How to do digital marketing effectively? – Step-by-step guide to create a successful digital marketing strategy

What are the best ways to do digital marketing? 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 To Do Digital marketing –

Know about AACRO® model of digital marketing

We at Seven Boats follow our own trademarked AACRO®, model of digital marketing which is a 5 step model consisting of Activation, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention & Optimization processes. Today I will try to explain you the digital marketing steps in a easier way point by point. Learn the best ways to do digital marketing.

Step 1: Prepare The Digital Marketing Strategy

1. Understand the business well and try to figure out the marketing 4Ps. Take notes with pen and paper. Identify and define your target audience.
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. Focus on better user experience.
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 – The brand loyalty part. 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 & Blueprint – Create Digital Marketing Mix

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, ), 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.

Related reading: The digital marketing mix

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. Get access to Google search console, Google analytics, Facebook / Social insights, Heatmap tracking etc for tracking.

Step 3: The execution part of digital marketing

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. Also you have to maintain keyword consistency (KC), Keyword Density (KD) and Keyword Proximity (KP) all through your content.

Related reading: Best SEO Tips

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. You can do content curation and content recycling also.

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 ads or LinkedIn ads.

Related reading: Social Media Marketing Tips

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.

Related reading: Online Marketing Guide

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.

Related reading: Digital Marketing Strategies in crisis time

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

5 Quick Digital Marketing Tips for beginners

Find below a few quick digital marketing tips for beginners. These are fundamental but important.

The Internet swallowed up many of the traditional marketing methods and made businesses market their products online. Digital marketing is like a double edged sword. If it’s not handled with care, it might harm you. Each activity you do online is like a brick, it may help build your presence or block your traffic. Therefore, it is crucial to determine what to do and when to do it.

As mentioned already, if you use the sword properly, you can cut off all the competition and conquer kingdoms. All businesses try to persuade potential customers to buy their products and so it is difficult to win the war. However, there are some ways to handle the war efficiently and emerge out strong and appealing to potential customers.

Have a Smart Website:

A smart website is the basic need to be successful in digital marketing. Your website should be user-friendly, informative, and pleasing to the eyes. Using highly contrasting bright colors creates a bad impression in the minds of visitors and your website will gain negative popularity. Test how your website works in different browsers and optimize it so that visitors using different browsers don’t find it poorly designed. Use powerful verbs instead of flowery adjectives in the content. It will make your website both attractive and promising.

Regularize Social Media Activity:

If you are on social media, then interact regularly. It’s not enough to just say something once in a blue moon and be idle for the rest of the time. You might be a fan of Facebook but if some of your customers love Twitter, you will also have to tweet regularly in order to reach out to them. Another thing to be taken care of is the relevancy of information on your social media pages. If you provide outdated information on your social media pages, it is going to drive away traffic.

Make Magazines:

It seems to be and is a complex process. However, the efforts are rewarding. Many of the businesses do it and have found it successful. You just have to think a bit different to make magazines. The regular blogs you write can be edited into magazine articles and a fresh and crisp e-magazine can be distributed instead of mere picture emails. If you incorporate the glossy effect, it’s even more appealing than the ordinary ones.

Ask for Testimonials:

Customer testimonials are powerful elements in building reputation. Make sure that the testimonials don’t exaggerate but just explain the usefulness of your products or services. It is an indirect way of referral marketing. Someone saying that your product is good is equal to them recommending it to others. Seeing one customer respond will make the others offer to testify. Also take care that your website or social media page is not flooded with testimonials. To satisfy all your customers who testify, you can change them regularly.

Develop a Personality:

The business and the owner are different identities is only a law for accounting. However, when you connect with the customers, you need a personality. Develop a strong personality for your business and make it pleasing to your customers. People tend to respond if you show a human-like approach rather than just a business. Instill warmth and liveliness in your content and you will be surprised with the result.
Make these small changes in your digital marketing strategies to successfully market your business. Your business will mean a lot to your customers if you build trust and bond with them well.

Related resources: Digital Marketing Guide

How to do digital marketing? [Simple Flowchart]

Simple ways to understand “digital marketing for beginners” – A simple & basic flowchart approach through infographic.

How to create your own digital marketing strategies

In a growing world of internet revolution, people are more likely to sit back and exchange views & information with a click. One must not deviate from the idea of exploring the internet for various marketing activities. Often it is said that to decide on the internet marketing strategies, one has to be a technical personnel. This is simply a wrong concept, with a very few basic knowledge on computing & internet you can create a strong base for your brand.

We are going to discuss some easy steps to formulate the strategies on the internet

Create a brand –

It is very important to create a brand at the very  initial level. Emphasis on the brand message,  logo, business name, trademark ,website etc.

Design & Development –

Try to be simple & professional with the layout of the homepage of your website. Don’t just stuff your web pages  with unnecessary contents. Try to be selective with the colors. You can create a theme color for your business that should be uniformly maintained in all the pages & formats. Creating a mascot can be a fine idea, who would virtually promote your brand value & message from time to time.

Develop your website following the latest google algorithm. We would suggest you to develop your site in wordpress , as nowadays google can easily crawl the wordpress  sites, as they are exclusively SEO friendly, having variations in customized features.

