The digital strategy is a crucial component of every company’s marketing today. The use of digital media is widespread, and you definitely need a digital marketing strategy to grow in such a competitive market. Most companies invest a lot in digital marketing. However, only those who do it right get great returns.

Digital strategy is about understanding your audience, it's about understanding the behaviours, but it's most importantly about looking into the distance and

seeing what are the larger goals that you can achieve with digital strategy. With a defined strategy, you can easily track and understand consumer behaviour and improve brand awareness.  

So when we think about digital marketing, we want to think about, what is the strategy that we will be using? Are we going to be inbound or outbound-oriented? Are we going to promote and develop a lot of content that are going to make our brand valuable and interesting and, you know, a logic fit in our customer's life?

As a digital marketer, you don’t just aim for short-term conversions, but also to build long-term brand awareness with your campaigns. Here are 10 of the most successful ways to amplify your business, organisation or company using a digital strategy to drive returns on investment.

1. Set Clear Goals & Tactics

When you’re starting to build your marketing strategy, make sure that you have clear objectives. Be it in terms of leads, conversions, engagement, or even downloads, you need to have a specific target market in mind.

It can be difficult to implement your strategy without having clear goals. And measuring your success from your campaign becomes more difficult without knowing your objectives. Setting objectives allows you to change your strategy based on the results you are getting as well.

During the planning phase, we focus on a number of key factors. The first is purpose, the second is the success outcome, the third is the existing channels, and the fourth is the resources. The goals are really the key consideration that you should have when you get started because it's not all about what you put out there but what you're going to bring in. How are you going to be different? How are you going to benefit clients? What is your SWOT analysis?

Setting up these goals as early as possible will help you understand what direction you’re going in because creating a strategy to get more customers is not the same as creating a strategy to make your brand more likable.

2. Identify your Target Audience

Finding your target audience is of utmost importance as it helps you reach people who matter the most - people who are likely to convert. Not only does this increase the number of relevant leads you get, but also improves brand perception through positive word of mouth. You need to first create a consumer persona in order to identify your target audiences. Using demographic and location data, you can devise your strategies effectively. You can also target based on qualitative information like goals, hobbies, interests, or priorities.

For example, when you run ads through Facebook, it allows you to choose the audiences you want your ad to be displayed to. You can select specific locations, age groups, genders, and even interests. This ensures that your ads are only displayed to people who are likely to be interested in your products or brand.

3. Optimise & Update your Website

Web optimisation is the art of creating and continuously improving

websites to improve the visitor experience, which is going to help result in higher visitor satisfaction, a better user experience, and high repeat visit and conversion rates. So it involves a lot of aspects, which il get into.

First, UX is short for user experience. So that's how a user is actually using your website. It needs to be as easy to use as possible. Next, so how your website is laid out. So the visual components of your website, is a sidebar on one side, where's the navigation? That all goes into design. And then finally, how a website displays information, so the graphics and the text of a website are very important if you want to land first page of on google.

All of these things work together to create a better more optimised website experience. It's going to also help users find the information that they're looking for and lead them to make a purchase, showcase what you are about, and what you offer. People that are interested can sign up for your email list.

4. Use Search Retargeting

Search retargeting involves targeting users based on the previous searches and keywords that they have used in search their engines. This allows you to connect with people based on their interests. As these users are already looking for something similar, your chances of conversions are higher. This helps the customer find value in what they are looking for rather than promoted content that is useless. It is a very powerful tool for people, businesses looking to reach the most appropriate audience. Retargeting can drive a huge return on investment if done correctly.

5. Use Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has many benefits.

Chief among them, the ability to build relationships with new and existing customers. It provides a pretty real-time feedback loop for brands and businesses to test

new products and new ideas. It also allows quite a bit of creative flexibility for brands to know very quickly, whether or not their creative is resonating with their desired audience. And lastly, it delivers a higher ROI than

most other marketing channels.

