bring in More Traffic

Convertkit.com is the second email marketing service I tried (Mailchimp was the first and I was not crazy about it). Convertkit is so easy to use. Whether you want to create a landing page that converts or an automated email marketing campaign, this site offers beautiful, easy to use templates and drag and drop features. 

Convertkit offers a free plan for anyone who has under 1,000 subscribers. You aren’t able to use automated funnels with the free plan but you can use the landing pages if you want to collect email addresses. That plan is $29 per month.

Constant Contact is also a great tool for marketing. You can use it to create logos, set up email automation, and marketing for $45 per month. One of the unique things about Constant Contact is that you can embed surveys directly into your emails.

Retargeting Ads Help Track Your Customers

These types of ads attempt to bring customers who left your website without purchasing anything, back to your website. This is how it works: Potential customer visits your site but leaves without purchasing, they surf the web looking at other content and see an ad for your site. 

Hopefully, this will remind them to come back to your site so they make a purchase. This is accomplished with a bit of javascript on your website that is invisible to the user.

Ever visit a website and then go to Facebook only to see an ad for the very site you’ve already visited? This is no coincidence, it’s because of a Facebook pixel. You too can add free Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok retargeting pixels for your website.

Video Content Marketing

Youtube is a popular search engine that is used by many business owners. You can create video content that will allow you to reach potential customers or clients and provide you with an audience to whom you can market your business. 

Because Youtube acts as a search engine you will want to be sure you use SEO strategies to optimize your videos, video titles, and descriptions so you reach the people in your particular niche. If you have a podcast you can record your podcast episodes and reach people on two platforms with the same content. Finding multiple ways to use your content will help you grow your audience faster with the same amount of effort.

SEO Strategies Help Attract Organic Traffic

If you want to be able to determine what content you should deliver, or you want to search for the best keywords to use in your content to attract the most eyeballs with the least amount of competition, there are more than a few websites out there. Many are very pricey, especially if you are just starting out.

I would suggest using the free version of sites like Ubersuggest, where you can get approximately three daily searches, or KWfinder, which offers you a ten-day trial. If you can get all of the keywords you need in those ten days you can get a lot of research done. I have also used free Google trends to see what topics and keywords are trending on Google. 

Finally, if you create an ad campaign with Google ads you can use their keyword search tool to get a general idea of how competitive a certain keyword may be. Websites like Semrush will also run an SEO audit of your site, among other things. Semrush also offers a 7-day free trial.

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

If you offer a service or product that you created, you may want to consider offering it for sale by affiliates. Affiliate marketing is a structure where other people sell your product in exchange for a percentage of each sale. 

As the owner, you determine what percentage your affiliates receive and you set the terms for their compensation. If they agree you have a contract with an affiliate and they will begin their own digital marketing strategies in order to help sell your products. There are several platforms that you can use to offer your product or service to affiliates, including Shareasale, CJ Affiliate, and JV Zoo are just a few.

Other Helpful Digital Marketing Tools

I have to add Kartra in a category of its own because it handles more than one type of digital marketing campaign. 

Kartra allows you to create all types of pages for your website; landing pages, upsell pages, etc.. You can also sell your digital products on the site and offers a platform that makes it possible for you to offer your products to affiliates. 

Kartra makes it easy to track your payments and actually pay out the affiliates as well. This software is amazing at handling multiple tasks in your digital marketing strategy.

While I used to use Kartra and loved it, it is not for the newbie. If you are just starting out I would not suggest Kartra as the first automation software, unless you are already familiar with funnels and email automation. If you are brand new to all of it, I would suggest you start out with Convertkit. It is much cheaper and more user-friendly.

Should you decide to invest in Kartra later you will be able to import your leads to Kartra. Many people recommend Mailchimp but I personally found it very confusing.

One other site worth mentioning is AppSumo. This website is a marketplace for many software packages that are reasonably priced and very helpful. Many of the products found on AppSumo are little known treasures which makes it so much fun to browse their catalog of products.

You can browse the software on the site by category and find assets related to SEO, lead generation, marketing, content creation, and so much more. They even have freebies that you can easily download and use right away.

When it comes to digital marketing strategies there is a lot to consider. If you’re just starting out take it slow and use as many free tools as possible.

Once you feel more comfortable that you are getting the hang of each particular type of strategy, or are starting to earn revenue, invest in more automated tools. It will all seem very overwhelming at first so start out small while you learn.

What kind of email marketing are you implementing or thinking of implementing? Comment below!

The fees listed here are current as of the date of the post. Also, this site may receive a small commission if you purchase from any affiliates at no cost to you.

-Lisa Michele

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