Archive for February, 2024
Developing Your Digital Marketing Strategy
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
As a marketer, considering the creation of the best marketing strategy, you need to have a clear understanding of your business, product, and demographics before choosing one that will be effective for your needs.
To grow your online visibility, you need a plan for using different channels to do so. In this plan, you should consider factors such as your target audience, strengths and weaknesses, and your competitors.
To help you decide which marketing channels to use or test, check data from across your business, your target audience, and how you want to communicate your message or brand.
We’re NOT talking tactics here, but actual strategy. Tactics are what you use to implement your strategy.
What is a marketing strategy?
When developing your digital marketing strategy, there are a few key elements to consider.
1. Understand Your Customer
Your digital marketing strategy will not be successful unless you have a clear understanding of who is buying your product, why they’re buying it, and where they buy it.
1. Create a profile of your audience using data and demographics
2. Speak your customers’ language
3. Understand what their pain points are and how to switch on emotions
4. To help customize content and predict buying patterns, create buyer personas
5. Be culturally aware
6. Consider influencer partnerships
7. Focus on results and action-oriented experience rather than your product
8. Use automation tools to segment and target
2. Review
Creating an effective strategy requires auditing and assessing. You need to know the digital marketing channels and assets you currently have and use.
So conduct a complete channel and content audit and include everything on a spreadsheet for a full picture of your marketing activities across owned, earned, and paid media.
Then link each part to your goals. If your main goal is to drive revenue, look at each channel and asset (you may only want to look at top performers if you have a lot of content) and map it to revenue.
By doing this, you’ll get a better understanding of what is currently driving revenue and what isn’t. You can then put more effort into what’s successful explore new content pieces or channels for any further effect.
3. Focus on the End Result
In marketing and product development, there’s usually more emphasis on product and revenue than on the products’ purpose.
What really matters is to whom you’re marketing and why. When you demonstrate what the product does, people will remember why they need it in the first place.
4. Review and Improve
When developing your digital marketing strategy, you must include KPIs (key performance indicators that fit with your crucial business goals.
Have a plan in place to understand your goals and objectives and monitor the metrics to get insights about the KPIs that matter. To do this:
~ Forget about vanity metrics(numbers that aren’t crucial to long-term success like Facebook likes
~ Use KPIs to measure success, but don’t have them set in stone
~ Set up continuous intervals for understanding, analyzing, measuring, and reporting
~ Know how to isolate critical metrics if it seems like something is not working
What are the most effective digital marketing strategies?
The digital marketing strategies you’ll use depend on your needs and goals – to grow leads or build brand awareness.
Any strategy you use should align with your brand and message. Here are a few that are proven to get results and help you build online visibility and generate leads.
Content Marketing
Offer valuable content and use digital channels to promote it. An example is tying an Instagram post to a specific offer using a landing page. This could be done by promoting an E-book that is relevant to your audience which contains a form to get a visitors’ details.
When using content marketing, don’t stick to just one content type. You can use a blog, create videos, create a valuable E-book, or host a webinar using in-house staff or experts to drive leads and engagement.
Social Media Marketing
You can reach and influence 4.6 billion people across the globe with social media marketing. And depending on the network, you can target specific age groups and locations. While you can use social media for brand, product, or service promotion, it can also be used in developing a community. This will allow you to have meaningful engagement with prospects or customers and create brand advocates that will promote your brand without being asked. Each channel requires its own strategy and metrics.
SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an important digital marketing strategy for making your brand, product, or service more visible online.
The goal of SEO is to optimize your content – a homepage, landing page or blog – so it gets found easily by existing and prospective customers. It not only helps to drive traffic but improves user experience and helps boost your authority.
A few elements of SEO you should consider are:
Keywords
Backlinks
Links
Meta descriptions
Images
and
The key is to use SEO to target the people searching online that are most likely to be interested in what you’re offering.
Paid Advertising
Organic marketing can go a long way to help drive traffic and generate leads, but using a paid channel can help you to be targeted and reach different audiences.
These are only a few of the most effective digital marketing strategies.
So know your business, product, and demographics before developing your digital marketing strategy then choose the most effective one for your needs.
Try this viral mailer that pays
Current Email Marketing Changes
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
Whether you’re an experienced marketer or just getting started, these email marketing trends will help you create relevant, engaging, content for now and the future.
As we move forward, trends will redefine how we connect with our audience, measure success, and create our email marketing strategies.
We’re now venturing into the realms of heightened engagement, smarter analytics, and more intuitive user interactions.
Do the latest email marketing trends matter?
Yes. Here are some reasons why email marketing trends matter.
1. Consumer habits and preferences continually evolve with the changing digital landscape. What interested them in the past may not resonate this year.
2. The digital space constantly fluctuates with new technologies appearing quickly. Keeping up-to-date on the latest trends means using new tools and techniques (such as AI and interactive design) to substantially enhance the performance of your email campaigns.
