Create a Proven Digital Marketing Strategy That Generates High Quality Leads

A digital marketing strategy without a focused campaign is just like throwing darts in the dark. You’re doing something, but if it’s without a rhyme or reason, you’re not doing it effectively, and you’re not even sure of your results. 

In this article we’ll show you the importance of a digital marketing strategy, explain some of the most effective ones, and give you guidance on improving your existing online marketing strategy to generate better leads all from the eyes of a digital marketer. 

The Journey to Develop a Digital Strategy

I started my journey in 2016 when I was thrust onto the scene as a business owner creating a sales prospecting training company. If you had asked me then to define or how to implement a digital B2B marketing campaign encompassing traditional marketing methods, digital advertising, inbound marketing, or search engine marketing I would have looked at you with a blank stare. At that time, I had no digital marketing agency, I would not define myself as a digital marketer nor did I know the first thing about online marketing. 

My content marketing, SEO, advertising, marketing automation, marketing analytics, offline marketing and/or paid social media advertising skills were so far off the mark for driving success that I had no business being in business. 

At the same time, being a new small business owner with a family that was entirely 100% dependent on me to succeed, I began my own digital marketing boot camp. I studied every blog article, watched every video I could find, joined the leading digital marketing thought leaders email marketing lists. I had literally immersed myself from 9pm to 2am every night for a year. I had no other choice because starting my new business I didn’t have a marketing team, nor did I have extra funds to purchase digital marketing services from anyone.

I became insanely interested in social media marketing, namely because I was teaching social media selling skills to sellers. Brand awareness and influencer marketing were also major focuses of mine. I knew if I could master those three areas, I could massively increase my marketing efforts exponentially, and get enough free advertising to generate sales leads. 

What were the results?

My studies took me far beyond my top 3 and, because of implementing all the internet marketing strategies within 1 year, I became a top sales influencer, generated more than 10K visitors in organic traffic, delivered sales training to a many of the world’s top Fortune 100 sales organizations, and had marketing activity of nearly 1,000 leads per month. 

Of course, the journey didn’t end there. I exploded my results after merging seven companies to drive what is now one of the highest website domain authorities around on sales prospecting and training. Developing a digital marketing strategy that is second to no one continues to be one of my key goals. 

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy? 

A digital marketing strategy is a type of inbound marketing plan that helps you achieve your goals through specific marketing channels, content, analysis, and much more. 

Your digital marketing strategy needs to be based on facts, analysis, research, and analytics using tools such as session replay to check the user’s journey through your website. That’s the only way you’ll be able to achieve measurable goals and have a great basis for improvement. Having a bulletproof strategy will help you with your marketing proposals as well. 

No matter what media channels you decide to use, make sure to plan everything out and have customized strategies and marketing tactics for different platforms for the content to feel native. 

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Plan 

The biggest thing you can achieve from a digital marketing strategy is to generate ROI and return on sales. However, to maximize your return, it’s important that you are strategic in your approach and don’t resort to using just any digital marketing tactic.

Instead, you want to have a strategy to follow and know exactly what to focus on, when, how, and for how long before trying another approach. Your strategy will include some type of content, and every piece of that content, be it a picture, blog, video, or something else, needs to be planned, prepared, posted at the right time, and be a part of the bigger picture. 

Simply posting content without a clearly defined sales strategy behind it could result in your sales team leaving many sales opportunities untapped. The goal with any digital marketing strategy is to post or send out the right content that draws potential customers out to raise their hand to want to learn more about what you have to offer.

That’s why the most effective digital marketing strategy is crafted only after doing careful market research, looking at all sides of the marketing equation – from search engine optimization to a social media marketing strategy, even to earned media. In case you don’t have time and are busy with multiple projects, you can take advantage of FancyLab.com performance marking agency, which will help you set up your marketing campaigns and other activities.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy? 

Let’s take it step by step.

You’ll need to: 

• Build your buyer persona or target audience
• Evaluate your online presence
• Set your marketing goals
• Create a sales funnel
• Create a content strategy

But, before you can put your digital marketing strategy into action, it’s important to establish a few key foundational pieces that will help to shape the type of strategy you use and how you measure its success.

Identify Your Goals 

Your long-term goal as a marketing and sales organization is to ultimately increase revenue.

