Right now, there are thousands, if not millions of customers out there, across online and offline channels, waiting to discover your products for the first time. However, for every budding customer, there’s also a rival band competing for their attention.
If you want to cut through the noise, engage them effectively and win their business, you need a structured digital marketing strategy that will help you achieve your goals. But what is a digital marketing strategy, and what can you do to give yours the kickstart it needs to start delivering results? In this article, we’re giving you 10 tips you can use to get your digital marketing strategy performing at its peak. Read on to find out more.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a business will leverage digital channels to achieve its marketing goals. It encompasses a variety of online marketing techniques and tools, including email marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and digital advertising, to reach and engage a target audience effectively.
Whether it’s brand awareness or boosting sales, the key to a successful digital marketing strategy lies in understanding what you want to achieve, and then building a structured plan that walks you towards your goals.
1. Unlock Your Data and Use it to Drive Conversions
How can you sell to your customers if you don’t know who they are, where they’re spending their time, and what they want? This is why data is such a vital pillar of any high-performing digital marketing strategy.
Data analytics should influence every decision and action a marketing team takes. This means digging through the data you have to understand where potential customers are spending their time (which social platforms and websites), and then targeting them with personalized, relevant content.
Before you get a migraine thinking about the amount of CSV files you’ll need to juggle to get this data, customer engagement platforms simplify this process.
While B2C marketing teams traditionally take the approach of casting a wide net and hoping for the best, customer engagement platforms allow you to consolidate and activate your customer data. By targeting specific demographics and audience segments with personalized content, incentives, and product recommendations, you’re able to drive conversion through increased relevancy.
2. Set the Stage for Long-Term Value
Short-term wins can be tempting, but when you’re making marketing decisions, you need to shoot for long-term value that will drive lasting results. Before pouring resources into a one-off campaign for a specific social media platform, you need to perform your due diligence and research to ensure your marketing investment will pay off in the long term.
With technology changing at an exponential pace, there will always be ideas and trends that are ‘in’ or ‘the hot new thing’ in the industry. Marketers should take care to understand where the brand best stands to benefit from these trends before making any decisions that could impact long-term growth or revenue.
3. Double Down on Customer Experience and Service
As a digital marketer, you might be thinking, “This is a separate team within my business – what does customer experience have to do with me?”
In marketing, it has everything to do with you. Although it’s sometimes easy to forget, every single interaction a customer has with your brand shapes their overall journey and forms their experience.
In an economic landscape where brands need customers to keep coming back in order to drive significant ROI, delivering a compelling experience is paramount. This is a critical component of achieving success with omnichannel marketing, which means ensuring a single customer has a seamless, integrated buying experience, no matter the platform or channel.
Customer service shouldn’t be left out of this equation either.
Even though the concept of customer service may feel like a more fundamental concern for brick-and-mortar stores than online retailers, many of today’s brands have shown the importance of stellar service in e-commerce experiences.
Digital marketers play a key role in establishing a customer-centric reputation for the brand. Whether this is through personalized emails, welcome pages, or customized product recommendations, that personal touch can make a huge difference in the eyes of the customer. In fact, 66% of consumers remain loyal and frequently purchase from a brand due to personalized, relevant communications. Consumers expect superior service, and personalization helps you deliver on those expectations.
4. Create the Ultimate Omnichannel Customer Journey
As customer engagement technology helps us build clear pictures of who our customers are from the data we have, our role as marketers is to turn that data into tangible improvements to the customer journey. Enter omnichannel marketing.
Imagine a shopping experience so unique that each customer – whether they’re shopping on mobile or in-store – feels like it’s been crafted just for them. That’s the power that omnichannel marketing holds for your brand.
The key to omnichannel marketing success lies in acting on the data you have as a marketer. Customer engagement platforms like Emarsys cut the endless spreadsheets and hours of detailed data analysis out of this process. By accessing data from key touchpoints across the customer journey and integrating your marketing channels, a customer engagement platform will give you the insights and intelligence you need to craft a unified shopping experience across the customer journey.
No matter where your customers choose to engage – whether it be opening an abandoned cart email on desktop or clicking a push notification upselling a product on mobile – the experience they receive will feel cohesive, connected and deliberate.
5. Map Customer Touchpoints
Before you can make your data accessible across every customer touchpoint and craft an omnichannel experience that hooks customers for life, you need to know what those touchpoints are.
What does your buying journey look like? Where do your customers shop? How do they engage with your brand? By mapping out your customer touchpoints, you’ll get a clear view of how customers interact with your brand across multiple channels and stages of their journey.
