Digital marketing strategies are sets of plans designed to achieve your digital marketing goals. These strategies are expected to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART)

Before you start a digital marketing campaign, the first thing to do is to set goals you want to achieve within a time frame and plan on how to achieve these goals.

Your digital marketing goal could be to improve brand visibility, increase leads, conversion etc.

Investment in digital marketing is a medium to long-term investment because your first objective should be to build brand visibility, acceptance and people’s trust.

Research shows that it takes time for a brand to be recognized and accepted. For a successful investment in digital marketing, you need to build a strong and lovable brand first

Why you should consider digital marketing

• Your customers are moving online (some have moved long ago). You need to follow them.
• Digital marketing is “the Now” marketing. 
• Lots of companies are winning more clients on the internet using digital marketing strategies. 
• Cost per conversion is low compared to traditional marketing where you fuel your car, visit the client, spend lots of time and others.
• Digital marketing is relatively cheap. You can reach more prospects at a lesser rate compared to traditional marketing.
• With time, at least 85 to 90% of the world population will be online. 

Digital marketing strategies you should consider

Local Listing

You need to ensure your company is listed on local business directories like Google My Business, yellow pages, etc.

Ensuring your business is visible on the local listing is crucial because when people search for products or services within a geographical location, Google and other local listing service providers display a list of registered businesses within that same geographical location before displaying other

Google and Bing are the most popular search engines in the world, and it is wise to optimize your business on Google my Business and Bing Local. However, Bing local is not available to countries in Africa and as a result, google my business and Google map seems to be the best option for SMEs in Africa.

Benefits to business (Google my Business)

• Your business is listed on Google my Business and Google map
• Most people that search for information with location tags want to buy.
• There is a high propensity to make more sales from Google my Business.
• Google My Business has helped lots of my clients increase leads and make sales.
• You can measure performances over a period.

Search Engine Optimization.

Most business owners focus on having a website and ignore the need to optimize their website. They care less about page loading speed, on-page optimization, keywords optimization, etc.

Search engine optimization allows search bots and spiders to crawl, index and rank web pages so that when prospects in need of your product or service search for related keywords, your website will be visible to potential buyers.

Invest in web pages optimization, keyword optimization, and link building as these will help improve your website domain authority which is essential for improved website rank

Important SEO factors.

below are some of the SEO you should consider for your website:

• Indexing: Submit your website to search engines webmasters to be indexed.
• Submit your website’s sitemap
• Run on-page optimization for all the pages on your website. 
• Run an off-page optimization 
• Ensure your web pages are well structured 
• Create a blog for your website and post relevant content regularly
• Avoid slow-loading web pages. 
• Optimize relevant keywords with keyword research tools and know which keyword is most useful for your business.
• Spy on competitors 

Content marketing.

Content is king. Creative contents are best for inbound marketing which involves content idealization, content creation, content distribution and content marketing.

If you want to build brand visibility, generate quality leads and make high sales, consider the following:

• Use video content to build brand awareness and generate qualified leads.
• Use text content to grow website authority and ranking on search engines.
• Use graphics and infographics to engage followers on social media and build a great brand.

Social media marketing.

Social media marketing is an essential digital marketing strategy for every company.

Use creative content to drive your social media marketing campaign because the quality of your content will determine the quality of prospects you attract.

Before running social media marketing, define your target market first to know what social media channel is the best for you.

• To reach a large number of employed and corporate brands, use LinkedIn 
• To reach a large adult age group, use Facebook
• To reach large numbers of youths, use Instagram and TikTok 
• To reach public office holders, and government parastatals, use Twitter 
• To reach social media influencers, use all the social media channels 

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the cheapest marketing strategies with a high conversion rate. 

While roughly 281 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2018, the figure is expected to increase to over 347 billion daily emails in 2022.

Email marketing is an old marketing strategy but still one of the most effective marketing strategies your company can take full advantage of. Start with free email marketing tools like Mailchimp