Summary: Most new businesses find it a bit difficult to present and maintain a compelling image of their brand. A brand cannot afford to lose ground to its competitors. The question is - what can go wrong with digital marketing strategies? Here are four tips to make your marketing initiatives a success.

Strategy is the key to any successful initiative. If you have a defined digital marketing strategy, chances are that you have already won half the battle. However, the war still ensues!     

Here are four tried and tested steps that will give you a strong launchpad and foundation for your marketing initiatives.

1. Build the skeletal frame

You should start your marketing automation strategy by creating a compelling business website that actually drives traffic and customers. Try finding a cause that connects your customers and your business. Your brand identity must be the connection and it can work a magic. Invest time building the website and launch it once you feel your website expresses your vision just the way you want it to.  

2. Build relations – both online and offline

Focus on building and strengthening relationships with your customers instead of following transactional marketing (where you keep trying to sell). Understand the fact that when customers love your brand, they would not hesitate to spend more on it. Your online marketing strategy should include relationship building as a key responsible area.

Alongside relationship building, you will need to find new ways of integrating offline marketing with newer technologies. This will help build more engaging customer experiences, thereby, increasing your brand’s reputation. Make use of mobile apps, mobile marketing, marketing automation tools to boost your offered purchasing channels.  

3. Make the most of available platforms

Use all available digital channels like Search Engine Marketing, Digital Billboards (yes, they work!), content marketing, social media platforms, email marketing etc. to increase your leads and convert them into customers.

You will need to have some level of SEO expertise if you want to start on your own. Understanding of search engine algorithms and rankings will be of help too as this process needs you to continuously research and target keywords and optimize your website to stay abreast of SERP (Search Engine Results Page) best practices.

It is great to have traffic on your website, but it is not valuable unless a good part of it converts to leads and customers.

4. Optimise marketing efforts through data and feedback

This is the part where most businesses or agencies follow the “set it and forget it” concept. Analytics and reporting helps you understand the result of all your marketing strategies. You need to understand that your customers have specific needs and crosscheck if you are actually making it to their expectations. Ensure that everything you or the agency does is being tracked. Understanding the data and gathering customer feedback would allow you to adjust or grow your marketing efforts as required.

If you have a vision and a strategy, your business would surely reach the top. Every effort of yours needs to be aimed at contributing to developing an irresistible online presence for your brand.

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