Steps to do digital marketing the right way

Many of our students ask me about what are the brief steps to do digital marketing the right way. Digital marketing itself is a big and  ever changing subject and it’s bit challenging to jot down all the steps one by one in a crisp and concise way, still I am trying to do it today. I am using my smartphone to write this post and apologizing beforehand for any typo or auto complete word formatting errors.

Right Steps of Digital marketing –

Step 1: The Digital Marketing Strategy
1. Understand the business well and try to figure out the marketing 4Ps. Take notes with pen and paper.
2. Try to find out the main long tail keyword from the content of the website or by understanding the nature of business. Apply common sense, no tools are required at this stage.
3. Google it with that keyword and find a few competitors.
4. Analyse your competitor with features, offers, their content structure and popularity. Find out their strength and weakness. Google your competitors company or brand name and you can see from which other sites they are linked from. Take a note.
5. Try to find out where you are different. Create a USP. Focus on who really are your customers and how you do solve their pain points.
6. Think how you can better organize your content – topics to be researched and how to present them on website.
7. Think about your brand tone, positioning message, above the fold content and call to action button/text.
8. Think about why your customers would love you and come back again. Sketch, visualize and plan your website and landing pages that way.
9. Innovate, innovate and innovate. Find out new ways how you can add more value to your users and how you can enhance their experience on your site. Take note.

Step 2: The planning – Digital Marketing Mix
1. Choose the right channels where to promote the business and what activities you need to carry out there. For example a good mix can be a combination of your own website, mobile app, social media sites (Facebook fan page twitter, Instagram, linkedin, Pinterest, G+ etc), sites you get from competitive analysis, PR sites, top local classifieds, business profile sites, running ad campaigns, email blast, sms blast and many other related websites from where there is a chance to get a link back or mention to your website. Prepare a blueprint and schedule it for execution.

Decide about the primary KPIs –
Decide about what would be your main performance indicator whether it is leads, sales revenue, traffic, page views, time on site, bounce rate or social engagement.

Step 3: The execution
A. SEO – we call it search experience optimization. It is broadly divided into technical seo, structural seo(optimizing website structure, internal linking between your pages etc) local seo (google places for business, geo tags etc) and link building. Use the best practices guidelines mentioned in google webmaster guidelines and google seo guidelines. Website audit, Keyword research, understanding LSI techniques (synonym) are important here.

B. Link building
Fresh, relevant, natural and high quality one way links are the only ones you need to focus on. Don’t run after quantity, go about quality. Participate more into community by helping others or sharing your opinion answers etc
Try putting excellent content as linkbait and viral videos for clickbait. Be cautious about over use of exact match anchor text while you are building backlinks.

C. Content writing, curation and marketing
High quality fresh and original content is king. Prepare your content to add unique value, rich info and lucid easy digestible chunks. Bring variety into it – text, pic, info graphic, video, podcast, eBook, webinar etc. Maintain a content calendar. Update, update and update your website.

D. Social Media Marketing
Promote your site via social media sites such as Facebook, google plus, LinkedIn, twitter etc. Prepare social content related to offers, quiz, quotes, causes, question answers, advice, fun etc. Use more images, videos. Use hash tags, mentions and latest trending topics. Go for Facebook or linkedin ads.

E. Adwords /PPC
Run your ad campaigns time to time by creating PPC or CPA campaigns in AdWords. Use broad match, narrow match/phrase match and negative keywords the right way. For Ecommerce, use google merchant centre and dynamic ads. Blend ad for search and display network.

F. Misc. Other online marketing
Go for bulk email marketing, bulk sms marketing, mobile app development, affiliate marketing, digital display advertising, media buying etc time to time.

Step 4: Monitoring
Monitor your performance from Google analytics, google optimizer and GYB WMT (webmaster tools). There are many other seo, social tools. Get info about traffic, content, goal conversion, links, HTML issues and more. You can do link detox or disavow to protect yourself from negative seo by removing bad back links.

We call it the 3E model of 7boats
Experiment, Experience and Enhance. It’s an ongoing process. In every step, there is a chance of improvement. If you go in the 360 degree approach properly maintaining a right schedule and sustain to your digital routine for long, you can see very positive result and digital marketing can give you maximum ROI.

If you are interested to learn more about digital marketing, you can enroll for our digital marketing course at Seven Boats Academy.