LookinLA | How To Create A Successful Digital Marketing Strategy In 2019

Where is your business? Staying up to date with the last technologies and trends? Or has your business become stuck in its ways? Doing things the traditional way without adapting to the newer way of the world? For those stuck in older ways, it’s time you wake up to the new world, especially when it comes to marketing in 2019.

Digital Marketing includes social media marketing, email marketing, search ads, search engine optimization, remarketing, and more. These methods prove the most effective today, and every business attempting to grow should take up these tactics. Digital marketing is the way to go because:

• You can target your ideal audience – Digital marketing lets you pick the exact demographic and psychographic specification of your ideal audience. That way, only the right people see your ad and you’re not wasting money on an unqualified audience.

• You can personalize your content to your audience – Depending on the demographics of your different customers, digital marketing lets you target different groups of people with different messages. This kind of personalization gets your advertising noticed!

• It’s affordable – Even with the cost of an agency, you’d be paying a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing when you go digital. (See our guide to choosing the right digital marketing agency here)

• You get a clear measurement of ROI – Many tools exist to tell you exactly how many people saw, engaged with, and even purchased from your digital marketing. This easily allows you to understand your ROI and what types of messages perform best on what channels.

Here are a few steps to consider when you are planning for a successful digital marketing strategy:

1- Determine Your Corporate Branding

Your company comes to a customer’s mind. What do they think? How do they feel? What expectations do they have? These are all questions a brand strategy answers. It stands for who you are, what you do, why you do it, and for whom you do it.

When your customer thinks of your brand, they think of a promise. Decades ago, they’d recall your brand by your name, slogan, sign, symbol, or any combination of those. Today, a brand is a perception a customer has when they hear or think of your company name, service, or product.

Every company needs a strong brand strategy. Not only does a brand strategy set you apart from the competition, but it also promotes recognition and can generate referrals. This builds loyalty from not only your customers but also your employees. It gives them something to stand behind and believe in.

2- Data-Driven Website Design

First impressions are everything and your site might be the first interaction a customer might have with your brand. It tells them who you are, what you do, and how you perceive yourself as a company. Whether your company is a business of one or business of thousands, it needs a well-designed website that meets the expectations for your brand. No question. Without a doubt.

Your website design should announce your brand to the world. Tell the world who you are, who your company is, what your company stands for, and what your company cares about. Visitors need to see and feel your identity. This creates feelings of camaraderie, which builds loyalty. Not to mention, having a distinct, tangible brand distinguishes you from competitors.

This isn’t 2000. Gone are the days when the company website was only found to learn basic information. It’s now a virtual marketplace. How a website looks and feels is the deciding factor between you and the competition. The first few seconds need to keep a customer glued.

3- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Let’s dive into how to get the most quality traffic to your site. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo need to determine what searches your website is relevant to. How do they do this? Through your search engine optimization (SEO for short.)

What does SEO mean? SEO is the discipline of increasing the quantity and quality of your website traffic through organic search results. Imagine this common scenario. You go to a search engine. You type a question into the search box. The search engine responds with a list of websites that have the potential to answer your question. Ever stop to consider how that all works? For starters, let’s learn SEO works:

Whatever search engine you’re using has a crawler that goes out across the wild web and collects information on all the content on the Internet.The crawler brings what it finds back to the search engine to build an index.The index gets pushed through an algorithm that tries to match all the data is collected with your search.

4- Social Media Advertising

There are a few companies that currently rule the world. Facebook is one of them. With 2.27 billion monthly active users, it’s a platform that plays a major role in shaping our modern society. Free to all users, one of Facebook’s revenue stream of great interest to marketers is advertising. But what actually is a Facebook ad?

Simply put, it’s an advertisement that appears on Facebook. It can appear on desktop or mobile in your News Feed or in the right column of Facebook. It includes some text, a photo or video, and a call-to-action. You and others also have the ability to “like” or “share” the ad.

You should care about Facebook ads for a few reasons:

• Your Customers are on Facebook - 1.49 billion people log onto Facebook on a daily basis. Those people make 22 billion ad clicks per year. With numbers like this, Facebook advertising is the largest advertising opportunity since search. Your audience is somewhere in that number – it’s just a matter of finding them.

• Facebook Ads are Cheap - Facebook ads cost a fraction of what other online marketing channels cost. For example, our friend reached 200 people who visited her website only spending $5 a day. This means Facebook isn’t a question of cost, it’s a question of how far your money will go. If you go into Facebook advertising with a clear focus and follow a simple strategy, the cost-efficiency of the platform will blow you away.

• Exceptional Targeting Capabilities - The granularity you can get with Facebook capabilities is beyond belief. You could literally target the Pope or even Madonna. Whether it be by behaviors, interests, demographics, connections, age ranges, languages, or locations, you can dig deep with these targeting capabilities and layer them upon each other to ensure you’re getting rid of any questionable viewers.

5- Google Advertising

There are too many ways to advertise online today. You have Facebook and Instagram Ads platform, Twitter Ads, Pinterest Promoted Pins, Bing Ads, Yahoo Search Ads, and on and on. Despite all the competition, Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is one of (if not the) best way to reach your target audience.

What is Google Ads? Simply put, Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform. It’s Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for clickable ads to appear. Unlike PPC platforms like Facebook, Google Ads offers multiple ways to reach people, such as:

• Google Search Network: This allows you to show “text ads” to users who actively search for keywords you selected. For example, if you owned a maternity shop, you would bid to have your ad show up every time a user types “Maternity in Chicago.” This provides an excellent way to capture users at the research or purchasing stages of the digital sales funnel.

• Google Display Network: Instead of showing ads in the search engine results page (SERP), this allows you to shows “display ads” or “banner ads” on websites you think your target audience will be on. Since people aren’t actively searching for what you sell in this instance, people may be less likely to click on display ads. These ads can be photos or videos and provide an excellent opportunity to re-engage past visitors to your website.

• Google Shopping Campaigns: This allows you to sell promoted products to shoppers through Google’s Shopping platform. They show a photo of your product plus a title, price, store name, and more. It’s great for promoting your online and local inventory, boosting traffic to your website or local store, and finding better-qualified leads.

• Google Universal App Campaigns: App advertisers want to get their apps into the hands of more paying users. So, how do you connect with those people? Google Universal App campaigns streamline the process, making it easy to promote your apps across Google’s largest properties including Search, Google Play, YouTube, and the Google Display Network. Just add a few lines of text, a bid, some assets, and the rest is optimized to help your users find you.

Feel free to reach out to us for any help needed in building your digital marketing strategy. We’d love to help you identify and share your story.