Digital Marketing in 2021: A Holistic Strategy You’ve Never Heard Before

Aren’t you tired of skimming through the internet and not being able to find a Digital Marketing Strategy that would help you scale up your business and generate steady growth? We were all looking for that magic pill, until now!

What I’m about to share with you is a thought process most elite marketers wouldn’t dare to talk about, just so that they can keep the cream to themselves. I started researching about this a year ago and the information I’ve gathered during this period is every last drop of the good stuff that I’ve shared below.

The Holy Trinity of Digital Marketing

Did you know that global B2C eCommerce sales are expected to reach $ 4.5 trillion by 2021? As more and more businesses are growing, Digital Marketing Experts are constantly calibrating and testing their own strategies to stand out and grow.

However, no matter how unconventional their methods may be, you don’t need to worry. All you have to do is optimize the following 3 aspects of your website and you’re bound to see substantial growth.

Traffic

One of the main focuses of a Digital Marketing Strategy is to drive traffic to your website, and not just any traffic, but relevant traffic. In order to make sure that happens, you have to incorporate keywords throughout your landing page that are relevant to what you’re selling, whether directly or indirectly.

There are 2 ways to drive traffic to your website:-

Paid Traffic

Let’s be honest. Most of the niches are highly saturated and in order to stand out, you either have to come up with something entirely new so you’ll organically thrive or advertise your services. Most successful businesses rely on both. However, advertising seems to be an effective revenue-generating tool if done right.

A good advertisement involves a headline that hooks, and a landing page with an attractive banner and sufficient information about your product.

There are 5 typical sources wherefrom you can drive paid traffic to your website:-

• Display Ads – The ones that you see when you’re reading a blog. They’re around the edges, adjacent to the blog, usually in a square or rectangular box.
• Search Engine Ads – The ones that pop on top of other search results. They look like the first search results but you see a little “ad” icon to signify that it’s an advertisement.
• Discovery Ads – If you’re ever scrolling on Google, YouTube, or Gmail, then you have come across a Discovery ad. On YouTube, it has a panel with an image and “Learn More” is written below it. In Gmail, you’ll find it in Social and Promotion Tabs.
• Sponsored Content – When you’re reading a blog and there’s a panel that looks like another blog but it’s actually a landing page, which could be anything from a blog to a product advertisement.
• Influencer Marketing – Using social media influencers to promote your product. Lately, this has become just as mainstream as other forms of advertising.

Organic Traffic

When someone discovers your business on the internet when you didn’t advertise it, it means you were able to drive traffic organically on your website. Growing your business organically is a discipline in itself. The fact that people were able to discover you organically, indicates that you did a good job with SEO.

People find you either when they’re searching for you (or for similar services) on Google, or on Social Media platforms (could be Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc). According to Search Engine Journal, 70% of the links people click on are Organic. Even though ads work, it’s clear that a lot of people just skip the first 3 links on Google because we habitually understand that they’re advertisements.

How Do I Maximize Traffic On My Website?

Create a Keyword Database

In generating both organic and paid traffic, you require keywords that resonate with your target audience. What most people underestimate is the power that these keywords hold. Using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc will help you find the right keywords by offering several parameters.

Any SEO expert can tell you that you should use keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty, but knowing what keywords to target is a refined process, and if you’re serious about your business, then here’s what you should do:-

Make 5 columns in an excel sheet. One for the keywords, and the other 4 for “Intent”, “Relevance”, “Trending”, and “IRT Score”. Refer to the excel sheet below:-

In the above image, I have taken an example of a web development company and used 4 keywords. Each of these has been assigned a corresponding score between 1 to 4 and has been totaled in the column IRT score. Let me explain what these are and what their implications are:-

• Intent – This signifies how transactional is the intent of the keyword. If the keyword is highly transactional, it has a score of 4, and if it’s not at all transactional, it has a score of 1. In the above image, the keyword “Hire Web Developer” is highly transactional, and the keyword “ReactJS vs Laravel” isn’t transactional at all and hence, they’ve been assigned scores 4 and 1 respectively.
• Relevance – This will signify how relevant the keyword is for you. If the keyword has a product or service that you offer, then you may rate it between 1 to 4 in terms of relevance. In the above image, the keyword “Hire a .Net Developer” is rated as 1 because the web development company isn’t relevant to the kind of development services they’re offering.

• Trending – The more the keyword is trending on Google or any other search engine, the higher will be its trending score and vice versa. In the above image, “ReactJS vs Laravel” is a keyword that has a significantly high search volume on Google and hence, has a trending score of 3.

• IRT Score – IRT is simply the aggregate score of the columns “Intent”, “Relevance”, and “Trending”.

If you make a list of all the relevant keywords, you can segregate and prioritize them on the basis of these 3 parameters. The IRT score will serve as an extremely quick and reliable guide since the higher the IRT score, the more important the keyword will be for you.

Optimize Technical Performance

Did you know that the first 5 seconds of page-load time have the highest impact on the conversion rate? According to Portent, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load-time.

Optimizing page loading speed is only a factor and not a Digital Marketing Strategy in itself. However, improving the overall architecture of your website can help you make sure that your target audience doesn’t wander away from your landing page. Besides, the longer the page load time, the worse it is for SEO performance.

