Often brands can have bags of enthusiasm, huge ambition and great vision for their digital marketing strategy. But without the right tactics to deliver results, it’s futile. Uncover the most effective, tried and tested tactics for digital marketing that’ll help boost your ROI.
There’s a long-list of digital marketing tactics available, but if we’re honest, it’s not a one size fits all situation. Nobody knows your brand as well as you do and so your tactics need to be unique to your business, it’s goals and must underpin your wider digital marketing strategy.
We’ve grouped the top tactics for digital marketing into the following five categories:
- Content marketing
- Social media
- Search marketing
- Paid advertising
- Analytics – Integrate and automate
1. Content marketing
70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, with 96% of the most successful marketers claiming that content has helped to build credibility and trust with their target audience. Content marketing is a tactic that fuels other important marketing tactics; it underpins everything from search engine optimisation (SEO) to email marketing, right through to social media. Which is probably why the phrase, ‘content is king’ is used so frequently in marketing circles.
Tactics for digital marketing evolve with technology and user behaviour, content marketing is no exception. As more people choose mobile devices to access online content and video continue to increase in popularity, brands need to respond inline with these trends to engage their audiences. Brands that fail to do so or are too slow to invest in lucrative channels risk falling behind digitally savvy competitors.
Catch your audience’s attention with video
In 2020, 81% of businesses invested in video as a marketing
tool, a smart move when 78% of people are reported to view video content every
week. Certainly a tactic brands could leverage to boost engagement and brand
awareness.
Consumer behaviour can be a minefield. Data shows that users
are impatient, they often disengage with websites that don’t load quickly (40%
of people abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load), they
subscribe to ‘always-on’ models like Netflix and Amazon Prime that capitalise
on convenience and immediate gratification. So, when it comes to content, its not
really that surprising that video is a preferred way to consume content and
that it can drive conversions by up to 80%.
Blogging is still an essential tactic for digital marketing
Yes, video content is awesome. But written content is still a big player in the marketing toolkit and certainly shouldn’t be overlooked. Ultimately, with content that sits on your brand’s website, you should consider two things:
1. Google
2. User Experience
The two really sit hand in hand. Google looks for experts in their field that are sharing quality content frequently, that will best serve their users online search queries. So, if Google’s aim to continue to be the best search engine and show the best content on page one of its search engine results pages (SERPs), and brands want to be visible and convert relevant traffic – its only logical to create content that adheres to Google’s guidelines to rank well. One of these is producing frequent written content, that’s optimised, unique and usually around 1500-2000 words. Companies that have a blog section on their website gain 97% more links to their website – boosting their visibility and authority.
2. Social media marketing tactics
More than half of the world’s population uses some form of social media, making it a crucial tactic for any brand’s digital marketing strategy. The key to social media marketing is having a clear insight to the difference audiences that exist on each platform and understanding where it is your audience prefers to hang out – digitally. Not every platform will be suitable for every organisation, which is why we would recommended carrying out some initial analysis before adopting this tactic.
Despite the growth of video platforms such as TikTok that receive a lot of buzz, Facebook continues to dominate the social media space in 2020, being the most used platform by individuals and businesses. Interestingly, YouTube comes in second, with 39 million UK users (just 5.8m less than Facebook, which is more than TikTok’s 3.7m UK users). YouTube is the world’s second more popular search engine after Google and also has great SEO value – highlighting again, the importance of video for marketers. Using video across social media is becoming industry standard for brands that are striving for great engagement results. In the last year we’ve seen the leading platforms add video and bitesize content features, including Instagram Reels, Twitter Fleets and Linkedin stories.
Keeping up to speed with emerging digital trends is also important when choosing your tactics for digital marketing. TikTok might not be the most widely used platform, however its one of the fastest growing platforms, since launching in September 2016, It now boasts 800 million active users. Although 41% of TikTok users are aged between 16-24, the demographics on the platform are continuing to widen, giving marketers a great opportunity to start considering how they can leverage this platform in their social media strategy.
