The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the consumer landscape online more than ever before.
A digital strategy is a must for any business’s marketing efforts. The main goal is to drive users to your website, learn about your brand and make a purchase—ultimately helping your business grow.

In this blog, we’ll touch on the most important components you should add to your digital efforts!

Content

The very first thing you should do to expand your website’s presence is to create content! This could be building out more pages, such as About Us, service pages, and most importantly, blog articles.

Hone in on your unique value proposition when you’re writing. Think about the most common questions you get when potential customers are inquiring about your product or services. Write content directly addressing these concerns. You will be able to build trust by establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

Your content should be educational and entertaining–all while offering value to your website visitors.

Try to position your brand offering as the solution to your consumers’ pain points.

Don’t forget to incorporate Call-To-Actions throughout your website and blogs–in moderation, of course! It could be a link to another helpful article on your site, download a handy eBook, or filling out a form to contact your sales team.

Note: While you create content for your website, combine it with SEO strategies for better results.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is the continuous process of improving your website to rank well in search engines such as Google or Microsoft Bing. SEO will be the primary driver of organic traffic to your website.

It encompasses a lot of items, such as on-page and off-page SEO and technical SEO. We won’t get in the nitty-gritty as there are countless articles online you can find on each of them, but here are some SEO strategies you should be working on to rank higher in search engines:

1. You should be optimizing for keywords. What are users typing into the search query, and how do you show up for them? Have a keyword strategy in place to enrich the relevancy of your content.
2. A determining factor of your ranking on search engines is the relevancy of your content. If someone expects a specific topic or answer to their search query and you don’t deliver it to them? They’re going to leave, resulting in a higher bounce rate, and Google will ding you for that.
3. Ensure your website is easy to navigate and has a fast loading time. People expect a seamless experience on your site, and there’s no doubt they will leave if it’s not up to par.
4. Set up an XML sitemap. It is a file that shows a list of the most important pages of your website. It helps search engines understand your website structure and can crawl all of your pages (which makes them rankable on search engines).
5. Work on getting backlinks: connect with trustworthy websites with higher domain authority and ask for a link back to your website. This will increase your domain rating as well, making you more likely to rank on search engines.

You can use tools for your SEO needs, such as SEMRush or Ahrefs. Both are robust, data-driven tools you can use to check the health of your website and how well its SEO performance is and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.

Paid Advertising

Digital advertising campaigns drive paid traffic to your website. If your website isn’t ranking on search engine results or is has weaker SEO, paid advertising enables you to show up for your desired keywords.

The traffic you drive will be high-quality. This is because you will be able to control your ads:

• You’ll be able to design and customize the ad messaging
• Decide which audiences you want to reach
• What websites or channels your ad should be shown on
• Where you want to direct the user to (Homepage? Specific product page? Dedicated landing page?)

By building a paid strategy with your business goals in mind, whether to increase brand awareness or drive conversions, you can effectively drive results that will grow your business.

What makes paid advertising effective but complex is, every business’s strategy varies. That’s why it’s crucial to pinpoint which channels your target audience is at and serve your ads to them at the right place and time.

Some digital channels include:

• Paid Search (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.)
• Display (across the internet, on millions of websites)
• Social Media
• Video (Youtube etc.)
• Over-The-Top (video streaming platforms such as Roku)
• Digital Out-Of-Home (digital billboards at high foot-traffic areas)
• Mobile advertising (app stores, in-app etc.) and so much more

It takes trial and error and constant monitoring and adjustments to ensure your ad dollars are used to their full potential.

We highly recommend you try out more than one type of paid channel to see effective results. A good combination to start with is paid search, social ads, and display ads. You will be able to capture people who are actively searching for you, retarget people who might have visited your website but didn’t convert, and stay top of mind!

Programmatic advertising is a new form of advertising that businesses of all sizes are jumping on board with. Instead of going to each publisher and negotiating a deal to place your ad on their site, this process is automated through machine learning ad tech. It grants you access to countless ad publishers, widening your audience reach more than ever. Another perk is that it centralizes your advertising channels where all the data can sync together. Consider looking into a programmatic advertising platform or working with an advertising agency to help manage your paid advertising campaigns!

Social Media

Studies have shown that the COVID-19 pandemic has propelled more people online, social media included.

Some of the most popular social media channels include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, etc. They are great channels to engage with your audience, especially to share the latest news via photos, videos, and captions.

They are also useful to promote your website and branded content. If you have a new blog article, announce it on social! You want to maximize exposure online.

Do note that you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin by trying to be on every channel. Let’s say you’re a law firm. Perhaps having a social presence on Instagram wouldn’t be isn’t as effective as LinkedIn. Think about where your target audiences are likely to be and work on creating content for those channels!

Online Directories Google My Business

Another way to help people find your website is to list your business on online directories.

You will be able to list your business’ contact information (name, address, phone number, etc.), office hours, services, and a link to your website. This enables more people to come across your business online, potentially driving more traffic.

One of the most prominent “directories” is Google My Business (GMB). When people are looking for a product or service, they are likely to turn to Google. By having a GMB listing, your business is more likely to pop up in the search results.

