What are the must-haves when it comes to your digital marketing strategy? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you look at the sheer number of tools that promise to increase your inbound leads, website traffic, and prospect conversions. So easy, in fact, that you might be overlooking the foundational aspects of what really makes your digital marketing effective. That’s why we’d like to share with you which ones we think are essential, and the best ways we’ve seen to leverage them.
Contact Database
First, you need a pipeline. While some marketers tend to buy lead lists as a means to boost their contact database, this can be problematic. Conversely, the manual search for the points of contact for each of the companies you want to work with can be both time-consuming and mentally taxing. We’ve found that the best approach is to use prospecting automation to find, verify, and nurture new leads toward conversations. This slowly builds your contact database, protects your brand’s digital reputation, and allows you to transfer those nurtured leads over to a different customer relationship management (CRM) tool when they’ve reached a specific level of engagement.
Email Automation
Emails are still the backbone of new business discussions, and essential to your digital marketing strategy. They’re also much easier to manage when you automate them. Most CRMs offer this functionality, and we recommend that you choose one that also includes the following items at a minimum:
- An intuitive user interface.
- Convenient list segmentation for your contacts.
- Lead scoring.
- The ability to send a sequence of emails based on a lead’s actions.
- Dynamic reporting that measures organic and direct traffic.
- Social media integration.
Content
When done well, content prompts your leads to engage with your brand to learn more.
Let’s start by discussing your emails. Generally speaking, these perform better when their content:
- Focuses on leads, not your company.
- Offers solutions or educational material.
- Uses the word “you” a lot.
- Remains brief but relevant.
- Sticks to one or two questions max (including calls to action).
- Includes backlinks to drive traffic to your website.
- Sounds natural, like you’re talking with a coworker.
- Avoids sales lingo.
But that’s not the only place where content is important…
Website
We like to think of your website as your business resume. It’s where you want your leads to go, so why wouldn’t it be the most updated part of your digital marketing strategy?
With that in mind, the content you develop for your website should include:
A Solution. The first thing readers should see on your homepage is what problem of theirs you can solve.
Static Content. This should briefly touch on products and services you offer, and link to the appropriate pages that discuss them in more detail.
Videos and Testimonials. Leads gravitate to videos because they’re easier to digest, and they can creatively showcase your work. Testimonials have a lot of pull because people are increasingly looking to reviews as a means to gauge a company’s value.
A Blog. This is where you get to tell your full story, and write as much as you’d like — as long as it’s appropriate, relevant, and not flagged by search engines for keyword stuffing.
Contact Information. You might be surprised that some businesses forget this!
Do you have questions about how well your website stacks up? We can audit it!
Social Media
Posting on social media is similar to blogging: as long as you do it consistently, you build market authority, demonstrate active engagement with your audience, and stay top of mind. You can use retargeting and pay-per-click to improve your visibility on specific social media platforms and web browsers. You can incorporate user-generated content from happy clients as a free way to promote your brand. And you can showcase your products and services in a highly visual medium.
Note: Although most social media platforms allow you to schedule your posts, not all do. That’s why it may be preferable to integrate them with your CRM.
Once you have all of these areas covered, you’ll establish a strong foundation for your digital marketing strategy. Then you can spend more time comparing the pros and cons of the other digital tools out there that claim to complement them.
If you have questions about any of these areas, or want to learn about how you can outsource them, we’d be happy to help you. Click the link below for a free marketing consultation.
