Best Digital Marketing Strategies for Business Growth

It’s critical to have a digital marketing strategy in place to help your business grow and thrive. But budgets are finite—so how do you choose where to spend your marketing dollars to get the best results? Let’s explore some of the best digital marketing strategies businesses can use, and how they can be combined to maximize your ROI.

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is an overarching plan that organizations use to reach more customers online. There are numerous tactics involved in a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, all of which help bring in more business by increasing brand awareness, attracting qualified leads, and helping those leads become customers.

Benefits of Having a B2C Digital Marketing Strategy

With more people purchasing products and requesting services online, having a B2C digital marketing strategy in place is essential for businesses of all sizes. Here are just a few of the benefits:

• Better online visibility for your promotional campaigns and business as a whole
• Increased sales from e-commerce platforms
• Opportunities for more personalized and targeted marketing based on buyer behavior
• Higher ROI than traditional marketing tactics

How the Best B2B Digital Marketing Strategies Lead to Growth

B2B digital marketing strategies are more important than ever for organizations that are trying to get more wholesale or business customers. Even within niche industries, more and more company decision-makers are turning to platforms like Google and YouTube to find solutions to their problems. B2B digital marketing is beneficial because it:

• Improves brand awareness within the industries you’re targeting
• Increases customer retention and referrals
• Attracts more qualified leads to your business, making your sales team’s job easier
• Boosts community engagement
• Increases your marketing ROI overall

Digital Marketing Strategy Examples

The best digital marketing strategies employ tactics across multiple channels and platforms. Here are some tried and true examples of strategies that could be valuable for your overall marketing goals.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s infrastructure and content to improve visibility on search engines like Google and Bing. The objective of SEO is to increase organic traffic to your website when people are searching for terms on those search engines that are relevant to your business.

There are several different types of SEO that businesses should know about when planning their marketing strategy. While you may not need every type of SEO mentioned here, using some of these overlapping strategies will increase your chances of being found online.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is typically within the wheelhouse of the developer or SEO specialists who specialize in optimizing the back end of the website. Some technical SEO measures include:

• Improving site speed
• Establishing canonical URLs
• Facilitating page indexing
• Optimizing the site for UX and accessibility
• Applying schema markups to pages
• Implementing lazy loading
• And more

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO encompasses optimizing the content with which your visitors interact when they come to your site. These measures are typically part of the duties of content strategists, and can include:

• Creating high-quality website content
• Including both internal and external links in page content
• Incorporating metadata, such as meta descriptions and tags
• Optimizing for keywords in a natural, readable way
• Adding high-quality images that are easy to load
• Implementing optimized URLs

Off-Page SEO

The tactics for improving off-page SEO often take your team off of your website to help establish your business as credible in other places, which is a job in its own right. Off-page SEO tactics might include the following:

• Backlinking from other reputable websites
• Creating guest blog posts
• Adding your website to online listings
• Having an active social media presence for your business
• Using public relations tactics

Local SEO

While local SEO has several overlapping tactics with on-page and off-page SEO, it also comes with a different set of objectives. As the name suggests, local SEO connects businesses with potential customers in their area who are looking for their services, such as those looking for digital marketing agencies in Grand Rapids. Some of the tactics tailored to local SEO include:

• Adding keywords optimized for the city or area you’re targeting
• Using metadata with localized descriptions and key phrases
• Having local listings on Chamber of Commerce websites
• Localizing social media to engage with members of your community
• Utilizing local reviews

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating digital content that supports your brand. This can include blog posts like the one you’re reading right now, videos, gated content like digital guides, and social media posts. 

However, this content typically does not just promote your business outright like a traditional ad—it’s instead meant to stimulate interest and promote your expertise. That way, when your readers are ready to buy, they know where to find the expertise they need.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM can include SEO, but its primary focus is pay-per-click (PPC) marketing—the practice of using paid ads that appear at the top of SERPs. It involves an auction-like process where advertisers place bids on keywords their audience might be using to look for services or products like theirs. In turn, the winning bid for a particular keyword appears next to the organic results for those search queries. 

By contrast, SEO uses content development and website optimization to push website pages higher in the search results, without paying extra for these ads.

There are several different types of pay-per-click ads, including search ads that look like standard Google or Bing results, product listing ads, display ads, video ads that play on YouTube, and more.

Savvy marketers frequently pair SEM and SEO strategies together to further engage with their target audience when they’re looking for answers on search engines.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a great way to generate brand awareness and make your digital marketing strategy the best it can be. It includes both making regular, organic social media posts on your highest-performing platforms and using paid promotions to increase your reach and attract more potential customers.

Email Marketing

With as many new platforms as there are to reach potential customers, email marketing might seem obsolete. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some industry experts like HubSpot view it as one of the most important strategies businesses can use.

Email marketing is the process of sending promotional and lead-nurturing emails to potential and existing customers. This allows businesses to engage with as large or as small of an audience as they want.

Even more, email marketing allows you to connect with existing customers and let them know about promotions or sales, making it easier for them to return for your services.

