Top 10 Digital Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Brand

By Vanhishikha Bhargava

Marketing your business isn’t easy when the competition is increasing by the day, but it’s not rocket science either. Most businesses struggle to keep pace with the growing digital marketing trends and more often than not fail to reach the right audience and have the right impact – simply because they’re spreading themselves too thin. 

If you have been in the same boat for too long, you’re in the right place. 

With new ideas, technologies in place along with the constant need to reach out to more consumers, it’s time to spruce up your digital marketing strategies. But let’s start with those that have proven to work time and again. 

10 Digital Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Brand Reach 

1. Hop aboard the video marketing bandwagon

It’s no secret that video marketing has become a popular tool for digital marketers. The rise of the “mobile-first” notion, affordable data plans, and increased use of smartphones across consumers have paved the way. Not to forget, the rising consumption of short-format video content in the form of TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts has only grown by manifolds in the last few years. 

About 84% of digital marketers have said that video marketing has helped them to generate leads when included in their digital marketing strategy template for all platforms (Lemon Light). Besides, video marketing helps in grabbing customers’ attention directly to your business and is only going to increase. From including videos in ads, blogs to email newsletters, you are more likely to reach more audience with this strategy. 

2. Tap into the power of influencer marketing 

As the trust over regular advertising and organic opportunities of content distribution across channels grow challenging, influencer marketing will remain relevant throughout 2022. Don’t believe us? 

The Power of Influence revealed how brands are most likely to spend 25 percent of their digital marketing budgets on influencer marketing which is expected to grow 5x in use by the end of 2022. This report is from GlobeNewswire.  

Influencers are now working more as communicators of brands than amplifiers. More than celebrities and big names, brands are eagerly connecting with micro-influencers to actively engage with their audience. After all, these are people that audiences more often ‘connect’ with on a personal level. 

Therefore, including influencers in your digital marketing strategy for a brand will pay off in form of recommendations, endorsements, and more eyeballs.  As more focus grows on performance marketing and brands look to establish long-term relationships with influencers, the landscape is surely looking to change. 

For instance, brands like HDFC promoted micro-influencers to promote their credit card and it indeed helped them to gain massive engagement.

Bonus Tip: One of the fool-proof ways to choose the right influencer marketing strategy is to conduct thorough audience research or survey on names they look up to.

3. Make cause marketing an integral part of your strategy 

Since the pandemic, “supporting a cause” has been recognized as a driving force for most of the purchase decisions businesses make. 

As the idea of creating a better world gains value, big brands have come to recognize the impact of supporting a cause in their digital marketing strategy. 

An IBM research revealed that over 40% of consumers now fall into the category of ‘purpose-driven’, where they are willing to associate themselves with brands that align with causes that resonate with them. 

Similarly, Deloitte’s Global Millennial Survey 2021 also showed how Millennial and Gen Z customers are more likely to move away from businesses that don’t share their personal values or common goals. 

Uber’s digital marketing strategy ‘Move What Matters’ campaign during the pandemic urged everyone to stay at home and use their service only if it is essential. Besides, as the dire situation continued, Uber pledged to provide 10 million free rides and food deliveries to seniors, essential workers, healthcare service providers, and anyone in utter need. Uber showed with its action, behaviors, and commitments that it’s a brand that doesn’t shy away from being ‘purpose driven’ anymore. This also played a role in improving their corporate image.

4. Embrace information-driven content marketing

Consumers today are no longer enticed by a long list of features or discounts on pricing. More than 60% of consumers choose to gather information about a product or service by a brand, before interacting with them. This stat is from the Content Marketing Institute. 

If you want your business to stand out and grab attention, you need to become the one brand that is willing to answer all consumer queries – including the hard questions that your competitors seem to be avoiding, or not doing as transparent or thorough a job at. 

Through content marketing, you get a chance to not just address consumer queries, but also educate them about your product/ service, and how it brings value to them. It helps you portray the ‘usefulness’ of your offer more than discounts and deals in an ad too; which of course can become motivators to make the purchase at a later stage. 

Now content marketing can look different for everyone. If you’re a furniture brand, you may want to create lookbooks to help people visualise how the products look in a certain room. But if you’re a social media marketing tool, your content would be more focused on educating people on how to use various platforms to reach their audience. 

5. Craft stories that boost brand value

Stories bring people together. 

In fact, according to statistics from research by Headstream, if people love a brand story, they become 55% more likely to buy from them in the future, 44% become likely to share it and 15% are likely to make the purchase right away. 

A storyline helps you bring together your vision, value proposition and what distinguishes your business from the others, in a narrative that engages the audience on an emotional level. 

Coca-Cola’s digital marketing strategy carried out one such stunning storytelling marketing that was innovative and resonated with consumers. 

They employed Augmented Reality (AR) to showcase 12 stories when customers point their phone’s camera at a can of Coke. Audiences were able to watch a light-hearted story where animated characters spring to life as they share a coca-cola. Coca-Cola not only explored a new medium but also humanized their brand through a memorable experience through storytelling. 

