10 Digital Marketing Tactics For Brand’s Success

Digital marketing plays a crucial role in brand success in the digital age, where consumers spend more time on digital media than traditional media. This strategic option is beneficial for small businesses as they can use digital marketing tactics without spending a huge amount of money on advertising, which allows smaller brands to compete with larger competitors effectively. Small businesses, which often serve a more defined target market than large brands, also benefit from the niche targeting offered through digital advertising platforms. Today, we’ll discuss tactics used to promote your business in digital marketing, why you should build them into your marketing strategy, and how to do so effectively.

10 Digital marketing tactics

Above, you can see the tools you need to consider in building your digital marketing strategy. If you want to learn more about these tools and how to use them effectively, I’ve written a post that shares the best digital marketing tools containing suggestions for products and how to get the most from them. Today, I want to go beyond using these tools to combine various tools into digital marketing tactics you should consider for your business and your marketing plan if you want to succeed.

1. Increasing visibility and brand awareness

Before you can convert visitors, you first need to build brand awareness and a positive brand image by increasing the visibility of your brand. With users spending an average of six hours and forty minutes online every day (based on data from Q3, 2023), that means using digital media, including:

• Streaming video such as YouTube, TikTok, and streaming services like Netflix
• Internet search via SEO
• Social media
• Email and messaging, including SMS (short message services like Messenger and Google Message

Because users hop between different internet uses, often using more than one device at the same time to multitask across various internet platforms, you need a diverse digital marketing strategy that involves an integrated campaign on the different platforms where your target marketing spends their time online rather than putting all your eggs in one (internet) basket. In fact, with the uncertainty surrounding TikTok’s future, you are in danger if that’s the only online platform you can use to reach your market.

Digital marketing strategies like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), influencer marketing (including soliciting user-generated content from your customers), and social media marketing help increase a business’s online visibility. This makes it easier for potential customers to find the company, thereby increasing brand awareness. As you can see below, this journey from awareness to conversion and repeat purchase is cyclical. You must work consistently across all your efforts to create the best blend of digital marketing tactics aimed at each stage of the journey to move prospective buyers toward conversion effectively.

2. SEO

A website is no longer an option for ANY business, yet 27% of small businesses still lack a website. With over a billion websites on the internet as of 2024, you’re gonna struggle to attract visitors even if you have a website since a large percentage of these websites are nearly invisible to searchers as they show up in the back pages of search results, where users never go. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of tools that help bring your content onto the first page of search results and generate more traffic to your website. More traffic commonly results in a better shot at achieving your goals.

Search engines, like Google (which accounts for 92% of all searches), use a complex algorithm to rank every piece of content published. While the algorithm isn’t published beyond hints about some of the approximately 300 factors included in it, experts agree on the most influential factors to consider when you build your website if you want your content to rank well. These factors reflect the search engine’s goal of helping users find valuable content. They are organized around the relevance of the content based on a user’s query, content quality, and functionality. Search engines use a snippet of code to interpret how well your content meets these three goals in developing a rank for each page. Among these factors are:

• A secure and accessible website, which means sites created with website builders like Wix and Squarespace don’t rank well as they aren’t coded well. Instead, use a content management system like WordPress to build a self-hosted site, which is at least as easy as using these website builders. I even wrote an ebook that walks you through the process with step-by-step directions and images. Find a good hosting company and ensure your site is secure with an HTTPS protocol. Submit your sitemap to Google to ensure your content is indexed (and ranked). Most SEO plugins for WordPress can handle this task.
• A website that loads quickly (again, website builders fail here). Choose a fast hosting company and use tools like WPMU to cache content and lazy load images to speed things up. In recent updates, Google downgraded the impact of speed on your content’s rank somewhat.
• A mobile-friendly website is essential, so choose a theme that’s responsive to the user’s screen size.
• Domain age, name, and authority. You can’t do anything about your domain’s age except start your website early in your business. The domain name, however, means spending time considering the name you want for your business and ensuring you can purchase the URL, as you want a name that reflects what you do. Domain Authority (DA) is something you achieve by publishing high-quality content. The number of backlinks to high-quality websites is a major factor in DA.
• Optimized content is one of the most important factors in determining your ranking. Not only does optimized content attract visitors to your site by ranking higher, but it is also critical for improving your conversion rate—more on this in a later section.
• Technical SEO factors are also used in the ranking algorithm, although many of these are too technical for small businesses and are handled by your SEO plugin.
• User experience is a ranking factor. Clear navigation is important, but the metrics used to assess the user experience are elements such as bounce rate (a negative factor), dwell time, and click-through rate once your content shows up in search results.
• The number of backlinks you achieve and where those links are embedded are important metrics that show the quality of your content.
• Social signals, such as engagement, are another indicator of content quality.
• Real business information is supplied through your domain registrar or hosting company.

