Digital marketing has taken over the traditional methods of interacting with consumers for brands and businesses in an overwhelming manner. This has led to a major shift in the marketing and advertising industry. The concept of digital marketing is not only new and intimidating but also rapidly growing and changing with each passing day. With the shift in marketing activities from traditional to digital, a lot of us believe that being a part of some online community and promotions is enough for our brand's relevancy. Unfortunately, lesser integrated approaches lose out to platforms and campaigns that are holistic in nature.

 For this, you don't have to go all out and opt for everything that’s being offered, definitely not in one go. But if you continue to slice your digital marketing efforts, there are chances of underperforming on a grand scale. Also, having a holistic approach gives you multiple options to fall back on in case the campaign doesn’t work as hoped. Begin by understanding what the core objective of your campaign is. Understanding the objective clearly is half the battle won. Without a defined goal and a plan to reach the goal, you’ll be just shooting in the dark, which can be hazardous. Ensure that your plan to achieve your goals is strategic, cohesive and covers the goals of your campaign. See that every little detail is well thought and researched based on your brand and campaign. This majorly includes the target demographics, so that you are clear about your customer persona. Understanding this will help us select the right tools of digital marketing to reach them.

Here are some digital marketing tools that you must include wisely and proportionally to make your campaign a Holistic one:

1.         Strong Content Marketing Strategy

You need to prove why you're worth listening to, in order to prove why you're worth buying from. Go back to your content strategy plan and ensure that it's up-to-date, innovative, and strong. Your potential customers need to know what makes your products and services better — or, at least, different than your competitors in the market. Hence, a strong content marketing strategy is significantly important.

2.         Video Marketing Strategy

People today are spending one-third of their time watching online video content. While a lot of marketers know on a basic level that video is important – and might even be posting videos regularly – there’s not always a deeper objective behind it. As per Wyzowl’s Video Marketing Statistics 2018 Survey,  81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool, up from 63% in 2017, and 81% of people have been convinced to avail or purchase a product or service by watching a brand’s video. Hence ensure to have an optimized video campaign included in your strategy. Following are a couple of video marketing platforms that are trending and doing extremely well currently.

a)         YouTube video

b)         Facebook/Instagram live

3.         Community Building

Customer communities are a consequence of the customer voice becoming paramount. Setting up a customer community is a win-win: your customers are empowered to easily find answers, leading to greater customer satisfaction. You have better insights into your customers because of these personalized interactions. With a Community, your customers can find everything they need to make the most of your brand by connecting them directly to helpful resources, your support staff, and other customers. The end result is a full customer journey that connects every department of the business and boosts customer loyalty.

4.         Broadcast Email

Email marketing is beneficial to b2b & b2c businesses alike. According to the researches, 81% of SMBs still depend on email as their key customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention. However, your email strategy needs to be personalized as per your business and target audience. Ensure to have a strategic plan for your emailer campaigns. Following are a few successful types of emailer campaigns that help in higher engagement and ROI.

a)         Newsletters

b)         Sales campaigns

c)         Curated content

5.         SMS & WhatsApp Campaigns

Majority of us are hooked onto our mobile phones most of the time. Hence it’s undoubtedly the best device to tap when it comes to advertising our brands. With the facility to send out bulk SMS and WhatsApp, we can personally tap each screen of our TG in the most effective and cost efficient manner. Some of the top benefits are as follows:

•         Reach mass audience with a single click

•         High conversion rate

•         Cost Effective/Low Cost

•         No setup fees and No hidden costs.

•         Instant message delivery

6.         Social Media Campaigns

In today’s world, social media cannot be ignored. With the rise of social media users, it’s one of the best platforms to have our brands talking on. Trends in social media bring in a variety of ways to reach the TG. Some of them are as followers.

a)         Influencer Marketing – People having a high follower base who have the capacity to influence purchase decisions of their followers

b)         Trending social apps – Like TikTok, Snapchat, etc are unconventional platforms that are very effective to make topics trend. It can help your brand earn a name overnight if used effectively.

c)         PPC campaigns – Paid promotion campaigns on social media is crucial to ensure your brand reached a wider sect of audience in the most efficient manner. A dedicated budget must be allotted for the same.

7.         Creative SEO

While it is a continuously changing industry, full of lingos and time-consuming tasks, the advantages that SEO brings to the table can do a great deal for you. However, don’t stick to the regular ways, explore new and creative ways of SEO to stand taller than the rest in the market. Following are a few creative SEO tactics:

a)         Link bait – Content on your website that other sites link not because you ask them to, but because they want to.

b)         Ego bait – Ego Bait is just about attempting to engage influencers to further augment your work and build links. In simple words, it’s reciprocity. This includes positively featuring people which can, in turn, lead to them returning the favour by re-sharing our content. This can be through social media shares or even a link.

c)         Online PR–The objective is to influence or amend the opinions about a product, brand or company. It can help drive traffic to your website, enhance the awareness of your brand, can boost SEO & help in effectively positioning your brand in the market

8.         Social selling

Social selling is basically building relationships as part of the sales process. It has become the most efficient sales method and experts increasingly give more importance to their strategies because applying it in a precise manner, reinforces the entire sales process. Studies show that sales executives with high social network activity achieve 45% more sales opportunities, and are 51% more likely to hit their sales quotas. Some effective ways to do the same are as follows:

a)         LinkedIn groups

b)         Quora

c)         Value marketing

9.         Up-to-date Landing pages

Landing pages house specific actions for your business. Any new product or service can be presented to the TG through a creative landing page on your website. Apart from this, it even helps in conversions and lead collection in case you have a form on the landing page for the TG to avail a special discount or offer. Make sure you have a well-updated landing page so that your entire digital marketing campaign is in sync.

10.     Seminars

Hosting online seminars can be helpful as a part of your digital strategy. People love to be a part of insightful sessions from where they have something to take away with them. These seminars have proven to be beneficial to business as they help spread a word among the target masses. Some of the most effective and trending ways to host a digital seminar is as follows:

a)         Podcasts

b)         Webinars

Don’t forget to access your business thoroughly to understand the objectives of your campaign and then wisely choose as many digital tools as possible as this can ensure a wholesome approach to reaching out to your target audience.

(The author is manager – digital promotions, Spicetree Design Agency. The views expressed are her own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)