Digital Marketing consists of a number of strategies and tactics that achieve different goals. Depending on where you are in your company lifecycle, you may want to leverage different online approaches at different times. Most digital advertising tactics impact one or more of the following areas: Brand Awareness, Search Engine Optimization, Lead Generation, Conversion Optimization, or Customer Engagement.
This guide reviews 17 digital marketing tactics in an easy to follow format. It includes a short description of the tactic, some pros and cons of each, as well as which strategies the tactic falls into.
A method for getting commission- based affiliate partners to sell your products on your behalf.
A low-risk way to get partners to sell on your behalf
Only pay commissions when something sells
Varying degrees of setup costs
Requires regular management of keeping affiliates informed about promotions and
product information
Strategic Categories: Conversion
An area of your website where you write about relevant topics to increase user knowledge.
Demonstrates thought leadership
Highlights your company personality
Helps you stay up-to-date on best practices
Takes effort to develop content plan
Can be difficult to maintain high quality when using multiple writers
Can face internal
challenges recruiting
employees to write
blog content
Strategic Categories: SEO
Educational or informative content that does not specifically sell your product or service. It is published across multiple marketing channels.
Demonstrates expertise in the topic.
Improves SEO because of extended content on website.
Can generate many leads.
Minimum spend fees can be higher than other channels
Need skills and resources to create quality content
Takes time for results to be seen
Requires resources to constantly be thinking of new ideas
Strategic Categories: Awareness, SEO
Banner and box ads displayed on someone else’s website.
Least expensive advertising option for cost per impression
Ads can be seen by thousands/millions of users
Easy to deploy
Minimum spend fees can be higher than other channels
CTR can vary widely
Strategic Categories: Awareness
Sending emails to prospects/ customers to show thought leadership, educational materials, product features, service options.
Displays company personality
Keeps users informed
Gets your message into their inbox
Many email systems are easy to create &
deploy
Takes time & planning
Requires someone who can write content
Presents risk of over-emailing without appropriate planning
Strategic Categories: Conversion, Engagement
Reviewing individual pages on your site for keyword optimization and conversion rate optimization.
Ensures that the content on your site meets your users needs
Lets you constantly test new layouts/copy to see what yields the best result
Takes times to implement and time to evaluate results
Strategic Categories: SEO, Conversion
Advertising that shows up in Google or Bing Search Results.
Easy to deploy
Able to tightly control costs and messaging
No graphic design needed
Can easily tie success or failure back to specific ads
Costs can spiral if account is neglected
Requires ongoing management to find out what is/isn’t working
Varying degrees of success
Strategic Categories: Lead Gen
Display advertising that follows users who have already visited your site.
Easy to implement
Can customize ad based on what parts of the site the user has visited
Higher CTR than normal display
Requires a lot of web traffic to make it worth the effort
Time consuming to create multiple ads in
multiple sizes to account for all possiblilities
Strategic Categories: Lead Gen, Conversion
Schema is a specific set of tags that describes the content on your site.
Helps Google understand what information is
on your site
Provides you with a standard set of labels
that everyone uses
Multiple ways to implement
Lots of labels to chose from so there is a learning curve in knowing which to choose
Typically requires a developer to implement
Strategic Categories: SEO
A code review of your website to improve the technical SEO aspects of your site.
Improves SEO rankings
Provides consistency of SEO approach across site
Requires development resources to fix changes identified
Strategic Categories: SEO
Presenting specific ads to targeted users based on the demographics and other preferences.
Ads can be highly targeted
Very successful once correct target is
identified
You can advertise where users spend most of their time.
Higher cost than PPC (though better returns)
Can sometimes take time to figure out most effective target audience
Strategic Categories: Lead Gen
Using various social media platforms to post news & information about what your business is doing.
Displays company personality
Keep users informed about what is going on
Gets your name in from of your customers and their friends
Takes effort to maintain regular cadence
Leaves you open to public criticism
Strategic Categories: Awareness, SEO
Presenting at conferences in your industry.
Good way to get in front of large numbers of
people
Allows you to demonstrate expertise in your field
Hard to break into speaking circuit
Can take a while to see results
Strategic Categories: Awareness
Renting a booth at a trade show relevant to your industry.
Great way to show personality and get in front of a lot of people
Gets you facetime with prospects and customers
Easy way to get live customer testimonials
Takes a lot of effort and planning
Can be costly
Generally requires many people to manage the booth
Strategic Categories: Awareness
15 second to 2 minute videos to be used in social media marketing, YouTube, and on your website.
Produce multiple videos during a single shoot
Highly engaging
Displays company personality
Can be used across multiple channels
Requires significant planning and can be costly if not well planned
Employees may be shy about being on camera
Content can become out of date
Strategic Categories: Awareness, SEO
Easy to deploy
Inexpensive solutions available
Chatbots are very powerful and require few live resources
Low threshold for users to cross to get information
Can take some time to account for all options when using chatbots
May require human resources to monitor the system
Strategic Categories: Lead Gen, Conversion, Engagement
Hosting an online presentation about a topic relevant to your industry.
Demonstrates thought leadership
Creates lots of reusable resources that can be used in other marketing activities
Time consuming to organize and run
Internal employees may be hesitant to give a live presentation
Strategic Categories: Lead Gen, Conversion
Speak with a digital strategist to see how we can help.
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