If you desire to get more eyes on your business, a solid digital strategy is a must. While networking with family and friends will always be a decent start, it takes lots of time, and most people within your close network wouldn’t be your ideal customer anyway. This is why you need to adopt a digital business strategy to help propel your business to new heights. In this article, we reveal the process of creating a digital marketing blueprint for your Australian business to drive more qualified traffic, generate leads and sales.
Digital strategy defined
Have you once considered the possibility of adopting a digital strategy for your business? What impact would it make? A digital strategy refers to all the marketing activities you do online to promote your business.
Marketing strategies can be divided into two main groups: digital marketing and offline marketing. Both methods work and have their advantages and disadvantages.
Traditional businesses were built from scratch using offline advertising methods like newspapers and TV. While this strategy can produce good results, today, a solid digital strategy offers small businesses with a small budget ample opportunities to compete with big, established brands in their industry.
Your digital marketing strategy will be a combination of some or all of a range of strategies such as social media marketing, search engine marketing, content marketing, and paid social media advertising. However, experts often advise you to choose one strategy and master it before adding another.
Trying to implement too many at a time would only make you a jack of all trades and master of none. Most small businesses are found of making that mistake.
Why should you use a digital business strategy?
With the uncertainty in our world today, adopting a viable digital strategy has never been more critical. Events have shown that offline networking gatherings are not the way to go for now.
When you adopt a digital marketing strategy, you will have the luxury of promoting your business from the comfort of your home. Also, most small business owners fail at offline marketing because their time is limited.
While online marketing is effective, it is often time-consuming. Perhaps the most significant advantage of a digital marketing strategy in Australia is that your content can keep working for you online 24/7 while you focus on other things.
As a start-up, having a marketing machine that requires little to no supervision is priceless. Small businesses have to handle several tasks simultaneously.
Furthermore, looking at online advertising vs. organic marketing, both can be great. However, most small businesses should start with organic marketing. Once you start getting results with organic marketing, you can then proceed to paid advertising.
Where digital strategy begins – your website
Your website should always provide the foundation for your digital marketing strategy. Your website serves as your asset and business hub that helps you build long-term traffic.
Also, your website design should be professional and functional. Lots of people make nice-looking websites but fail to incorporate functionalities like lead and sales generation.
You will still need to incorporate other strategies, such as paid advertising and social media marketing, into your overall plan, but you don’t have complete control over those platforms. For instance, social media marketing is great, but things can change quickly, and their rules can be updated at their discretion. Facebook pages used to enjoy lots of reach, but today, you have to pay to run ads to your audience or fans.
Your website allows you to leverage content marketing strategies, such as SEO and blogging, to build organic traffic, leads, and sales on your platform with 100% control. You also get to make passive sales of your services or products on your website.
Undoubtedly, your website should be the foundation of your digital marketing strategy.
Marketing tools needed for a viable digital strategy
Having the right tools to work with is critical to the success of any digital marketing strategy. Your website serves as your foundation, but you can gain more ground when you bring other proven marketing tools on board. You will likely need essential tools like an email autoresponder, a CRM, and a sales funnel if you are just starting.
With an autoresponder, you can collect leads on your website, and deliver scheduled, automated messages to those leads. It also allows you to send broadcast messages to thousands of leads simultaneously. If you are yet to start leveraging the power of autoresponders for your business, please let us know as we can point you in the right direction and can find one that will suit your business needs.
Sales funnel builders, such as Clickfunnels, allow you to create stunning, fully functional sales funnels and landing pages with no web design or coding knowledge. They have loads of templates with seamless integration with common autoresponders that help you generate leads and sales on autopilot.
A customer relationship manager (CRM) is an essential and effective marketing tool for any digital strategy because, with it, you can build a relationship with your leads.
You can monitor the progress of your leads and increase sales conversions with the help of a CRM.
How to leverage your digital strategy for lead generation
The marketing tools mentioned above are enough to get you started with generating leads using your digital marketing strategy. People who don’t have a viable lead generation process mostly resort to cold calling.
For Bright Owl Marketing, cold calling is not our preferred method, and if you put a good lead generation strategy together, it can bring you loads of targeted leads. For a successful lead generation process, you need first to have your lead magnet. Now, depending on your objectives, you could offer a free download or a free quote in exchange for their email, phone number, or name.