However, you should only send emails to people who have explicitly signed up for your email list, rather than purchasing a list. Sending emails to those who haven’t asked for them is illegal and can harm your deliverability rate. In turn, it will become harder to engage with customers.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves using endorsements and product placement from individuals and organizations with a large or dedicated audience and a knowledge or social influence in their field. These individuals can include everything from social media personalities to radio show or video hosts with a significant following to subject-matter experts in niche fields.

While the common conception of influencer marketing is working with celebrities and using their social media platforms to get a few posts endorsing your product or business, it can also include everything from content sponsorships to guest appearances on podcasts, live product demos, and more.

Video Marketing

Video marketing can dovetail with several other marketing strategies, including social media marketing, SEO, and SEM. By using video content, you’re able to engage with your audience in a more personal, engaging way.

Incorporating video content alongside your written digital content can boost your SEO efforts because Google prioritizes pages with quality, relevant video content. It also allows you to reach more people, whether through YouTube or your company’s social media platforms, as these algorithms also have preferences for quality video content.

However, getting the most out of video content takes more than sitting in front of a camera and then publishing the video to rake in the views. It also requires editing knowledge, the right equipment, and often a planned script.

Podcast Marketing

Podcast marketing is the art and science of using podcasts to promote your brand, both as a guest on other people’s shows and by having your own podcast for people to learn more about your industry.

Similar to how content marketing allows you to demonstrate your expertise through blogs and other written content, podcast marketing allows you to highlight your knowledge through audio content that your buyer personas can listen to anywhere. This allows you to promote your expertise to a dedicated audience that found you through their favorite podcast platform.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM is a targeted growth strategy in which a company’s marketing and sales teams work together to create a very personalized buying experience for high-value prospects who are more likely to close for larger amounts of money. This can have immense benefits for your ROI when done correctly.

Suppose you’re a B2B company that sells promotional products that larger businesses can use as thank-you gifts for their 10,000 employees. If your sales team identifies five or six of these corporate buyers who are in the market for potential gifts, your marketing department can create a landing page for them to personalize the experience for the individual in charge of buying or researching these products, making them more likely to close larger sales.

Your teams must have a seamless sales-marketing alignment strategy in place. Once your team has a plan, they can deliver consistent, targeted messaging to your most valuable prospects and delight them even after they close the sale.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy for Business Growth

1. Knowing Your Target Audience

To develop the best digital marketing strategies for your business, you need to know who you’re marketing to. 

A great place to start is by looking at your existing customer base. Ask yourself:

• What are my average customers looking for when they reach out for my products/services?
• What are my best customers looking for?
• Do I have repeat customers? If so, what causes someone to come back again?
• Does my customer base understand what I offer? Are they experts, or are they new to the industry?
• What are the top three questions my customers ask?

Understanding your target audience can help you tailor your digital marketing strategies to their specific questions and pain points. You can create content and other digital marketing campaigns for your target audience at each level of the sales funnel.

2. Identify Your Marketing Goals

The key to identifying your marketing goals is to set them with the most valuable criteria in mind. When looking at your website’s role in business growth, some of the most valuable SEO metrics include your conversion rate, organic traffic, and number of backlinks and referring domains.

In most cases, it’s smart to avoid using vanity metrics, like impressions, as part of your marketing goals. Even focusing too much on the rankings of individual keywords can take your eye off the prize. Instead, take a holistic view and determine whether your digital marketing budget is essentially paying for itself with new, qualified leads from your website.

3. Evaluate the Marketing Assets You Have

Unless you’re starting from square one, you likely have some marketing assets already, such as existing blog posts that get a decent amount of organic traffic and landing pages that get a lot of form submissions. Conduct an audit of every piece of marketing collateral you currently have, whether you used it recently or not—and see what the data says about how these pieces performed historically. You may be able to make small changes to optimize what you already have and see large improvements.

4. Plan Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

To plan your digital campaigns for the year or quarter, determine which channels you can use, including those that are owned (such as your website), paid (such as PPC ads or paid social posts), and earned (such as Google reviews).

You may find yourself planning this out in an editorial calendar, which allows you to know exactly when each piece will run and how you can leverage each one to maximize your goals for the campaign. However, if you don’t know where to even begin with scheduling your content in an editorial calendar, working with an agency can be a good place to start—they can provide recommendations and handle the legwork of scheduling the content for your campaigns.

5. Prepare to Launch Your Campaigns

If you have assets already created for your campaign, you can begin to schedule and promote them through email, SEM, and other means. 

However, if your team identifies a need for new content—such as blog posts, downloadable content, social media posts, or videos, to name a few—it may be time to let your SEO and content marketing team do what they do best and develop content that promotes your campaign, both organically and through paid channels.

Get Results with the Best Digital Marketing Strategy Experts

Want to get better digital marketing results but know you lack the resources or team to do so on your own? That’s where Avalanche Creative can help. Contact us online today or give us a call at 616-965-6743 to start boosting your marketing ROI with SEO, web design, content development, and more.