Whether you’re trying to launch a business or trying to scale an existing one, you’ll probably come across the marketing aspect for your business. With the advent of modern technology, having a strong online presence has become more important than ever before!
In fact, around 97% of people go online to learn about local businesses!
Digital marketing has already been a critical part of any business, and more businesses are increasingly focusing on this. With a high ROI and measurable success rate, proper digital marketing campaigns can truly reach an infinite number of people within very short spans of time and create a higher impact!
The DrawBack
Digital Marketing is one of the most effective marketing tactics used by brands all over the world. However, getting into the digital marketing ecosystem can feel like taking a dive into the unknown! This is because there are a lot of things that one can do, and each brand will have different marketing strategies that work for them.
Well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should panic. Why? It’s because although brands will have their custom marketing strategy, there are a few digital marketing guidelines that they can follow to ensure they’re on the right track. Every part of the digital marketing effort is a great opportunity for learning, so following the guidelines will help to craft a marketing strategy that works for the brand.
It’s all about starting small, testing, learning, optimizing and growing over time! So, without further ado, let’s get straight into the ultimate Digital Marketing Guidelines you’d need for your small or medium business!
The Ultimate Digital Marketing Guidelines
To start off, let’s be clear that there are hundreds of different strategies that businesses can take. In this article, we’ve listed some of the general tactics that would work if you can implement these properly.
So, here are the top tactics that you can use!
1. Establish A Strong Brand Identity
Before you start your online promotion, you must determine and establish a strong brand identity for your brand. This is one of the most important preliminary steps before you take on marketing. This will ensure higher brand loyalty and visibility for your brand.
In fact, a survey from Facebook found that 77% of the customers are loyal to brands. This proves why creating a strong brand identity will strengthen your marketing campaigns.
2. Identifying Customer Persona
Similar to establishing a strong brand identity, identifying the brand’s customer persona is very critical. Knowing this will help to customize marketing efforts to a point so that it ensures better acceptance.
It’ll also help you optimize all your strategies to bring higher return-on-investment (ROI) from your marketing efforts.
3. Have A Consistent Brand Style
Each and every brand must have a consistent brand style guide that encompasses the brand image and speaks out to the customers. The brand style includes everything starting from your brand’s logo, color schemes, typography, imagery and so on.
A consistent brand style will enhance brand recognition and brand credibility among your customers.
4. Have A Responsive Website
Recently, there has been a widespread shift from computers to smartphones. More people are now accessing websites right from their websites, and you must ensure that your website looks great from all platforms regardless of the size.
Major search engines, like Google, also put high importance on the website’s responsiveness. This means that having a responsive website will help your company’s website rank higher in the SERPs.
5. Well-Planned SEO Efforts
Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help boost your business’s online presence, and the brand’s image by ranking higher in the SERPs. With over 1.7 billion websites currently on the internet, you may find that most of your competitors are now online. Moreover, pages ranking in the top three gets more than 70% of the clicks, meaning that having a website ranking on the second page of the SERPs will have little to no value for your business.
Sounds intimidating, right?
Wait, it’s not over yet! Most of your competitors are already competing for the top spots in the SERPs, and it can be very hard for you to rank if you don’t adopt an SEO strategy! That’s why it’s one of the fundamental digital marketing guidelines for small to medium businesses!
6. Optimized Blogs
Blogs can be a great way to reach out to your users and help them out with useful resources and information. When doing so, you must ensure that you’re optimizing the blogs to be SEO-friendly.
To do so, you can try out diving deep into the world of keyword research and find out exactly what users want. Next, you can cater to your blogs using those keywords and queries.
Also, make sure that your images are compressed with the lowest file size possible while maintaining the highest quality possible. This will ensure that your website has a faster load speed, boosting SEO.
7. Photos and Video Content
Visual storytelling is a crucial part of top brands nowadays, and you must embrace it to boost conversion and help with your brand’s image. Experiment using different visual content, especially photos and videos to see which is more effective for your business.
You can also try out custom comics, infographics and documentaries relevant to your niche. However, before investing long-term in such content, make sure that you’re measuring the success rate of these. Doing so will help justify the investment!
8. Empathy Maps
This is another important Digital Marketing Guideline that you should follow. However, the sad part is that most of the businesses online do not. Having a well-planned empathy map will not only give you additional information on your users but will help you to cater to your services.
Moreover, you’ll know where different groups of your customers are in the sales funnel and create custom marketing campaigns for them. Doing so will assist you in creating customized campaigns, ensuring lower investments and higher ROI.
9. Leverage Social Media
We’re living in an era where social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. More than 45% of people use social media for over 2 hours every day! This implies that most of your customers are online and on social media platforms.
By leveraging social media, you can reach out to your customers very easily and effectively. This ensures a higher brand reach and brand visibility.
Convinced about working on social media platforms? Well, before you start you must know where exactly your customers hang out. If your business caters to the business class, investing resources into SM platforms like Snapchat will not bring in the desired results! That’s why it’s very important that you research before you dive deeper into the world of social media!
10. Getting Close & Personal
In the last Digital Marketing Guideline, we suggest that your brand gets close and personal with the users and/or the customers. Don’t know how to? Well, you can do anything that gives your customers a feeling that you as a brand care for them.
To start off, you can reply to their comments in your Facebook feed or retweet some of the Tweets by your followers. You can also reply to their comments in your blog, or appreciate them staying with you as a brand. This will help boost your online credibility and brand image!
On an ending note
Up until now, we’ve gone through a lot of details on our picks for the top Digital Marketing Guidelines that businesses must follow. However, these are not the only ones! The world of Digital Marketing is a vast one, it’s changing every single day.
To make sure you’re always on top of your competitors, you must always keep close attention to what’s trending and enrich your marketing campaigns using effective marketing tactics. Also, you should work harder on having a better social media presence!
Well, with so many different digital marketing guidelines and strategies to use, you might as well get overwhelmed with the number of choices that are available to you. Trying these will cost you time, money and effort. And, you might also get diverted from what’s truly important – your business!
But that shouldn’t be a barrier to market your business online! That’s where we come in! With an expert team of digital marketers and designers, we can handle all of your digital marketing, website development & maintenance and more!
So, why wait? Contact us and let’s talk over your brand and discuss how we can help! Don’t worry, contacting us won’t cost a penny!