Here’s are some questions you need to ask yourself:-

• Are internal pages getting enough internal link votes?
  The internal pages of your website should have at least 10 internal links. The more links, the more will be the Page Authority.
• Are all pages 3 (or less) clicks deep?
  No pages should be more than 3-clicks deep. This is to make sure that your pages are being crawled and indexed well. For Google, more clicks mean less valuable, and vice versa.
• Are all internal links using effective anchor text?
  Always use exact match anchor text with your links. Here’s a catch though – If you have a huge site, you will end up using several internal links for a keyword in pursuit of site navigation, in which case you need to dial down on external links. You need to make sure that you avoid getting external links otherwise it will lead to over-optimization of the anchor text. Eg. if you have 1000 internal links for “chamomile tea”, be less aggressive on having external links with the same anchor text.
• Are there any pages with existing backlinks?
  Your top internal linking targets should be pages with high Page Authority. You can boost the page authority by linking pages that already have high authority.

Create Intelligent SEO Content

Having intelligent SEO content serves you in 2 ways – It will help you rank your content and will be interesting to read as well. Most writers can’t get the right mix of these 2 tangents in their content.

Ideally, 80% of your content should be keyword targeted and 20% of it should be a link bait (designed to attract backlinks). This is a long-term strategy to improve the Domain Authority of your website. This means that you’ll be able to rank on highly competitive keywords.

Here are the steps you need to follow:-

• Select a qualified keyword – We already discussed this in the above header “creating a keyword database”.
• Map the keyword to an existing page – If you don’t have a page targeting this qualified keyword, create a new one. Update and optimize the existing pages before creating a new page.
• Only target one keyword on one page – If you have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, you either consolidate those pages, and/or delete or redirect the pages that don’t have good quality content.
• Create an SEO content brief – In the SEO content brief you’ll hand over to your writer, you can mention the estimated value of this keyword (CPC x clicks), the SERP features that need to be kept in mind, the estimated organic CTR of the keyword, target word count, search intent, how many backlinks you need to rank, etc.

Conversions

Did you know that 92% of your website visitors aren’t ready to buy? We’ve talked about how you can generate traffic to your website to generate more leads, but that wouldn’t mean anything if your leads aren’t getting converted.

What you need to do is nurture these visitors until they become a qualified lead. The majority of those remaining 8% visitors are highly motivated to buy, so even if you use decent keyword targeting and copywriting, you can easily convert these. However, to get the rest 92% on board, you need to create a nurture sequence.

Here’s what you need to do:-

Create a Lead Magnet

Anything that incentivizes the visitor to sign up for your email list is called a lead magnet. It could simply be a free training webinar, a video series, or an ebook. The key is to keep these incentives really simple.

Segregate the Qualified and Unqualified Leads

Just because some visitors signed up via email, doesn’t mean they’re qualified. You can find out which leads qualify and which don’t by using 2 ways:-

• New Subscriber Survey – This can include all the basic questions relevant to your target customer.
• Use Trigger Links – Send a welcome email with 2 or 3 links and when the subscriber clicks on one of those, they get tagged based on what they clicked. For example, if you send an email saying “What best describes you?” and give 2 or 3 options, and based on what they click on, they get tagged accordingly, so that you can send them relevant content from that moment on. You can use Drip to accomplish this.

Created Automated Nurture Sequence

Now that you’ve qualified those leads and have segregated them into relevant categories, it’s time to nurture them. You have to accept the fact that leads convert instantly. Realistically, you have to treat them as if they don’t plan on buying for the next 6 – 12 months.

You can lay back and take your time to plan how you can add value to these people’s lives every now and then during this period. What you should do is to create an automated nurture sequence and send them value-added material, which will develop trust over time. Next thing you know, they’ll already be sold.

If the nurture sequence is solid, then these leads will be moved into a different automated sequence. This is highly dependent on your business model, but with a successful digital marketing strategy, the goal is to gradually build up and pitch them when the time is right.

Remarketing

You already understand that 92% of your website visitors aren’t interested in buying anything, so basically, they’re just bouncing away from your website without taking any action. This means that there’s so much untapped potential that you’re missing out on, unless you’re remarketing.

Remarketing is the way to reach those 92% by reaching them even when they aren’t on your website. This can be achieved through the following ways:-

Enable Tracking Pixel

A tracking pixel is an HTML code snippet that is loaded when a user visits a website or opens an email. It is useful for tracking user behavior and conversions. At a bare minimum, you should have Google and Facebook tracking enabled on your website. Depending on the nature of your business, you could enable it on Bing, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, or even TikTok.

Create Intent-Based Campaigns

Based on what pages a visitor is viewing, you can understand their intent and should target advertisements that are designed accordingly. For example, if someone visits your website, read a blog, and just exit, then you shouldn’t advertise to them to buy your service right away.

What you can do instead is move them down your sales funnel and target with a lead magnet that’s related to the blog that they were reading. Heck, you can even split test your visitors, see what induces a favourable response for you and then use that as the main campaign.

Wrapping Up

If you were trying to understand how to reduce marketing costs, I wouldn’t blame you. All these tools can be costly and when you’re starting out, it can be an unexpectedly high expense. You can rely on free tools or consult a Digital Marketing Expert as well.

Hopefully, this Digital Marketing strategy served as an all-encompassing guide for you to understand how marketing really works, and how vast the role of relevant targeting can be. You can do your own litmus test to figure out what works for you.

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