Related reading: Landing page guidelines to get better conversion

Analyze your competitors –

It is very important to analyze your competitor’s move. Keep a track on the ongoing activities of your competitors. Experimentally implement those activities for your brand. For example you can follow the facebook fan pages of your competitors & accordingly set your campaigns.

Know your market –

Make a strong idea on the market, the tentative choice & tastes of the clients. Accordingly set your plans & strategies. Frame your budget keeping in mind the behavior of your clients. For example if you find your services or products are in demand in a specific season or month, then you can certainly spend a substantial amount of budget on PPC ads & facebook ads.

Communicate with your customers –

It is a very fruitful part for your marketing activities, try to rate your customers’ reviews, allow your clients to rate your services. An occasional contest through the social networking sites can also attract additional clients & can create a sense of brand value for your business.

Apart from all these you can publish articles in online magazines, publish paid press releases, run extensive campaigns through email marketing, graphical illustrations & many more. It is very important to keep yourselves updated with the latest techniques of internet marketing as revised by the panda-penguin updates from time to time.

Best strategies to keep your website healthy with frequent Google Algorithm Updates

The regular updates of Google have confused and thrown digital marketing off-key a number of times. Many self-proclaimed pundits have laid claim to have inside knowledge of what the updates are about, but very few of their predictions have stood the test of time. To dispel misconceptions, Google itself has thrown light on the backend of the updates at different times. Danny Sullivan of Google has now authored a guideline on how to make sense of Google’s Core Updates.

To make matters simpler, Sullivan asks content creators to ask four basic questions on their content. If they pass this test with the right answers, their content is not going to be adversely affected by Google’s updates. The four questions are:

Content and its Quality:

This has always been a focus area for Google. To improve the user experience, it puts a lot of premium on content. Google wants content to be original, exhaustive and full of insight. To avoid the traps of writing content that are hardcore marketing messages, Google advises to stay away from clickbait headlines.

Expertise, Authority & Trust (E-A-T):

To enable better consumption of authoritative and genuine content, Google advises content creators to credit their sources of information. In the days of fake news and post truths, this is quite an important area that Google is bringing under the scanner. Social media has become a hub of distributing content parsed from dubious sources. To stamp your authority on the factual correctness of content, attribute them to proper sources.

Presentation:

In a time when content consumers have a number of choices to read something, you have to be careful with the presentation of the content. Traditional methods of simply writing content as text are now passé. You can use videos, infographics and other means to present your ideas. The thumb rule is to make matter more presentable and share-worthy.

Comparison:

You cannot run your website content without taking a look at the competition around you. If a competitor website is answering relevant questions asked in your domain with more clarity, precision and authority, you need to revise your own content to match those standards. Google views the content on your website in comparison with the competition when it comes to ranking them.

Hope these four questions will help you upload better content to satisfy Google’s updates!

Related reading: How to safeguard your website from Google Panda & Penguin updates

Internet marketing strategies for emerging online businesses

The number of online businesses is increasing every day. There are many online businesses that are alike and that’s why being unique is very important to become successful. The internet marketing strategies are very important.

As we know, marketing is very important to let people know about yourself and if you are starting an online business then the internet marketing will help you to reach masses. The internet marketing is something that makes you reach to expected customers and create a good impression about your products or services. The internet marketing companies have expert men who can help you to advertise your online business and grow fast.

The very first purpose of internet marketing is to reach people and attract them. If you are starting a new online business then your first goal is to build your online presence. The internet marketing strategies allow you to reach people by getting you a good spot in the search engine page.

When people search for a product or service with a search engine then they mostly show interest towards the first few results on the search engine result page. For that, the internet marketing experts use the search engine optimization techniques. There are many SEO techniques that can be used but only the SEO experts can set you the best strategies for sure success.

Another very effective internet marketing strategy is the search engine advertisement. The search engine advertisement is relatively a newer concept and it’s also very effective. The search engine is the most used place in the internet and that’s why having your advertisement there will reach more people at once.

The most effective internet marketing strategies are those where you get to reach more people and attract traffic towards your business website. You need to get the most out of the search engine advertisement as it costs some money but get you sure results. Hire a professional internet marketing service to make sure that your purpose is fulfilled.

The social media marketing is one of the best internet marketing strategies available for online businesses. The social media sites like Facebook or Twitter has great number of users. If you use the social media sites for internet marketing then you will be able to reach maximum people and will surely find some interested customers.

The social media sites are great mediums for advertising of your online business as they allow you to choose different options. You can choose to advertise your business to specific groups or people. That way the marketing will be more effective. You will attract more people in social media sites than anywhere else.

There are some more internet marketing strategies that are really very effective. One of them is the content writing services. You can have articles and blogs written about your online business and it will really help you to create better impact on people. There are other strategies like banner advertising and video marketing. Make sure to hire the best internet marketing company to have success with the marketing.

The Noob Guide to Online Marketing

The Noob Guide to Online Marketing- by Oli Gardner of Unbounce

How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success – by KISSmetrics

Blog Design for Killer SEO – by Cyrus and Dawn Shepard

A Visual Guide To SEO (Infographic)

Blogging and Social Media Infographic