However, you could have a wider variety of short-term goals that you can pursue with a digital marketing strategy. For example, perhaps you want to boost brand awareness and generate more traffic away from your competitors’ websites so you can expand your market share. Or you could be looking to do a detailed SEO competitor analysis and improve your SEO ranking on search engines to get in front of more prospects who are actively searching for what you offer. Or it could even be that you want to differentiate your company as a thought leader in the industry and a targeted digital marketing strategy will help you do this.

The point here is to determine what your short- and long-term goals are for digital marketing and then implement the necessary tracking tools to ensure that you are achieving your goal.

Take for example, if your goal is to increase your search engine ranking by posting keyword-driven content regularly, then using tools like Google Analytics or Semrush could be helpful to monitor if you are improving your ranking position. 

Evaluate Your Current Online Presence

Before you can craft a digital marketing strategy, you must first analyze your current online presence and fully understand where you stand in the market. Determine what digital channel drives the most and right traffic to your website, which channel(s) generate the most revenue for your company, etc. Also, make sure your website looks nice and professional, if you do not know how to achieve this consider hiring a knowledgeable company to do this for you.

The goal is to get clear on what you’ve already tried, what isn’t working, and what is so you can design a plan of action that will yield better results before you start wasting money on advertising spend like a Facebook ads (e.g Facebook ads comments, image or videos).

Create a Sales Funnel

Understanding the journey your leads go through to convert to a client is the base of your sales funnel. 

Awareness stage. At that stage, you must make your potential clients aware of your brand, products, and services. That could be done through a variety of media channels, including investing in Google Ads, launching an SEO checker strategy to rank high on heavily searched keywords, or to leverage social media to gain traction.

Interest stage. You’ve gotten your prospect’s attention, now it is time to nurture the relationship. This can be achieved through an email campaign, posting blog articles around their pain points, or through engaging and highly relevant social media posts.

This is where you convert your leads to new customers. Although your digital marketing strategy may have leads raise their hand that they’re interested, you’ll need a proven sales process to get them to a sale. With that in mind, you want your digital content to have specific calls to action, so that your lead knows exactly what next step to take.

Perhaps they read a white paper you posted on your website or came across an article posted on a blog – either way it’s important to include what they can do to get more information. Maybe they can click a link to book a demo, or provide their email to get a free trial, or email a request to sales to get on a call. Whatever action you want people to take, be clear and explicit about it on every piece of digital marketing material you post online.

Evaluation stage. At this stage of the sales funnel, your potential customer is interested, you’ve likely provided them with more information via emails and other free resources. However, they still have not made the purchase. They’re trying to determine if what you offer is, in fact, what they need to solve a problem or to achieve a specific goal. At this point, leading with case studies, testimonials, free trials, competitors’ comparisons, and live demonstrations can be very helpful to move the prospect closer to a sale.

Engagement stage. By now, you may have had your initial contact with your prospect. They are aware of what you’re selling, they’re interested, they’ve seen what your product/service has done for other customers in their industry. Yet, they may need more coaxing to get to the finish line.

During this stage, you’ll focus on following up or offering discounts or promotions to entice them to close the deal. You may look to launch digital marketing campaigns on social media, focused on retargeting ads to those prospects who have taken a specific action.

You could initiate a follow up email nurture sequence. It’s important to keep in mind that many of the follow up outreach you do, at this stage, can be streamlined by using a marketing automation tool like HubSpot.

Purchase stage. At this stage of the sales funnel, you have successfully converted a lead into a customer! Congratulations, but your work is far from done. You have the sales opportunity to upsell the customer to a more robust or longer-term solution. You could also ask for referrals at this stage to see who else in their network may be looking for what you provide. 

Build Your Buyer Persona

You need to know and understand your customers to provide them with a great service. That’s why you need to create a buyer persona that is based on facts and data. 

You can have multiple personas for your business, and a good trick is to give them names so that you can easily identify and differentiate them. 

The questions you need to answer are: 

• How old are they?
• Which gender are they?
• Where do they live?
• What kind of a job do they have?
• What is their lifestyle like?
• What are their expectations?
• What problems can your products or services solve?

And any other questions based on the potential buyers’ behavior.

Once you have all those questions answered, you’ll be able to relate to your clients better and provide them with great content. 

Create a Digital Content Strategy

Your digital content strategy needs to incorporate not only the type of content you’ll create, the target audience or decision maker you’re trying to attract, but also the marketing goals you’re planning to achieve with those pieces of content.

That’s why the first step is to create a content calendar that describes all the social media posts, blogs, guest posts, articles, and other pieces of content you’ll make to achieve certain goals, like generating new business. 

