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Digital marketing has truly changed the landscape of the advertising industry in this era. Various terms come under the umbrella of digital marketing, such as SEO services, social media and content marketing, email marketing, PPC advertisements, or affiliate marketing.

Regardless of what business or industry you’re in, digital marketing can help you expand the clientele, increase your sales and create a brand image. However, that only happens if you strategize the marketing plan efficiently, which isn’t limited to simply running an ad on Instagram or Facebook and expecting your sales to grow overnight; there are a lot of technicalities that you must consider.

Before learning how you can strategize your marketing plans, let’s first take a look at how digital marketing can help your business stand out in a highly competitive world.

Benefits of Investing in Digital Marketing

If you want to stay ahead of the competition in your industry, it’s crucial to invest in digital marketing. Here’s how it can be a game-changer for your business:

• Helps you create a brand image for your business.
• Improves sales and increases the ROI.
• Makes it easier to reach out to the target audience based on demographics.
• Helps you understand the dynamics of market share.
• Provides greater engagement and makes it easier to reach out to a global audience.

Now let’s move on to the guide that we’ve prepared for you. Scroll down to find out how you can strategize your marketing campaign to maximize the revenue for your business.

Plan Your Strategy

Follow these steps to devise an effective strategy:

Set a Clear Direction
This includes setting clear and precise objectives, goals, and targets. Having a clear-cut idea will make it easier for you to plan your marketing campaign. For instance, ask yourself what exactly do you want to achieve from the Instagram ad. Is it getting more followers, or do you want to increase engagement and impressions?

The answers will not only give you a sense of direction but also make you focus better. Use SMART (specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-bound) strategy while setting your goals. That’ll ensure that you can easily keep track of it, thus making it easier to achieve the business goals.

Know Your Buyers’ Persona
Whether you have a B2B business or a B2C business, your buyers’ persona is one of the essential aspects that you should know. It’ll help you get an insight into which strategy might be the best one for you. It’ll help you decide your budget and what exactly it is that may appeal to your audience.

For instance, you cant sell a $100 training course to a startup. Your strategy would fail right there because they wouldn’t be willing to spend a hefty amount. Similarly, a teenage millennial might not be interested in why they should invest in your real estate property.
Thus, it’s important to know your audience before selling your product or services to them.

Some important aspects that you may consider are the age and income bracket, location, interests, and pain points.

Carry Out a Competitive Analysis
Healthy competition is always necessary if you want to move forward and make waves in your industry. Assess the progress of your competitors and see which strategies are working for them. It’ll also help you know your market share.

While assessing their progress, you can consider the following aspects: their strongest and weakest points, their marketing channels, their target audience, and the tone they use to promote their brand.

Which Digital Channels Are You Going to Use?
After you set your goals and decide upon the target audience, move on to this step. Depending on your goals and potential customers, you should prioritize the digital channels you want to use.

Let’s understand it this way: if your goal is to increase the ROI, it’s better to go for SEO services as it generates long-term revenue and is also more cost-effective. You can choose between link-building services, data mining, video advertisements, content marketing, or PPCs.

However, if your target audience includes millennials, there’s no better channel than Instagram and Facebook to connect with them. On the other hand, if you want to target a more sophisticated category like businessmen, email marketing and Linkedin might be the best platforms to reach out to them.

Highlight the Tactics
Once you’ve chosen the marketing channels, the next step should be coming up with accurate keywords and other strategies. You then need to plan the kind of content you’ll be creating; decide whether you want more informative content for your website or something opinion-based like a guest post, perhaps.

For the ads, it’s also important to see what category of content will resonate with your audience the most; is it highlighting a social issue, or would something fun and trendy appeal to the audience?

Invest your time and energy completely during this step, and brainstorm different ideas with your team members. We bet it’ll surely help you in the long run. Are you wondering how? Well, if your audience loves the content, you’ll see an increase in the reach, impressions, and engagement rate. Thus, giving a boost to your sales in the long term.

Set a Budget
It’s important to plan your budget and allocate it accordingly to different marketing channels such as emails, social media, and search engines.

