December 7, 2020 7 min read
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Digital marketing is the most effective way to reach your target audience, drive targeted traffic to your website, generate quality leads, and ultimately, close sales. To create a digital marketing strategy that will foster business growth, it is key to understand the following:
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How much money should be spent on digital marketing?
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Which tactics will provide the best return on investment (ROI)?
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Which channels will help funnel in high-quality leads?
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What can be done to foster the entire buyer experience?
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How can success truly be measured?
No matter how small or large your business is, having a deep understanding of what happens when you implement your digital marketing strategy is critical to making better decisions that will yield positive results. As such, having the right tools, processes, and people in place will only help elevate your efforts to meet your other business objectives.
Related: 7 Things to Know about Digital Marketing
Here are 5 powerful digital marketing hacks that will help you increase sales now:
1. Create stellar content for digital marketing
The key to making content work for you in terms of gaining the awareness, leads, and sales you want is to make sure that you’re adding tremendous value. This means that the topics you write about and tips you put forth are actionable and consumed by your target audience.
One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is that they develop content and hope that it will attract attention right away. Know that your content strategy needs to be focused on both short- and long-term goals. You’re really running a marathon, not a sprint.
There is a multitude of content types you can consider, so let’s look at a few and also understand the benefits of each:
- Blogging — research topics that are actually being searched for, including hashtags that are being used by your target audience. Find a way to be a part of those conversations by writing thoughtful blog posts.
- Infographics — visual content is easy to consume, so develop infographics as a way to drive engagement on your website, extend the time-on-site, and input a CTA (call-to-action) for people to inquire more about what you have to offer.
- Guides and eBooks — whether you choose to gate your content or not, what’s more important is that they are being leveraged successfully as lead magnets. You can do this without gating the content because inputting CTAs throughout the content pieces will still help you understand what drives engagement and what doesn’t.
Related: Want to Know How Gen Z Is Transforming Digital Marketing?
2. Run social ads
Advertising on social media networks is a no-brainer. Let’s say you’re in charge of generating leads for a B2B SaaS product and need to figure out how you can drive sales-qualified leads that will turn into opportunities — which social networks would you want to consider?
For starters, look at these three: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
You’ll be able to narrow down specific personas, test multiple creatives and messages, and collect data to see what works best. Like any advertising strategy, make sure that you tie your social ads to their own landing pages and that the copy from the ad to the landing page matches up. Additionally, consider the following:
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Leverage your content assets to funnel in leads and inquiries.
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Make sure your messaging presents a clear problem and solution.
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Create multiple creative assets to avoid ad fatigue.
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Fine-tune and tweak as you go. In other words, focus on progress over perfection.
3. Develop robust email marketing
Once you have lead information collected from your website, the logical next step is to develop automated workflows that will nurture your leads. The key to making effective workflows is to map out the buyer journey and align your email strategy with that.
Here are some key tips to keep in mind as you develop yours:
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Position the content around the lifecycle stages of your leads.
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Enable lead scoring so you can keep track of what drives engagement and movement from one lifecycle stage to the next.
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Segment and personalize.
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Test out multiple subject lines and copy.
4. Host webinars
Get creative with your webinars by inviting guest speakers to help co-host and even do interviews with happy customers who are using your product/services. According to Xant, 73% of sales and marketing leaders say that webinars are one of the best ways to generate quality leads. In fact, a single webinar could get you over 1,000 leads.
In order to make sure that your webinars are successful, do the following:
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Research and choose the right topic. Just as you would with your blog topics, do the same with your webinar topics — it’s about the searcher intent and target audience needs, i.e. the problem you solve.
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Decide on a promotion strategy for your webinar. Unlike your other ads that are pushed to promote a guide or direct inquiry, webinars need at least 1-2 weeks of a promotional period.
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Create a series of promotional emails as well as reminders.
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Run social ads and even search engine ads.
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Get out of the PowerPoint or Google Slides only presentation. Be interactive with your webinars.
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Make sure the webinar is available on-demand and then have a series of follow-up emails and advertising to still drive engagement that then turns into opportunities.
5. Push a growth hacking approach
Growth hacking takes on the approach of testing nearly everything you can during the entire buyer journey so that you gain clarity around what triggers a lead to be interested and then progress into a sale. The great thing about growth hacking is that you can apply it to every single digital marketing tactic.
Related: ‘Emily in Paris’: 3 Digital Marketing Mistakes the Netflix Series Made
Here are some actionable examples you can use:
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A/B testing headlines and CTAs for targeted landing pages that are tied in with ads and your homepage.
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Personalize your emails per segment and even personas.
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Develop multiple content clusters with your blog posts to see which one drives the best quality of leads that turn into actual sales opportunities.
Good digital marketing vs. great digital marketing
What separates good digital marketing from great digital marketing isn’t just your ability to spend a ton of money, but to use that money to show the actual problem you solve. In other words, you’re selling the solution for a clear problem and can show how you are able to do that.
More specifically, people buy from people, not companies. Therefore, being authentic with your approach and steering clear from just making a transactional sale will only help you in the long-term.
Finally, continue to integrate both your intuition and the data you collect to help excel your business forward. Don’t look at digital marketing as just a 1:1 — money in and money out — solution. Rather, use the power of digital marketing to create awareness that will expand beyond just one single piece of creative or content. Changing your perspective to this approach will help you keep the needs of your target customers top of mind, and in turn, support your growth initiatives.