3. Search marketing
Writing content that will get your brand noticed and ranking on the first page of Google is an aim for most marketers, but Google’s rapidly changing algorithms can sometimes make this difficult. The most sensible and sustainable approach to SEO is to create content that will be valuable to your audience. Content that puts the user intent first and optimising for a criteria second can’t go far wrong. Google may update its criteria but it’s unlikely to ever penalise great, quality content.
Start by carrying out some keyword research and trend analysis to find relevant key terms that will help you create future-proof content. This might seem obvious, but jumping to write an article in response to a trend or fad can be short sighted if that’s your only approach. Creating content that can stand the test of time and be updated is a great way to stay ahead with search.
Digital PR
An important part of any digital marketing strategy is digital PR. Whilst the most obvious benefit might be building quality links back to your website to build your online authority and profile for Google, there’s a lot more advantages to this digital marketing tactic. When launching a campaign, gaining online coverage and placements from relevant publications puts your brand and messaging right in front of a wider, relevant audience – boosting brand awareness.
It’s the being in front of a targeted audience that’s really important for this tactic. Digital PR is likely to drive targeted traffic to your website, giving you an engaged audience to convert and track for any future activity, such as remarketing.
Gaining coverage in authoritative publications across any sector can boost your brand’s credibility in that space. Building trust with your target audience and even introducing your brand to new relevant audiences.
4. Paid advertising
Whilst organic traffic has its benefits, sometime
competition is simply too tough or perhaps your brand is just starting out with
its search marketing strategy, which is more long-term. This is where paid
media can bridge the gap, offering quick results that allow marketers to target
specific demographics.
Pay per click (PPC) visitors are 50% more likely to convert
than visitors that come through organic channels, making paid advertising a
tactic digital marketers should definitely have on their radar to make the most
of valuable traffic.
Social ad impressions are up 20% year on year according to
Statista, a result that is being attributed to the rise of video and story
format ads that generally perform well for engagement. 27% of online users say
they find new brands through paid social ads. So, whether you’re considering
reaching some of Facebook’s 2.5 billion monthly global users or investing some
budget in Instagram influencers or harnessing the potential of PPC, paid
advertising is a great way to bump up your ROI.
5. Analytics – integrate and automate
Without fully tracking and taking advantage of a suite of
analytical tools, you could be putting your entire marketing effort at risk, or
to waste. Whilst there’s an endless amount of metrics that can be measured,
with some really fantastic tools – its some of the basics that are still
paramount to success. Bounce rate is one of them. Now, its fair to acknowledge
that some pages with high bounce rate, still receive high volumes or traffic
and generally perform well. This could simply be because the content is great –
it serves the user perfectly in answering a question or providing suitable
information. However, from a broader perspective this can have a negative knock
on effect that impacts your rankings on Google and therefore leaves your brand
penalised.
Reviewing your content’s performance should be standard
practice, giving marketers the opportunity to identify the worst pages and
improve them, either with adding links to related content on your site,
enticing CTAs or maybe contact forms.
We’re well into a digital era where customers simply expect
brands to be always-on and to know them. We often see great joined
up-experiences through our everyday lives, whether its Neflix sending an email
that suggests new films you might be interested in this weekend, or a food
delivery service sending you a text message that your takeaway in five minutes
away after you’ve placed your order on their app. We’re completely immersed in
omnichannel, automated, personalised experiences and so that’s the new normal
consumers expect from brands.
Knowing your audience and your digital marketing tools can
deliver amazing results, for brands and consumers. Carefully planning timely
emails that showcase the right content, at the right moment, has huge power to
convert. The key thing to remember is to carry out careful planning, monitor
activity and review as an ongoing process to get the best results.
Which tactics for digital marketing are most effective for your brand?
Although some tactics for digital marketing are necessary to best deliver campaigns, the tools and audience preferences are likely to change. Keeping your strategy optimised and effective can feel like a headache and get costly on tool subscriptions if you don’t have in-house expertise or resource. Partnering with a digital and content specialist agency can ease that pressure. We’re BBI, a content-led, performance agency. We’ve been helping brands across a broad range of sectors achieve their digital goals and move audiences since 2011. Contact us today to find out how effective your existing tactics are or to have a chat about your future goals – we’d love to help!