You can come up with a strategy to decide a budget based on various factors such as:

• Budget for running ads to gain followers
• Campaigns for brand awareness
• Hiring SEO services to rank higher on search engines like Google.

If you notice that a particular category isn’t generating expected results, you can stop spending on it and amend the plan accordingly.

Prioritizing the goals will help you save the budget rather than spending it on everything. For instance, if you want to gain more customers from a particular country, you can set the target audience and spend the marketing budget accordingly.

On the other hand, if you want to increase the conversion rate or email open rate, you can hire SEO service experts and ask them to do the job.

Monitor it From Time to Time
Some things you can do to monitor your digital marketing strategy include the following:

Set the Deadlines
Our advice is that you create a marketing calendar. This will make it easier to see your progress and ensure that you meet the targets within a deadline. Moreover, you’ll feel more proactive and determined to meet the desired goals.

Pro tip: Be realistic while marking the goals on your calendar. Being too optimistic won’t help you!

Analyze the Graphs and Results
You can use different tools to see the results of your marketing campaign. It’ll give you an idea regarding whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. It’ll also help you develop alternate plans or make amendments to the current strategies if you see low engagement or conversion rates.

Keep a Check on the ROI
A lot of businesses make the mistake of not keeping track of their ROI. But you shouldn’t forget to do it. It’s important to scale your progress by noticing how much profit you made on each dollar invested.

It’ll make it easier for you to look at the strengths and weaknesses and see what opportunities you can use to your benefit. Conducting a SWOT analysis in your board meetings can truly make a difference.

In case you don’t see the marketing campaign generating expected results, you can refine the plan accordingly by doing the following:

• Retarget the ads by showing compelling ads to visitors to make them return to the website.
• Low conversion rates might be due to the low speed of web pages. Improve the loading speed of pages on your website.
• Try a different content planning strategy. There might be a chance that the audience isn’t finding the content appealing enough.

Conclusion

Don’t think that the dollars you spend on marketing are the money wasted. That’s exactly where you could be wrong; rather, consider it as an investment that will produce long-term revenue for your business!

However, it’s essential that you stay determined and make consistent efforts to attract the audience. Once you create a brand image for your business and build trust with your customers, your business will surely make waves in the industry. Hire SEO service professionals for the best results.

This guest post was written by Hoseph, a digital marketing expert. He has been associated with Search Berg for a decade. His advice on digital marketing has truly done wonders for a lot of businesses and helped them earn huge profits.

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Sometimes it’s not the speed that matters but rather the direction. After all, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re moving in the wrong direction. People new to the marketing world often think that producing more and more content is a solid marketing strategy, living by the rule ‘the more, the merrier.’ But a professional writing service will tell you otherwise because, in content marketing, more content does not necessarily mean better results. You need to work smarter, and for that, you need a strategy.

Having a great strategy is more effective than producing great content because if your content doesn’t reach your audience or doesn’t produce the intended effect, that content is essentially useless. Even the best of strategies fall victim to avoidable mistakes.. If that happens, you’re back to square one – with a lot of content but of no use.

In this article, we will discuss some of the biggest mistakes that could end up killing your strategy. These mistakes can be in the content that you’re generating or in the strategy itself. Read on so you can be sure to avoid them.

1. Having No Strategy at All

The first mistake is going in without a strategy believing that your content is all that matters. There are still crowds of writers that are churning up words in the form of blogs and articles trying to meet their deadlines but have no strategy at all. Well, let this be your wake-up call. It’s 2021. Content marketing is not some new fad; it has evolved into a fully developed marketing practice with thousands of competitors.

If you have ever hired, worked with, or worked for a professional writing service, you would know just how much emphasis they place on their strategy because the content is incomplete without a strategy in place.

Putting up content without a solid strategy is like going to war with a pair of chopsticks. Before you start planning your strategy, however, wait just a minute. You should know that you don’t have to come up with a world-class strategy immediately. It’s not entirely possible either. Start with something simple and then build upon it. And remember, content marketing is an ever-growing industry; strategies get outdated pretty fast, so keep improving. Simply put, what works today might not work tomorrow.