You also must conduct a keyword search that will help you structure your content from start to finish, taking into account which sections you want to cover. Make sure to include dates and focus on your short-term goals. 

You can even incorporate a visual guide for your new content, to make sure everything looks similar and according to the branding. 

Examples of Digital Marketing Strategies You Can Use 

Now that we covered the creation of your digital marketing strategy, let’s dive into great examples of those strategies. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

You need to make it easy for your customers to find you on search engines. You want to make sure that when they Google your industry, product, or related service, that you come up in the results. SEO increases the exposure of your brand and buying backlinks helps.

It includes creating content for your website that responds to key questions that people are making on search engines, links to the right pages, and helps you increase your organic traffic, have more leads, and conversions. Link Building Services involve developing website material that addresses the inquiries individuals commonly pose on search engines and incorporates links to relevant pages. The better you are positioned in search engine results, the more authority you have in your industry. 

SEO doesn’t include paid Google advertising, so don’t expect overnight success. Your SEO strategy won’t show results for a few months, but it will be worth it in the end. Your Google SEO strategy won’t show results for a few months, but it will be worth it in the end.

PPC 

Pay-per-click is a strategy that involves advertisers paying a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. It is a great way to get people to your site without having to wait for organic traffic. 

To have a great PPC strategy, you need to work on your keyword search. Your keywords should be relevant, exhaustive, and expansive. You should constantly analyze the effectiveness of your keywords and change them accordingly. Incorporating a list of negative keywords will help you further enhance ad targeting and optimize your budget by preventing your ads from displaying to the wrong people.

You should also have good copywriting for your ads, something attractive that will encourage people to click on your result. Remember that the competition will be fierce, and you need to stand out. 

Content Marketing 

Content marketing entails the creation and distribution of content that will help you bring in more leads to your sales pipeline and help you gain more customers. It’s an effective strategy because it keeps people engaged, gives them more information on your brand, products, or services. Consider hiring a content marketing agency in order to create high-quality content that engages your target audience and drives results.

The more people read about your products and services, the bigger the chance is they will buy from you if you have the solutions to their problems. Once you determine your goals and media channels, get to creating. The best indicator of what types of content you need to make is the engagement you get from your audience. 

Make sure to listen to them, do some research about which types of content can help you the most, and make the type of content they want. 

Email Marketing 

Did you know that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies? Because email is free, as well as some email marketing software and tools, you’ll be able to reach a lot of people without spending money. 

With research showing that email marketing has the ROI of $38 for every dollar spent, it’s easy to see why so many marketers love it. Email marketing is one of the few ways to directly communicate with your clients and that gives you a lot of leeway in the type of content you can create. 

Social Media Marketing 

Social media marketing is one of the best strategies for creating and building a loyal following. It lets you engage with your audience through posts, comments, polls, and more. It’s important to focus on the social media platform which your audience uses, instead of just using one and hoping your audience will follow your lead. 

Through social listening and monitoring, you can figure out how to best shape your content and use it to reach new audiences and convert them to clients. 

Video Marketing

Video content is dominating social media. It engages more people than any other type of content. That’s why it’s a great strategy for businesses all over the world. 

The video format is great for explaining a service that people would not be familiar with, as well as for demonstrations. They let you showcase your product or service works once, instead of having to do live demos every day. 

For leads that are further down your sales funnel, we suggest how-to videos that focus on showing how your brand helps make someone’s day easier. This is where you showcase more than one function of your product or service and really connect to your audience. 

Once your leads reach the final stages of your funnel, bring them in with an emotional video that works as social proof. This is where you’re selling them on a lifestyle, instead of a specific product or feature. With the right video editing software, you can create such a captivating and engaging video in minutes.

How to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy 

Everything starts with analysis. Only after you analyze your current strategy can you begin to improve it. The trick is knowing which metrics to focus on in your analysis. 

Here are some of the most important metrics you need to work on:

• Conversions instead of leads
• Bounce rate instead of traffic
• Repeated sales
• Churn rates

If you want to improve your digital marketing strategy, you need to understand the buyers’ journey and which stages do your buyers have the most trouble with. This includes a lot of A/B testing and trying out different content. 

Seeing how we covered a lot of different strategies and types of content in this article, we’re sure you’ll find the best path for your business. If you focus on data and reanalyze your strategy even if it’s bringing in the wanted results, you’ll be on the right track to improving your sales and increasing your revenue.

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