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What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a guide that helps your company reach its goals through targeted online marketing channels, such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click advertising (PPC), content marketing, email marketing, and social media (more on this below).
Remember this: No two digital marketing strategies are the same. What’s working for a competitor may not work for you, and vice versa.
What are Some of the Best Digital Marketing Techniques?
If you remember nothing else from this article, let it be this: there is more than one way to create and implement a digital marketing strategy.
As you move through the planning stage, focus your efforts on two things:
- The digital marketing techniques you’ve used in the past
- Other options that make sense for your business
In regards to effectiveness, some level of trial and error must occur. Even if you’re 100 percent committed to a particular technique, there’s more than one way to approach it.
Take for example social media marketing. Although 89% of marketers use Facebook in their brand marketing efforts, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll generate sales for your business. You may find it easier to connect with your audience on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, or another social platform.
The word best is subjective, but here are some of the most commonly used digital marketing techniques:
- Search engine optimization (SEO): the process of building and marketing your website with the goal of ranking at the top of the search engines.
- Pay per click advertising (PPC): an online advertising model with which you bid on keywords and only pay when your ad is clicked.
- Content marketing: this is best defined as any form of marketing that revolves around creating, publishing, and distributing content, such as blog posts, infographics, and white papers.
- Email marketing: a form of direct marketing in which you connect with your audience via email messages.
- Social media: a form of marketing conducted on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
- Video marketing: a marketing process in which you create, publish, and distribute videos, such as on your website, blog, and sharing platforms.
Some of these digital marketing strategies will work for your dropshipping business, while others may not pertain to you. Just remember, it’s impossible to know what will and won’t work until you experiment with each technique.
Why is Digital Marketing Strategy Important for Dropshipping?
It’s 2020 out there, so digital marketing planning and strategy is important to every company in every industry. And this definitely holds true for dropshipping and eCommerce businesses. After all, you don’t have to worry about inventory or suppliers.
With dropshipping, your main strength lies in creating a riveting and unique digital marketing and planning strategy that establishes your brand as a leader in your respective niche.
Here’s why:
1. Competition is at an all-time high
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers were shifting their attention online. But, when you add in pandemic restrictions, it’s easy to see why a growing number of entrepreneurs and already established brands turned their focus to the internet.
This has resulted in increased competition in every niche imaginable, which forces every dropshipping business to seek a competitive advantage.
You’re fighting for traffic, engagement, and of course, sales.
A digital marketing strategy will allow you to position yourself strongly against established competitors while protecting against newcomers to your industry.
2. Out of Sight, Out of Mind
You’ve probably heard this saying before. In regards to selling online, if a consumer doesn’t see your product or know about your brand, they won’t buy from you. It’s that simple.
You don’t want your brand to be “out of sight, out of mind.” You want it to be visible to your audience, no matter where they look. It takes over 4 impressions for your dropshipping business to get someone’s attention, so don’t be discouraged when you don’t make a sale right away.
If they search one of your primary keywords online, you want your website to show up at the top of the organic (and possibly even paid) search results.
When they’re scouring social media for fresh content, you want your updates to be among the first ones they see.
When they check their email inbox, you want to greet them with a special offer.
You get the point. You want to be front and center as often as possible.
Steps to Build a Digital Marketing Plan
By now, you realize there’s no right or wrong way to build a digital marketing plan. But that doesn’t mean you should take a scattergun approach and hope for the best. There are five simple steps you can take to form the basic building blocks of a digital marketing strategy.
1. Start Small
You’re tempted to dive in headfirst, but that has the potential to cause more harm than good.
Start small by choosing two or three tactics that best suit your skillset and the goals you’re trying to achieve. For example, content marketing and SEO is a good jumping-off point.
If you bite off more than you can chew early on, it may scare you away from devoting the necessary resources to digital marketing in the future.
2. Perform a Competitor Analysis
This doesn’t have to be anything overly complex. Stick to the basics, such as:
- Target keywords
- Current search rankings
- If they’re running PPC ads
- Social media engagement, reach, and size of their audience
Doing this is beneficial for two reasons:
- It allows you to understand the approach your competitors are taking
- It helps you find opportunities for outdoing them
For instance, maybe you find that your top three competitors don’t have much of a social media presence. You can use this against them by putting more effort into this part of your digital marketing strategy.
3. Build Your Team
Answer this question: are you managing and carrying out your digital marketing strategy on your own, or will you do so alongside other team members?
Either way is fine, but you should decide on this upfront. If you’re working with others, even if it’s only one person, this is the time to define responsibilities. This allows you to work in the most efficient manner possible.
4. Attack Your Strategy with Trial and Error
It’s your hope that you get everything right the first time around, but that’s not likely to happen. Even the most skilled digital marketers rely on trial and error to pinpoint what’ll drive the desired results.
Trial and error is a good thing, but only if you record the results and closely review the data.