2. Not Documenting Plans and Goals

In this developing field of content strategy, it is crucial to document your strategies and goals. Although it seems kind of insignificant, it’s a really effective way to keep you focused. Don’t believe it? Well then, let’s talk numbers.

According to this research done by CoSchedule, content marketers with a documented strategy are more than 500% more likely to be successful than those who don’t document their strategies. People put off doing this thinking it’s wasting their time, and that’s understandable. Time is precious. But all said and done, this is one habit that can significantly increase your chances of success.

3. Not Having Tangible Content

This is one of the biggest and most common mistakes that fail a marketing strategy. People that are new to the content marketing world can sometimes be very imposing about their product or service.

This results in the content becoming too direct or excessively focused on the product they’re trying to market. We need to get this straight; you want to write articles and blogs, not brochures for the product.

You’re probably thinking, “what’s the point of the content then?” Well, the point is to be tangible to the product, not be entirely based on it.

Tangible content is related to your product, but indirectly. For example, the product could be an answer or solution to some problem. You need to reel in your readers first and bring up your product as a recommendation instead of forcing it upon them. The primary purpose of the content is to be read and shared by as many people as possible, if your readers catch a whiff of sales in the content, they might lose their interest and move on.

The sales point is important as well, obviously, but the product should be pitched in a smooth way, not abruptly. Not all of your content has to be this way; you can have content that is focused on your product as well, but just not all of it.

4. Not Knowing Your Audience

Knowing your audience is the most important factor for successful marketing. One of the best ways to get to know your readers is to read the comments and entertain them. Focus on what people think is lacking in the content, or there is too much of it.

You could also put in a survey and ask your audience what their occupation is, what age group they fall into, and their ambitions. This would tell you much about who you’re writing for, and you can tailor the content around their preferences.

5. Poor Representation

Many people hire content writers from a professional writing service; they get the perfect content written but ignore the presentation of their webpage and websites. Visual presentation is also important to many readers; a cluttered and messy web page will only drive traffic away.

Many companies that provide professional writing services also usually provide services such as web development. You can easily have them design your blog and/or your website for you. An added benefit of this would be that since the content and the web page are coming from the same organization, they would be better integrated compared to getting both things done separately.

6. Developing Content for Only One Phase

Remember that your content is a journey you take with your audience where you’re guiding them to your product. You’re funneling your readers into being customers of your product or service so you need to be making content for each stage of the funnel.

The initial stage is the discovery phase, where readers will discover your product or service and why they need what you’re offering. But you need to take them along with you down the funnel. You need content that traps them, draws them in and engages them – you need to convince them why it’s you they should choose over your competitors. This is when you give them content more focused to you and your product or service. Target each persona of the audience.

A lot of content marketers who are just starting out in this field tend to stick to one stage. They either keep promoting themselves or they play it safe, staying on the shore of the discovery stage. This leaves their communication strategy incomplete, and it eventually fails. It plateaus and eventually sinks.

7. Use of Unreliable Sources

Now this is a real strategy killer. People come to your articles and blogs for information. If you use unauthentic sources or just make up statistics to support your argument or your pitch, you’re driving people away. People check up on the sources you mention; when they find that they’re not trustworthy or credible, they’re going to think the same about you as well and write you off.

That’s why you should avoid using questionable sources in your content. If you want to add statistics, make sure they’re from scientific papers, academic journals, trusted news channels or magazines, or from industry experts. You don’t want your readers to think you’re deceiving them; it leaves a really bad impression. What’s worse is that once your readers consider you untrustworthy, they’ll avoid your content.

Final Thoughts

To sum it all up, gauging how well you’re doing in terms of content marketing by the amount of content you produce is not an accurate measure. The content marketing field is continuously growing and developing. Having good content is not enough if it is not backed by a solid strategy to go along with it. There are many more tips about marketing strategies and SEO that you should look into.

This guest article was written by Dave Brown, an expert marketing analyst and strategist. He also offers consultations for content writing services. When he’s not working, he loves spending time with his dog.

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