  

3. Targeted advertising

Digital marketing allows for highly targeted advertising based on demographics, interests, behavior, and even location. For small businesses with their more defined target markets, this targeting means you get more bang for your buck and waste less of your budget reaching folks who aren’t part of that market when compared with traditional media advertising. Platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads enable businesses to reach specific segments of the market, leading to more efficient and effective marketing efforts with lower costs

Retargeting ads are a particular type of targeting. These ads let you selectively reach users who visited your website within a defined time. These ads target folks who have already entered the consideration stage, at which point your messaging should be different to advance that interest into conversion effectively. You can also choose lookalike ads on Facebook or Instagram to show ads to users who look like customers or engaged followers. Employing these targeted ads as a digital marketing tactic is particularly effective.

4. Engagement with customers

An engaged audience is valuable for several reasons.

1. Engagement rates impact SEO to improve your search rank, resulting in more visitors to your website.
2. An engaged audience helps spread your message while decommercializing it (a fancy word that reflects the fact that users trust messages from other users more than they trust brand messages).
3. Engaged users are more likely to recommend your brand and make further purchases of it.
4. When users have questions or want advice, engaged users expand your resources to answer them or offer insights to help users make purchase decisions or get more from their purchases. We call these market mavens, hence the title of this website. When you work to build this cohort, they do a lot of your work for you.

Because digital marketing tactics encourage two-way communication, they foster engagement. But you must build an effective listening post to hear what users say about your brand (and maybe even other aspects related to your brand, such as competitors) so you can build those two-way conversations.

5. Data-driven decisions

Digital marketing tactics provide a wealth of data that companies can analyze to make informed decisions. By tracking metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, awareness, and engagement statistics, businesses can optimize their marketing strategies to achieve better results. Tools like Google Analytics provide a wealth of data to help you make decisions. The new version, GA4, incorporates events tracking and customized reporting that allows you to monitor the metrics that matter most to your company. Plus, these reports are interactive, which means you can access reports from any time period, compare results across customized periods, and segregate data by product, source, demographic variables, and even a specific piece of content, which provides a more nuanced view of your performance. You can track critical metrics such as shopping cart abandonment to help determine why visitors didn’t convert or apportion costs and revenue across different marketing campaigns to assess the ROAS (return on advertising spend) so you can make informed decisions about where to spend your marketing dollars.

Armed with this data, you’re now able to optimize your performance and spend your money wisely. Of course, making the most of this digital marketing tactic relies on assessing the right metrics. Even a cursory glance at Google Analytics will find the average business owner drowning in a sea of numbers that bog down any effort at analysis. To make informed decisions, you need to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and assess them on a routine basis (preferably every day). You can find information in the graphic below to help you identify the right metrics for your particular mission.

6. Content Marketing

By creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content, businesses attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Content marketing is not only cost-effective but also helps establish authority and trust in the market, which translates into more referrals, better reviews, wider reach, and more sales. As mentioned earlier, you must optimize your content for SEO. That means the following:

• Conduct keyword research (using tools like Google’s Keyword Planning Tool) to find keywords that users use when looking for the things you offer. Find keywords that generate a large number of searches and face low competition, if possible. Only use a keyword once, so you must use long-tailed keywords (a phrase) to achieve this and to match longer keywords that are common when users employ a voice search to find what they’re looking for.
• Include your keyword strategically in your title, headings, image alt tags, meta description, and a few times within the body of your copy. Please don’t overdo it (called keyword stuffing), or search engines will penalize the content.
• Long-form content performs best. Aim for a minimum of 1400 words that you post several times per week.
• Include a few images within the content. I prefer to use images that help build understanding, but any attractive, relevant images are good. Crafting unique images is an excellent way to attract backlinks.
• Include outbound links to high-quality websites, as these act like citations in a research report to show your information is valid.
• Use internal links to other content to increase dwell time and to flesh out the information you share.
• Make your content snackable by breaking it up into headings and subheadings.
• 70% of small business websites lack a call to action (CTA) on their websites. Include a CTA on your pages. If you don’t operate an e-commerce platform, your CTA might collect email addresses for future campaigns.
• Make your website and each page look professional.  A large percentage of small business websites don’t look professional. Since you have about 0.05 seconds to make a good impression on a visitor, an unprofessional website just won’t do the trick. Carefully edit for accuracy, spelling, and grammar before hitting the publish button. Use an excellent template to design your layout if that’s not a particular strength you have. Check out competitors’ websites to find elements you find attractive and professional that you might consider adding to your website.

Content marketing is such an important digital marketing tactic that I have an entire section of this website devoted to it. Use this link to find everything you need to succeed in content marketing.

7. Social media

Organic social media might not perform as it once did, but it’s still a viable option, especially given the targeting possible when using advertising. It’s also great for building engagement that results in wider awareness, loyalty, referrals, recommendations, and other positive outcomes. Just as for other digital marketing tactics, if you want to achieve success, you must consistently post valuable content on the platforms where your target marketing lives online. Below is a graphic to help you decide which platforms might work best for you.

Choose several platforms that match your target market and goals, but only choose as many as you can handle. Each platform requires at least one post/ day, with some, like X (formerly Twitter), requiring multiple posts per day. Each platform has its own norms, so stick to what users expect to see on the platform. For instance, TikTok requires short videos, while YouTube commonly features longer videos, including explainer videos.

Marketing automation can really help when you want to post consistently. By allowing you to schedule posts well in advance, you can use your time more efficiently. Schedule an entire month’s worth of posts in one session so you don’t constantly stop what you’re doing to log in and create a post to share.

8. Email marketing

Email marketing has the highest ROI of all other digital marketing tactics, with an average of 3600%. However, it is a two-pronged strategy that requires a brand to develop a subscriber list first. Most developed nations now impose heavy fines on brands that send unsolicited email messages. Once you have a subscriber list, you can send email messages.

Make it easy for visitors to subscribe by offering subscription forms on your website and using QR codes on printed marketing materials. Don’t ask for more information than required, as you decrease your success rate for each additional piece of information needed to subscribe. You might offer some incentive to encourage visitors to subscribe, and it’s okay to add customers and attendees at events to your subscriber list.

Your next challenge is sending messages that get opened. To increase open rates, personalize the message beyond simply including the subscriber’s name. For instance, if they attended a webinar, you might mention that topic in your email, especially in the subject line. Also, carefully monitor open rates and requests to unsubscribe to ensure you don’t send messages too frequently.

9. Mobile marketing

Mobile advertising and marketing are great digital marketing tactics, especially since users have their phones with them at all times. For some consumers, especially younger ones, their mobile device is the first thing they look at each day and the last thing they look at before they fall asleep. With the explosion of smartphones, mobile marketing has become more versatile, including SMS texts, which you can now schedule through various marketing automation and email marketing platforms.

Remember that between 50 and 60% of email messages are opened on a mobile device. That means your email messages must fit on those smaller screens. Also, since many email platforms won’t display images unless the user allows them, include the meat of your message in text formats.

10. Video marketing

Video marketing is another powerful marketing tactic. The benefits include [source]:

• Improved SEO
• Better engagement
• Higher conversion rates
• Enhanced credibility and trust
• Improved traffic
• Higher rates of sharing
• It’s cost-effective

Of course, creating videos takes more time, equipment, and effort than many other marketing tactics. However, the payoff is tremendous. To aid in the task, several platforms are currently experimenting with using AI to create video from text. Existing platforms, such as Canva and Adobe Express, make it easy to craft a video using templates, images, and music. TikTok offers creators an easy platform to use a mobile device to record, edit, and publish video.

Conclusion

In summary, digital marketing is an essential component of business growth strategies in the modern marketplace. It enhances visibility and customer engagement, provides valuable insights, allows for targeted advertising, and facilitates direct sales through e-commerce channels. Digital marketing’s flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness make it a powerful tool for businesses looking to grow and succeed in the digital age.

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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.