You could consider creating simple lead magnets such as PDF download, short video, MP3 download, or checklist. For instance, if your goal is to get real estate leads, you might choose to turn first-time home buyers into leads.
You could offer a cheat sheet of 20 things they need before buying their first home. You could share information such as how they can qualify for a loan, get a better quality score, the required down payment, explain the meaning of PMI, etc.
You can just record audio lead magnets with the free voice recorder on your computer or phone. For a checklist or eBook, you can use Google docs for free.
Executing a content marketing plan
If you are interested in knowing what you need to create a good content marketing plan, it has to do with knowing your ideal customer. When you know who they are, you can tailor your content to their needs.
You must know their goals, common questions, and pain points as they relate to your business as your digital and content strategy will be built on these. Understanding the ideal customer, however, is not all you need to do. You must be able to create timely and informative content based on their needs.
This move particularly brought loads of organic traffic to the Bright Owl website. We’ve spent years creating content that we believe would help our potential customers, but it wasn’t structured in a way that would make it show up when they search for such information online. This mistake meant that we ended up struggling to get qualified organic traffic to our website.
However, as illustrated in the SEO section, our traffic increased once we began creating content our potential customers were searching for.
Also, content marketing and good copywriting allows you to position yourself as an expert and the go-to person in your niche. You will also be able to make sales without overdoing it. Instead, you sell by educating your prospects, which has proven to be effective. Make sure you incorporate content marketing into your overall online marketing strategy.
Implementing a video marketing plan
Video marketing is another strategy that can give you and your business tremendous exposure. There are several reasons video marketing has become more prevalent in recent years. One of them is that it is excellent for building a relationship with your prospects.
Video also provides content to educate potential customers on your blog or website, thereby providing a massive SEO boost.
But Before rolling out your video marketing strategy, you should do proper keyword research and build on that. Once we started taking keyword research seriously, we began to get more exposure. It would be best if you considered following the same process when making content for your prospects.
Another advantage of video marketing is that once you do your initial keyword research before making the video, it can be sending your long-term traffic 24/7. This is particularly beneficial when you have limited time to spend making videos. You can create videos when you are off work, and they can keep getting you traffic even when you are busy with other projects.
When you upload your videos to YouTube, you can later apply for monetisation and get paid for posting your content. If you’re yet to embrace video marketing for your business, now is the best time to start.
Vital SEO tips you need to implement for your digital marketing strategy
Implementing SEO with a digital strategy is vital if you want to get organic traffic, sales, and leads consistently. Search engine optimisation (SEO) can give your website more visibility on major search engines such as Google.
Take the time to create and optimise your website content, and you will continue to get traffic, leads, and sales organically. Content creation and optimisation are similar to growing a YouTube channel. When you optimise all the content on your website, it pulls in traffic on autopilot.
You could have just one page (your homepage) bringing you traffic, or you could have several pages. As you create more content and pages, it’s like erecting multiple billboards to advertise your business. That is how you grow your business using content marketing and SEO.
The first tip is to research the keywords that your prospects are searching for. Then you have to concentrate on creating top-notch content. It would help if you focused on quality content that addresses all the questions your prospects are searching for.
It’s important to know that SEO is a long-term strategy. Don’t expect to start profiting from a new blog within a few days. Your website needs weeks or even months to rank in the search engine results. However, once you start ranking, it can bring you consistent traffic and sales. SEO is a must if you are looking to leverage a viable digital strategy for your business.
Have the right expectations for the success of your marketing strategy
The last step in your digital strategy is setting the expectations for results. Success from a digital marketing strategy will not arrive overnight.
Like farming, where you have to first plough and till the soil, you will need to create your website, research keywords, create lead magnets, and build your content marketing strategy.
After planting, you need to water the seeds. This concept is similar to promoting your content using video marketing, paid ads, or SEO. Then, in the end, you harvest, which means getting quality traffic, leads, and sales using your digital strategy.
Always remember that it takes time to see results after the initial “planting.” You need to know that before you can implement a viable digital strategy, you’ll need to learn the process. Once you understand that this takes time, you will be patient and take your business to new heights.
Start implementing the digital marketing strategies shared above, and you will put your brand and business on a path to long-term growth and profitability.
Still can’t figure out how to implement a winning digital strategy?
If you want to get more sales and build your business and are looking for an affordable marketing agency in Australia with expertise in digital marketing and sales funnel development, then get in touch with the experts at Bright Owl Marketing.
