Whether you are a seasoned business owner of a budding entrepreneur, you know the importance of choosing your digital marketing strategy carefully.

Your digital marketing strategy can either break or make your campaigns even before it’s launched. This week, we will be giving you 6 of the best digital marketing strategies to generate more leads, customers and sales.

Strategy 1: An irresistible offer

You need to offer your ideal target audience an offer that they simply cannot refuse and are compelled to take further action. You don’t HAVE to offer freebies away, but you NEED to understand three things about your customers

1. Pains
2. Problems
3. Frustrations

And your offer should show them exactly how your business product/service solves their pain for them. This is because people are a lot more likely to take action when they are trying to solve a problem that they are currently experiencing.

You can display this offer in an ad or as a call to action

Strategy 2: Lead magnets

Lead magnets are a piece of valuable content or information or could even be something tangible or physical like a book or email subscription, in exchange for your customer’s contact details (eg. name, email addresses and phone numbers).

Lead magnets are incredibly important and valuable for your businesses because it positions you as an ‘authority’ and shows you audience you know what you are doing by solving one of your problems through your content.

How lead magnets work:
Your offer for the lead magnet should be put in front of your target audience through an ad or maybe even a link on your website, and you are going to direct them to where they can download your freebies such as a free guide or book. Once they get to the landing page, they will input their name and email address, and you can use their contact details to follow up with them later.

Strategy 3: Email Marketing

Following up from our previous point, email marketing taps on the acquired contact information, and gives you that opportunity to follow up and provide more value and make offers repeatedly.
Most customers are actively involved with checking their email which means it is an effective medium to connect with them and to spread your message. Be strategic and seek to provide your audience with as much value as possible. Think about how you can

1. Educate about your area of expertise
2. Inform them of new insights
3. Provide entertaining content
4. Showcase your brand authenticity
5. Demonstrate the effectiveness of your product/service

through your emails, instead of crafting a generic, unmemorable piece that does little to benefit your customers and will only push them to unsubscribe from you.

Strategy 4: Video Marketing

Video marketing is a fantastic tool for small businesses in order to generate more authority, establish trust and show your brand personality. Video is the next best thing to having in-person conversations, especially in the midst of the pandemic.

Furthermore, the fact that video has a relatively high barrier of entry is a great thing because if you are willing to overcome this barrier and do the things that your competitors are not willing to do, you will gain that added advantage.

Videos are also very malleable – you can take your video content and repurpose it into a number of different platforms:

1. Uploading audio for a podcast
2. Transcribing the content for a blogpost
3. Turn your content into an email
4. Pull a quote for twitter
5. Summarise the key points of your video into an Instagram story

Strategy 5: Testimonials and Case studies

Case studies provide in-depth knowledge about the unique situations digital marketers face, and the steps your business took to overcome them to attain the desired end-result. Case studies reveal 5 facts:

1. Physical/statistical proof that your methods work
2. Social proof that your previous clients genuinely benefits your business
3. Ascertain the effectiveness of your strategies
4. Showcase your brand as a reliable business
5. Display how your business’ solutions can help your prospective clients

You can then leverage this social proof across social platforms as well as your website to clearly demonstrate your product/service is the one for the job.

Strategy 6: The Ideal Customer Avatar

In digital marketing, an avatar is a fictional representation of your best customers, to help your business understand who their ideal customers are, and really delving into what makes them different from the rest. Here is a list of details you can identify them according to:

Demographic details

1. Age
2. Gender
3. Income
4. Occupation
5. Title

Geographic details

1. City
2. State
3. Province
4. Country
5. Neighbourhood

Psychographic details

1. Attitudes
2. Interests
3. Opinions
4. Beliefs
5. Affiliations
6. Organizations

The better you understand your ideal customer avatar, the better you are going to make them feel understood when you create the marketing material and get them to take action. For instance, you know

1. Who your audience are
2. Who your audience like
3. How your audience speak
4. What your audience buy
5. What your audience do

You can thus make strategically aligned marketing decisions, and easily identify which social media platforms your ideal customer avatar is active and present on and which ones they’re not. Hence, it would be a lot easier for you to pinpoint what messages/campaigns are going to resonate with your audience and which ones are going to fall flat.

When you see your business strategically and holistically through the eyes of your ideal customer avatar, everything gets a lot clearer and a lot more effective.

Some of these strategies are a little bit rigorous, but our goal here is to make sure that you are filled with an abundance of possibilities, so that you can pick and choose to see what strategy works best for you and your company.

Remember, when it comes to digital marketing, it’s less about the tactics and more about the approach behind them. Even then, your strategy needs to be properly executed in order for it to perform well.