6. Leverage social listening and sentiment analysis 

Most businesses are making use of social listening to keep track of what their audience and customers are saying about them – be it repulsive, positive or neutral. While this has helped them respond to all comments in a timely manner, it’s time to go beyond just reactive measures. It’s time that brands started to focus on the sentiment behind these conversations to create marketing campaigns that are more likely to strike a chord with the audience. 

Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques that codes customers’ attitudes to determine the emotional intent behind such responses. 

It is a powerful tool that helps you to keep a tab on social media conversations and analyze what makes your consumers happy, or drive them away. Such insights can come in aid to construct better types of digital marketing strategies that improve your brand value proposition.

Our all-time favorite Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) implemented sentiment analysis to leverage its power and understand their customers better. They used memes, pop culture to continue building a positive sentiment around the brand and increase engagement. KFC digital marketing strategy boosted its online presence that definitely led to rise in revenue, growth, and reach.

7. Enrich your digital marketing strategy with Live Streaming 

Live streaming is not a novel marketing tool anymore. As the digital wave spurred by the pandemic grew, live streaming marketing quickly gained popularity as consumers expected more interactive content from businesses. 

In 2020 alone Facebook Live viewership increased by 50%, leading to a whopping 28% of marketers investing more in live streaming as a digital marketing strategy (Marketing Land). 

With Facebook lives, IGTV and reddit lives, businesses have the chance to directly interact with their audience and make them feel involved.  Besides, we are also witnessing a massive surge in live stream shopping that many savvy businesses are picking up on. 

8. Establish a multi-channel digital marketing strategy 

Research from Salesforce suggests that a minimum of six touch-points is required for an average consumer to make a purchase decision. Multi-channel marketing is the key to continually communicate with your potential customers and guide them to complete their buyer cycle. 

This type of digital marketing strategy involves leveraging all communication channels from SMS, Whatsapp to emails to interact with the audience through their preferred mode of communication. 

Multi-channel marketing also increases your re-targeting success and simplifies a buyer’s journey that urges them to complete their purchase cycle at the earliest touchpoint. This mode of marketing has been successfully leveraged by eCommerce brands.

Netflix has been a master of multi-channel communication as it continues to interact with consumers across channels. From social media campaigns to emails, or even push notifications and SMS, it continues to keep its audience thoroughly engaged; ensuring they don’t get forgotten owing to the increasing competition. 

Product launches, Q&A sessions, influencer streams, etc. are just some of the ways to leverage the live streaming economy. Tech giants like Apple and Microsoft have been using this marketing strategy for a while now, keeping their audience hooked and waiting for more.  

Apple has built a cult following by generating excitement around its product launches. This was possible due to live- streaming as more than ten million people tune in to such live events. It helps to come across as an authentic brand that looks forward to communicating with the audience in real-time, walking them through the product features. 

9. Let customers do the selling with user-generated content 

People believe people and so do 93% of marketers who agree that customers trust content created by other consumers more than the content crafted by brands (State of UGC 2021 Report). 

User-Generated Content is a combination of images, text, or even videos posted by consumers while talking about their experiences with a brand or a purchase they recently made. In fact, product reviews and testimonials also fall under user-generated content that can be used in digital marketing strategies. 

Apart from the fact that user-generated content is authentic, it also helps you build a narrative around your product/ service by letting your existing customers share their stories. And we all know how well storytelling works! 

It’s almost like getting a recommendation from a friend. 

GoPro is one brand that uses user-generated content in their digital marketing strategy really well. For that matter, their social media feed is actually fueled by all the customers making use of their products – from images to videos, a potential customer gets to see it all before making a purchase decision.

10. Bring back your focus to SEO (search engine optimization) 

A report by HubSpot states that about 60% of buying journeys start from the search engine. The information-hungry consumers want to learn more about a business and its products/ services before interacting with them in any way. 

With the pandemic, this hunger for information only grew, as consumers had more time to explore and research what they wanted to purchase. This only states that those who had moved their focus from the traditional SEO, need to get back into the game. 

Marketers will need to focus on creating a digital marketing strategy that takes into account the search behaviour of their target audience. This includes talking about or creating content that their audience is searching for, the channels that they need to be present on to rank for the right phrases and of course, how updated they keep their websites. 

For example, Dukaan, an online software that helps businesses set up a digital storefront, doubled down on SEO to drive traffic to their website. Here’s their team member sharing results of focusing on creating content and quality backlinks – if you notice, their blog is the only piece in the top search results that isn’t an ‘ad’, making it more trustworthy.

Which of the Top 10 Digital Marketing Strategies are for You?  

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to digital marketing. While it’s highly recommended that you tap into the current digital marketing trends to resonate with your audience, it is also advisable to experiment at scale; which typically means trying a handful of different digital marketing strategies, monitoring their impact and then looking into the others. 

The above ten strategies have time and again proven to give sustainable results to brands looking into boosting their reach and customer engagement. 

But your ideal digital marketing strategy could either include some of them, or be a mix of them all!

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