For example, you could find yourself comparing the return on investment of SEO and PPC. But if you don’t know how much money you’ve spent on both techniques, you won’t know what to do next.
Try something, learn from it, and then try again. This is the best way to build your knowledge of digital marketing while moving toward your end goal.
5. Introduce New Ideas
You’ve identified two or three techniques. You’ve dissected your competitors’ marketing strategies. You’ve conducted some trial and error experiments.
As you grow, it’s time to introduce new ideas while cutting back on those that haven’t yielded positive results.
Taking this approach allows you to eventually build a digital marketing plan that you can lean on, day in and day out.
Dropshipping, as a business model, cannot survive without digital marketing. This is the truth many failed dropshippers refused to accept or take seriously. To get people to notice your online store and buy what you are offering, digital marketing is critical.
Recognizing the importance of digital marketing is never enough. You need to adopt some strategies that will get you customers, especially if you are operating in a competitive niche. Here, we discuss eight digital marketing strategies that can help you sell more and grow your dropshipping business.
Integrate Instagram
There is something about Instagram that makes it one of the most attractive apps in the world. It is safe to say that most of your current and potential customers are active Instagram users. The platform is a great place to engage with them and make them buy more of your products.
Instagram is not only a place to connect and engage with customers. It is also a great place to connect with other brands and influencers that can help promote your business and get you more sales.
Run Budget-Appropriate Facebook Ads
Facebook has seen several changes that make it a little harder for businesses to organically connect with potential customers. This doesn’t mean it is less influential than it used to be in the past. You just have to restrategize to make the right impact on Facebook. It is still the king for social media marketing.
One of the major reasons brands have been embracing Facebook even more than before is the fact that ads are highly customizable. It is easier and more effective to target the right audience through Facebook. Once you understand your audience, the next important thing is to determine what is perfect for Facebook ads, based on your budget.
Take Video Content Seriously
We all know the power of audio-visuals. From recent data, it is clear that watching videos online is becoming extremely popular among most people. Video content has become the most effective way to reach most people, and you need to embrace it fully to grow your dropshipping business.
As a dropshipper, you can easily make videos of your products and use for selling and promotional purposes. In your video content, you can easily leave active links that will lead your audience to where they can buy the products featured on the video. Videos also rank better in Google these days. You may be able to get more traffic from search engines.
Blogging and SEO
There are several misconceptions about blogging that make many dropshipers miss out on the opportunities it offers. Some erroneously believe that blogging should only be focused on what someone is doing; like a diary. This is misleading. You can blog about your products and niche.
Blogging can get you lots of traffic if you implement SEO. You can blog about your product in many ways, talk about how to use them, and even compare them. You can even publish buying guides in your blog and attract online shoppers to your shop. Research your keywords and use them properly to improve traffic and make more sales.
Grow Your Email Subscribers
Email marketing is still a great way to keep your loyal customers close and sell to them on a consistent basis. Growing your subscribers may not be easy, but the results you can get from email marketing should spur you. By promoting your newsletter, taking blogging seriously, and offering your customers some perks for their emails, you will succeed at growing your subscribers.
In addition to growing your email subscribers, you have to improve your email campaigns. You need to understand the occasions that are perfect for sending emails, as well as how best to craft your emails. You can spice things up with exclusive promo codes and free gifts.
Take Retargeting Seriously
Most customers will not buy your products the first time they stumble upon them. When they are ready to buy, they may find it a little too challenging identifying your brand from that of several other dropshippers. This is where retargeting comes in.
This is a somewhat simple strategy that involves targeting visitors who have previously visited your website. It is the best way to display relevant ads to them in a manner that will make it easier for them to buy from you what they are ready. It is a very effective strategy.
Try Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Marketing
It is important that you maximize every transaction you get as a dropshipper. Upselling and cross-selling are some of the most effective strategies to do this. The first involves recommending a slightly more premium brand than what the customer is originally considering, while cross-selling involves selling additional products to the customer who has bought or is about to buy your product. Both techniques should be combined into a single strategy.
Build Trust for Your Brand
To experience real growth as a dropshipping business, you need to build trust for your brand. This doesn’t come easy. You will need to prioritize selling high-quality products and maintaining superb customer support. You can also add customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials to your dropshipping website.
Are you ready to build your dropshipping business? It is time to learn new digital marketing strategies and implement them. Here, we have discussed some really simple strategies that work perfectly for dropshipping businesses. Adopt them and remain consistent until you get the big change you deserve.
Final Thoughts on Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy
Creating a digital marketing strategy, whether it be for a dropshipping business or some other type, is critical to your success.
Once you have a strategy you trust, based on proven results, you can rely on it to reach your audience, drive sales, and establish your brand as a major player in your industry. Keep your eye on the landscape and always adjust to the oncoming changes. Nothing in this life is certain except for change, so it’s a swim or drown world for eCommerce and digital marketing.
