It’s no secret that 2020 was a year of uncertainty in terms of not only health and safety, but also the economic environment. That insecurity has impacted marketing efforts as we move through 2021. In fact, nearly half of all marketers participating in Highspot’s Marketing Challenges Survey said they have difficulty determining the best strategies for engaging potential clients and customers. Even more said COVID19 made it difficult to effectively engage prospects, and the pandemic also hindered their efforts in driving urgency and creating awareness.
The changed marketing atmosphere, therefore, has revealed challenges and opportunities as the world begins to move on from more than a year marked by tension, anxiety and trauma. First and foremost, brands must create small business marketing strategies that work and ensure their entire team is on board.
Check out the following tips on devising and implementing an engaging digital marketing plan in 2021, and the seven examples of good marketing strategies in the current digital marketing landscape.
Creating marketing strategies
Changing economic conditions might have created plenty of challenges for marketers, but it also revealed new opportunities for engaging customers in unique and novel ways. Of course, even the most effective marketing strategies are not a one-size-fits-all solution, so the first step in developing an engaging marketing strategy is identifying the target audience.
Just who is the target customer? What market segment is most likely to find value in your product or service? What is important to the target customers, and how does the product or service benefit them? Through what medium is your target customer most engaged?
By answering these questions, you can choose a marketing strategy that best engages the correct audience. Remember, just because a strategy is your favorite doesn’t always mean it’s the best option for engaging your customer.
“Don’t push people to where you want to be,” former HubSpot VP of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson said. “Meet them where they are.”
7 Effective marketing strategies
The following seven digital marketing strategies can boost your customer engagement and stand out among a sea of lookalike messages.
1. Educational content
Content is still king in 2021, but just any old content isn’t going to cut it with today’s savvy content consumer. Your target audience expects to find value in the media they consume, and educational content perfectly fits that bill. Whether it’s a how-to video, an informational blog, original research or educational quizzes, your customer will appreciate the relevant educational content as it boosts your brand’s authority, trust and credibility.
2. Personalized Messages
How do you reach your target customers when it’s almost guaranteed they are already overwhelmingly inundated with digital marketing messages? By personalizing your marketing messages, target customers take notice of your message. Send a message that makes the customer feel special and you’re in!
One effective method of personalizing messages for individual customers is behavioral segmentation. Through this strategy, audience members are separated into groups based on behaviors or actions, such as first-time purchases, repeat purchases and abandoned carts. The ad displayed or the email sent to the customer can reflect these statuses.
3. Engaging Video
Video has remained a popular digital marketing strategy for the past few years, and 2021 is no exception. The visual storytelling elements of video marketing reach customers on a deeper level than most still images, and their messages are more convincing.
But while customers of just a couple of years back were satisfactorily impressed with most any type of educational or entertaining video content, live streaming is well on its way to domination. At the same time, Google’s search algorithm appears to favor websites with informational video content.
4. Local Search
Digital marketers have been optimizing websites for search since before Google even existed. Generic SEO won’t cut it anymore, however. Today’s most successful digital marketers know the true power can be found in local search.
What does the average consumer do when they need to find a local business? They don’t use the phone book anymore, and they don’t look at the endless listings from the entire World Wide Web. Instead, they ask Google to show them businesses nearby or in a particular area.
These customers typically have a high purchase intent by the time they are looking for a local provider, and the results are automatically catered to customers within the geographical target. By claiming and optimizing their own Google My Business page, businesses can assure their listing falls within rich search results that include a map or a featured listing.
5. Social Media
Through social media marketing, companies with good marketing strategies can focus efforts on targeted audiences by filtering entire user databases within Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more.
The key to sending out viral content is offering material that the target customers find valuable and want to share, thereby boosting both traffic and visibility. Social media signals can also help to boost general SEO efforts, although to precisely what extent remains a mystery. In fact, 76 percent of American consumers now purchase products after seeing a brand’s social posts, so no small business wants to be left behind.
6. Online Chat
Conversational marketing is exactly what its name implies: marketing that occurs through a conversation. That real-time customer interaction can be conducted by chatbots or live chat representatives, providing customers with the exact information they need precisely when they need it. Providing instant answers can boost conversion rates since it promotes an immediate purchase as customers need not exit the site to find the information they seek.
7. Niche Influencers
What better way to shine a positive light on your brand than to leverage another personal brand already popular among your target audience? Influencer marketing has taken the business world by storm in recent years, but the key to success is finding the right influencers. In fact, it’s not always the influencers with the biggest followings that create the biggest success stories.
A moderately popular influencer with fewer than 100,000 followers who happens to fall within your product or brand’s precise niche not only can be effective at sharing your message to the perfect customer audience, but you can make a stellar impression on new customers by partnering with the influencer’s brand to provide a discount or free gift with purchase.
Communicating marketing strategies
Once you’ve developed an effective and engaging digital marketing strategy, you still have to communicate the plan to your team if it’s going to work. It’s important that your entire team end up on the same page, so keep your message simple, clear and concise, leaving little-to-no room for misinterpretation.
An engaging visual presentation allows you to break the information down into multiple topics and provides each with engaging visual storytelling elements, informative infographics and video content that leaves a solid impression on target customers.
You don’t even have to be a skilled presentation designer to create effective and engaging slide decks that communicate your marketing strategies. Beautiful.ai’s free PowerPoint-alternative presentation software features curated presentation templates with slides selected by our talented designers. There are presentation templates for practically any business and marketing purpose, including templates for marketing campaigns and plans, social media strategy, SEO reports, advertising presentations, content marketing and even influencer proposals.
