How to Write a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy for 2021

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Whether you operate as a small business, a newly-founded startup, or a solo entrepreneur, digital marketing is essential for success in 2020. With the rising popularity of social media channels, influencer marketing, and multimedia content, now’s the time to reexamine what digital marketing really means.

According to Smart Insights, 76% of marketers use organic traffic as a measure of digital marketing success in 2020, while 84% outsource their content creation. Based on Impact BND, only 41% of marketers have a planned digital marketing strategy, with 56% using data to gain insight into their target audience.

Modern customers lean toward personalized content and brands with elevated UX design. This begs the question – what’s changed in 2020? How can we write a winning strategy for digital marketing and benefit from it going forward?

The Value of Writing a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy

Let’s discuss the topic of value behind writing a digital strategy for content marketing before we delve into practicalities. According to Small Biz Genius, more than 90% of brands use digital content to approach customers, with 72% who report that it improved their engagement.

In 2020-2021, digital marketing has effectively become a part of corporate business intelligence, prompting companies to pay close attention to how they approach potential customers. Whether through social media, email, blog posts, or online seminars, companies such as yours can take advantage of digital channels to generate interest and revenue.

The best reason to invest in a digital marketing strategy in 2020? It’s to stay ahead of the competition in your industry. No matter how niche or popular your brand may be, rest assured that competitive businesses are working on their content marketing strategy as we speak. Start developing and publishing digital content for the purposes of marketing your brand. Then you will gain important advantages over your competition, including:

• Access to a global customer base through a variety of digital channels
• More cost-effective and ROI-oriented than physical and printed marketing
• Measurable form of marketing with post-engagement data analysis opportunities
• Help rank your website and published content through smart SEO optimization
• Engage your customer base directly through comments, surveys, social media, and emails

Writing a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy for 2020-2021

Start with Measurable Goals

The best place to start with your digital marketing strategy is to settle for the goals you want to achieve. Do you want to generate traffic and sales on your eCommerce platform? Do you want to attract local B2B companies to your startup? How often do you plan to publish content? A goal-setting methodology such as SMART can help you define objective long-term goals for 2020-2021.

These may seem like baseline questions. However, they will help you settle for objective goals in regards to your marketing strategy. Outsourcing some of your digital marketing to a trustworthy service is always a viable solution, especially for small-scale startups with limited manpower. Choose your Marketing Channels

Once you settle for the goals you want to achieve, it’s time to choose the platforms you will market your content on. It’s important to choose digital marketing types early. This is in order to write and format the content you create around their features and limitations. For example, social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram favor multimedia content such as photos and videos.

On the other hand, publishing blog posts on LinkedIn or your own website in written format will allow you to build brand reputation. Among others, your choices of marketing channels include email and PPC marketing. Also, organic SEO optimization. Likewise, live seminars, affiliate or guest articles, as well as social proof. These can also serve as viable digital marketing channels. Choose a combination of channels that suit your brand’s style and your content creators’ sensibilities and skillsets. You can always modify your content type and marketing channel selection down the line. Give some of them a shot and gauge their success.

Organize your Production/Publishing Pipeline

Now that you have several marketing channels selected let’s discuss the production pipeline. Ad hoc publishing of digital marketing content is never a good idea. It’s best to plan ahead and create content for future publishing in scheduled intervals.

A platform such as Google Docs can help you not only create but also schedule and organize your content long-term. For example, you can publish blog posts twice a week and multimedia to your social media channels three times, filling out the week. Once you start generating leads, your followers will intuitively know which days they can expect what type of digital content from you. Show your target audience that you are an organized and professional brand which they can rely on by introducing a back-end publishing timetable.

Adopt a Multimedia Approach

Given the freedom you have with digital marketing channels, it’s not a good idea to box yourself into a single content type. Thus, make sure to vary up the types of content you produce and publish throughout every marketing campaign. Data by 99 Firms indicated that digital content marketing production costs 62% less than traditional marketing. And it generates up to 3 times as many leads. So, why not take advantage of that fact?

You can create original photos, infographics, videos, interviews with customers/B2B partners, and so on. Live events on social media can also work wonders to ensure that your brand is personalized and appealing to a wider audience. “While written blog posts might be the bread and butter for SEO ranking, don’t solely write articles and call it a day”, says Angela Baker, a content writing specialist at BestWritingAdvisor. Free download content such as how-to PDFs or statistics you’ve collected on your industry can also elevate your brand’s reputation. Mix up your content selection in order to ensure that different types of online users have something to look forward to from your brand.

Don’t Neglect SEO Trends

We’ve touched on SEO several times up to this point without diving deeper into it. So, what’s it all about? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) represents a set of trends meant to filter out original content from irrelevant spam on the internet. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo lean on SEO. This is to ensure that the results they present to individual users are as relevant as possible.

According to Tech Jury, 93% of all online interactions begin with search engine inquiries, while only 21% of users access more than one search result. What does this mean in practice? The higher you rank, the better your odds at attracting relevant leads will become. In order to do that, you should implement trending keywords into your digital marketing strategy alongside link building and smart multimedia optimization. The more accessible and original your content is, the better it will rank based on SEO. This makes regularly referencing it essential.

Engage your Audience

Lastly, there’s no better seal of quality for a brand than social proof and communication with the user base. Make sure to write calls to action into your digital content. This will spark discussion via your blog posts, social media updates, and emails. Create surveys and questionnaires for your user base and ask them for objective feedback on your brand and product portfolio.

Online users love brands which genuinely care about their opinions. Especially if you decide to practically implement some of their suggestions. Gathered quotes and data can also be used as marketing content in itself to attract more users to your business. Most importantly, the data can be used to reevaluate and improve your digital marketing strategy going further into 2021 to the benefit of both sides. Don’t rest on your laurels and engage your audience in as many ways as you can.  It will help your brand build a pro-consumer reputation.

Playing the Long Game (Conclusion)

In order to make the most out of digital marketing, you will have to commit to a long-term plan for your business. Map out a marketing strategy which you can use for 2020-2021 with a cohesive message, style, and visual identity.

Don’t stop your marketing campaign for whatever reason in order to keep the momentum and buzz surrounding your brand going. Digital marketing is a valuable tool. It can help your business grow organically and develop over time, both in terms of revenue and reputation. Set a long-term vision for your business and don’t rest until you’re there. That’s the key to success with digital content marketing.

Dorian Martin is a freelance writing expert for Essaysupplyinterested in digital marketing and copywriting for businesses. An educational writer by training, he was solving challenges like how to write discussion in dissertation, and now he is also helping blogs with content strategies. Thanks to the experience in SEO, Dorian often works on content planning and auditing projects.