Google My Business also allows you to share updates such as seasonal offers or updates like blogs. Just like social media, you can cross-promote your content and entice people to click through to your website!

It is vital that you continuously deliver a great website experience for your users and amplify your efforts with these strategies, which are meant to interweave. By combining efforts to drive both paid and organic traffic, you’ll be consistently bringing in quality audiences.

We hope these tips give you a better insight into what areas to focus on in your digital marketing strategy!

A majority of content consumption has been taking place online, especially in the last 2 years. Hence, going digital is the key for any entrepreneur. Sharing content via online platforms is the prime way to increase brand awareness, attract potential customers and in turn increase ROI.

This blog pens down the 6 effective tips that entrepreneurs must adopt to increase their returns on investment.

Digital marketing is the future of marketing. Researchers have found a 20% increase in digital marketing activities of businesses from 2020 to 2021. This suggests that the pandemic has urged more and more people to turn towards digital marketing.

Making optimum use of the digital marketing tips available for you can help you build a friendly digital marketing plan and achieve successful results. Let’s now look at the 6 effective digital marketing tips for entrepreneurs.

6 Effective Digital Marketing Tips For Entrepreneurs

1. Establish Your Goals

Every entrepreneur sets specific goals to increase their returns on investment. Goals must be aligned with your business objectives and hence, before strategizing, one must decide what they want to achieve with the marketing strategy.

Setting goals will help you clearly understand each step that you should be taking. The most effective way to achieve your desired goals is using the SMART Criteria. It is a criterion that ensures your goals are achieved within a certain time frame.

The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.

These are 5 questions that you can ask yourself while defining your goals.

• Specific: What needs to be accomplished? How can it be accomplished?
• Measurable: Is the goal quantifiable?
• Achievable: Is the goal feasible and achievable by the team?
• Relevant: How is the goal beneficial to the organization?
• Time-Bound: Set a realistic deadline for your plan.

2. Curate Engaging Content

Curating engaging and appealing content will make more users stay on your website. They will engage in reading your content in-depth and spend time on your site.

Making relevant content and describing what your business is about will offer value to potential customers. You need to plan a different content marketing strategy and learn how blockchain-powered content works for each channel that attracts different customers.

Writing blogs about your business and answering questions builds trust, loyalty and also user experience. You can write blogs on the most demanded topics.

Search Optimization Techniques with the help of google analytics enable you to research the most demanded keywords and topics by your visitors. Learning Search Engine Optimization techniques in-depth can help you ace the game of ranking high on google.

3. Automate Your Tasks

Automating your tasks is highly essential as it saves tons of time, enabling you to focus on other important tasks, ultimately improving your productivity and ROI.

Following are a few tasks that you must automate:

Automate Social Media Posts: Hubspot, Co-Schedule and Hootsuite are some of the effective tools to use to schedule social media posts in advance. Scheduling your posts for all social media platforms at least a week in advance would be a good idea.

Automate Lead Flow: A free demo, a downloadable guide, a free PDF helps in lead generation. A scheduled automated email is sent to the user and helps in pushing them closer to purchasing from you.

Automate your Marketing Emails: Automated emails also receive 95% higher open rates than the ones sent manually. Welcome emails, Thank you emails, order confirmation emails are examples of automated emails. Automating emails is essential as it manages vital communication and builds a good brand image. Learn Email Marketing to build a powerful email list and create successful email marketing campaigns.

4. Get On Google My Business

Google My Business is a free tool offered by Google that allows you to showcase your business online. It generates a mobile optimised website, making it easier for viewers to locate your business.

It lets users find your location on google maps and contact you through a google search if you are within the designated area of the user.

Google My Business makes it easier for customers to connect with you by offering valuable information like:

• Products and services you offer
• Opening and closing hours
• Your address
• Website
• Contact details

This is what creating a google my business account looks like.

5. Track And Improve Your Performance

After putting much effort into widening your audience and increasing ROI, measuring and improving your performance seems highly essential.

Tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Hootsuite help you to easily track your overall performance. Learn Google Analytics to level up your business and understand where your leads are coming from and what steps you need to take to further improve your ROI.

6. Networking

Networking is also one of the essential things that an entrepreneur needs to do to enhance their reach. Attending expos, connecting and reaching out to other entrepreneurs both online and offline will help you build goodwill and ultimately expand your business.

Few Takeaways

These were the 6 effective digital marketing tips for entrepreneurs to increase their ROI. Online marketing opens up your business to an enormous population. Hence, using the above-mentioned tips efficiently will surely help you to design an impactful digital marketing strategy.

However, if you’re a beginner or someone who wishes to learn more, a comprehensive training in digital marketing can be extremely beneficial and can help you master different marketing techniques and tools in-depth.

We hope you enjoyed this blog! Will you be using the top 6 digital marketing tips? Let us know in the comments section below.

---

About the Author

An ‘Edupreneur’ and the founder of IIDE – Indian Institute of Digital Education.
He is a passionate public speaker and teacher for over 10 years. He has trained over 1,00,000+ students and 25+ corporates in Digital Marketing via online and offline channels. He is a Harvard alumnus specialising in E-commerce. He is a TEDx speaker and is a visiting faculty at India’s top management institutes like the IIMs.