Here’s how to make that happen:
- Collect comprehensive data from all interactions—website analytics, CRM systems, social media, and customer feedback—to fully understand where and how customers engage with your brand.
- Create a visual map of every touchpoint across the customer journey, from the first contact to post-purchase, to identify friction points and opportunities for enhancement.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of each touchpoint, identify areas of friction, and determine where improvements are necessary to enhance the customer experience.
- Implement strategic improvements: Apply targeted enhancements to optimize the performance of critical touchpoints, streamline processes, and increase personalization.
By investing time in understanding your customers’ touchpoints, you’ll get the structure you need to create tailored, personalized experiences.
6. Cultivate Brand Connection with Storytelling
Effective storytelling is a powerful tool that can humanize your brand, build trust, and create deeper engagement with your customers. You don’t need to become Shakespeare, but you do need to be authentic and genuine.
Your brand’s messaging should tell the story of why you started your company, why you do what you do, and how this helps your customers solve their problems.
Remember, when you’re crafting your marketing content, you’re not speaking to data – you’re creating content that will be read by real people who sit behind the metrics on your dashboard. Creating authentic content will help you connect with them.
So, engage with them personally and emotionally. Whether it’s through blog posts, videos, social media, or podcasts, weave messaging about your mission and how your products have helped customers into the content you create to help build closer connections with your audience.
7. Leverage Social Media Marketing
Looking to build an engaged audience of loyal, repeat customers? Social media is a vital cog in your marketing machine, giving you everything you need to target each stage of the buyer journey.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok give you a pedestal to shout about your brand from. Put this to good use by building a social media content strategy that mixes engaging, informative and promotional content that builds trust, educates your audience on the benefits of shopping with your brand, and drives conversions.
Want to build your audience faster? Consider adding paid social into your marketing mix, which will dramatically expand your reach, help you target new audience segments based on your existing customer demographics, and drive those all-important repeat purchases.
8. Negotiate Win-Win Partnerships
The world of digital marketing can be tough. Why go it alone? Establishing partnerships with other businesses, content creators and influencers can help you grow your audience and achieve your goals faster.
Start by making a list of potential partners who fit your brand and have complimentary audiences or products. Once you’ve got this list in hand, reach out to them with a clear proposal on how you planned partnership will benefit both sides. This could involve anything from free product samples to payment in exchange for video content or Instagram posts.
Communication is key in these discussions. Be open about what you’re looking to achieve from the partnership from the get-go, but also be willing to listen to the requirements of your prospective partners. Long-term relationships are the name of the game here, so try to strike win-win deals that work for everyone involved.
9. Automate Your Email Marketing
Why spend hours sorting through email data spreadsheets, or tediously creating and scheduling campaigns when AI can do it for you? Modern email automation platforms can save you significant time in execution, allowing you to place your focus back on strategy and planning.
Start by segmenting your email list based on user behavior, preferences, and demographics to deliver more personalized messages. From here, you can use this segmentation to trigger specific emails based on actions such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or abandoning a shopping cart.
The possibilities for engaging your audience with email automation are endless, giving you the flexibility to target customers at each stage of the buying journey.
Beyond abandoned cart, you can easily implement other key lifecycle campaigns like post-purchase follow-up to help you win reviews, cross-sell flows introduce customers to their next favorite products, and win-back flows to identify customers who are on the brink of leaving your brand, and reeling them back in with enticing offers.
10. Get Better Quality Customer Data
Your customers expect personalized brand experiences and content tailored specifically to their preferences and needs. However, to deliver this level of personalization, need to gain a deep understanding of your customers. This is where the importance of first- and zero-party data comes into play.
First-party data is collected directly from customer interactions with your brand, such as data from website behavior, app usage, and purchase history. Zero-party data, on the other hand, is information that customers intentionally and proactively share with your brand, such as preferences and interests collected through surveys or profile settings.
By gathering data from website pop-ups, downloadable content, AI chatbots and even during checkout, you gain invaluable insights into the customers behind the metrics. With these new, more accurate customer profiles, you can target your audience with more meaningful, personalized content, providing them with the experience they want – and connecting them with the products they need faster.
Build a Better Digital Marketing Strategy with Emarsys
As the world of marketing changes, so should your digital marketing strategy. It’s important to stay aware of the changing landscape and the new advancements in technology that can make digital marketer’s lives much easier.
Ready to get started? Learn how Emarsys can help you improve your marketing strategy through automation, personalization, and data-driven insights with our 3-minute demo.