3. Differentiation is key in a crowded digital market. If you adopt the latest trends, you can capture your subscribers’ attention and stand out in their inboxes, capture their attention, and stay ahead of competitors who might be slower to incorporate new methods.
4. The fundamental goal of any marketing plan is to effectively engage customers and drive a strong return on investment. The latest trends in email marketing often offer new ways to increase engagement, enhance personalization, and, ultimately, increase the ROI of your campaigns.
5. With directives like GDPR and changing email standards, staying updated with the latest trends also means ensuring compliance and adhering to best practices.
What are the hottest email marketing trends?
Moving forward, the email marketing landscape is in position for some groundbreaking shifts. These changes are about deep, impactful transformations that respond to the evolving digital environment.
There will be trends that will redefine how we craft our email marketing strategies, connect with our audience, and measure success. There’ll be an exploration of innovations that go beyond the traditional, venturing into areas of heightened engagement, smarter analytics, and more intuitive user interactions.
Email authentication is finally advancing from a best practice to a requirement, especially for high-volume senders. Enforcement is beginning now, signaling a significant shift in the industry’s approach to email authentication.
The following are the new requirements:
1. Authentication
1. Senders must set up SPF (Sender Policy Framework), a layer of protection in email infrastructure, and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), which allows the receiver to check that an email that claimed to have come from a specific domain was actually authorized by the owner of that domain. These protocols are essential for authenticating your emails and proving they’re sent from a legitimate source??.
2. Along with SPF and DKIM, a DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance policy is mandatory. It enables email senders to specify how to handle emails authenticated using SPF or DKIM. Then, these senders can opt to send those emails to the junk folder or block them altogether. This policy doesn’t need to be enforced at the beginning. However, achieving DMARC enforcement is still a best practice for safeguarding against domain spoofing and abuse??.
Only the main points are touched on here, due to the complicated nature of these protocols.
3. The domain in the sender’s “From” header must align with either the SPF or DKIM domain, ensuring uniformity and consistency in the sender’s identity??.
4. It’s essential to maintain valid forward and reverse DNS (Domain Name System) which are also known as PTR records. These records contribute to the legitimacy and traceability of the sending domains and IPs. Domain Name System (DNS) translates a domain name into an IP address to find the owner’s site.
5. Enabling a visible and accessible one-click unsubscribe option is essential for subscription-based messages. This practice augments user experience and aligns with Gmail’s requirements for sustaining low spam rates??.
6. Keep spam rates low, below 0.3%. This metric reflects the sender’s reputation and the effectiveness of their email practices??.
The industry is increasingly focused on security and authenticity. Compliance with these guidelines is crucial for ensuring high deliverability and preserving a good sender reputation. Although these new requirements are from major email service providers like Google and Yahoo, you can expect other inbox providers to announce similar regulations.
2. Generative AI
In the current email marketing changes, Expanded Generative AI is a major leap forward in email marketing technology. It allows marketers to create more effective, personalized email campaigns while saving time and resources. This enhanced AI technology goes beyond basic automation and enables the creation of highly personalized, dynamic content at scale.
AI can generate powerful email content personalized to individual preferences based on user data and past interactions.
Generative AI greatly reduces the time and effort needed to create varied and engaging email campaigns.
Although you might think that AI-generated content may not be very engaging, it has the potential to be the most engaging. As a marketer, you are limited in the personalization and segmentation of your marketing campaigns. The same restrictions don’t apply to Generative AI.
3. Interactive email experiences
With the current email marketing changes, you’ll see emails changing from static messages into dynamic, engaging experiences. There’ll be more embedded widgets and features incorporating elements like surveys, polls, and quizzes directly within the email.
Rich media integration using videos, gifs, and other things to make emails more visually appealing and engaging.
There’ll be real-time content updates based on user actions or external factors, like stock levels or weather conditions.
You’ll see game-like elements incorporated like spin-to-win features and scratch cards, plus, interactive CTA (call-to-action buttons) that animate, change color, or expand upon hover or click, providing immediate feedback to the user.
4. Minimalistic designs
Layouts will be cleaner, color schemes will be simplified, and minimal text with easy-to-read fonts will be used for succinctness and clarity. The focus will be on content and faster load times.
5. Mobile focus
With the current email marketing changes, designing emails with a mobile focus is a must, since the majority of emails being opened are on mobile devices. Although we know this, it still seems that mobile design is an afterthought. That might be because we’re often designing and planning email campaigns from a desktop.
6. BIMI adoption
Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is an email authentication protocol that allows brands to display their logo next to their email in the inbox, thus, enhancing brand visibility and trust. Although it’s relatively new, you’ve probably seen a few well-known brands using this in the inbox.
7. New metrics focus
Marketers and senders will start looking at metrics beyond open rates, and businesses will use other key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge the value and performance of their email campaigns like:
Engagement over time
Email influence on the customer journey
Subscribe lifetime value
Conversion rate, and
List growth rate
These current email marketing changes emphasize the continuous advancement of email marketing.
Have you tried this viral mailer that pays?