Many brands fail at effective social media marketing because of their practices. What they fail to understand is that social media isn’t just a platform to broadcast your messages. A solid social media strategy involves effective social media practices. Take the time to respond to comments on your social media posts, thank your followers, help them when they need something. If they’re looking for information, be proactive and help them find it.

Also make sure that the content you share is truly interesting, engaging, and informative. Include calls-to-action that encourage people to engage. Set up quizzes, polls, contests, or giveaways to increase participation. You can even feature your followers’ content that mentions you on your pages.

6. Create Mobile-Friendly Campaigns

Today, consumers are always on-the-go and heavily dependent on mobile devices. Because of this, optimising your ads for mobile is an effective product marketing strategy. You can achieve your goals with greater ease if you are visible where the majority of your audience is. That is why it is absolutely important to make your content mobile-friendly.

There is a lot that you can do to incorporate mobile into your marketing strategy. For example, you can allow the use of a mobile wallet and create ad content that are optimized for mobile. Social media websites provide buy buttons that take the consumer to the product page directly. This can also help increase sales

7. Video & Display Marketing

Display advertising has been a very prominent channel for many years. And in that time, a number of platforms have started to offer display advertising solutions.

Your video and display campaigns should be viewed as upper-funnel activity. And the KPIs that you set for your campaign should reflect this. Now, video and display campaigns can reach people at all stages of their buyer journey. But their strength really lies in reaching people at the beginning and creating that awareness and interest to consider your product or what you set out to sell.

It's important to remember that your campaign objectives will influence the settings and targeting that you choose when you come to run your campaigns.

There are also a number of platforms you can choose from when running video advertising campaigns. Under social video platforms we have Facebook and YouTube. YouTube is a video sharing social media network and a search engine that users can upload, view, and share their own content. Facebook allows you to display videos within the newsfeed of users that match their audience targeting while they're browsing the website.

8. Personalise Your Campaign

Personalisation can help you grab the attention of customers with ease. The more your campaign can be personalised for each individual, the more chances there are of conversions.

A personalised email or offer can go a long way to get a consumer to consider your product. Whenever possible, it is a great practice to personalise your campaign as much as possible.

9. Measure Data

This is one of the most important ways of ensuring that your product marketing strategy is working. You must keep measuring all of the parameters of your digital marketing campaign on a regular basis.

It is important to measure as much data as possible as this can show if your strategy is working or not. These analytics can help you figure out which strategies are working and which are not. Based on your analysis, you can modify your strategy and fix any issues.

10. ROI

Return on Investment is a commonly used phrase by all of our bosses, commonly misinterpreted, commonly misappropriated and commonly not fair because oftentimes everybody wants to see the euro value or the dollar value that's coming out of activity, but that’s actually quite unfair because sometimes it doesn't really equate to that, sometimes it's bigger than that. Return on Investment is the cost of your digital activities versus the return that it generates.

From what we see, is the “return” can have two outcomes. Firstly, sales. If you can track your sales end to end, then you should use that. Someone that buys your product through a digital channel or as a result of digital activity is an effective measure of how much sales it generated versus how much it cost to actually deliver.

The second is leads. Leads are very effective. They are new potential custumers that can bring value to your business if approached appropriately. They’re often underestimated how valuable they are to the business. Lead generation is the power to communicate with these leads through different channels.

With ROI, it can be a really tricky subject because sometimes people want to measure it in a monetary value. Sometimes it's not the monetary value but your potential for success with digital will increase as soon as you get rid of this thinking. Its important for businesses to start thinking outside of the commercial outcome being purely a monetary value to being actually a commercial outcome of success.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, there are plenty of opportunities you can create to get your digital marketing strategy right. Identifying your consumer personas, targeting the right audiences, analysing data, and retargeting can amplify your returns. There is no single perfect way of getting your strategy right, but continual analysis can definitely help you get closer to perfection.