Creating Advanced Marketing Strategies for Today’s Digital World
Advertisers now have many channels to choose from when building a marketing strategy. Some may even say there are too many. And with such diversity, it is nearly impossible for a brand to actively communicate with its audience everywhere.
Well, here’s the thing – You don’t even have to use them all.
But how can you choose the channels that will bring you the most conversions and, therefore, revenue? And what should you offer to stay relevant?
The most straightforward answer may be to build an advanced marketing strategy. And if you are wondering how, stick with us and learn how to rock with your marketing strategy.
What Is Advanced Marketing?
In essence, advanced marketing is a more detailed approach to marketing strategies and how you promote your business.
Such an approach is essential to niche businesses that may need to build, for example, a crypto marketing strategy. And that is because every part of the marketing strategy is taken one step further, diving deeper into how to market anything the right way.
This process is usually possible thanks to the surprising evolution of online platforms and marketing tools. Every channel now offers better UX, and advertisers can use newly developed features to personalize their ads, audiences, websites, and more.
Who’s Your Customer? Creating a Buyer Persona
When building a business from scratch, you should never forget that you create things for your customers. Of course, a personal touch will give your product personality, but your focus must be on your clients.
This should also happen when you create an advanced marketing strategy. If the visuals, ads, texts, and CTAs are specially designed for those you want to engage with, your investment will have better returns.
If you are wondering how you can learn whom you are addressing, there is a simple way to find that: create a customer persona.
A customer (or buyer) persona is a painting you create based on qualitative and quantitative data. What you paint is then used to figure out how to promote your brand so that users find it relevant.
And to have an even better idea of what a buyer persona is, let’s talk based on an example.
Let’s say you own an online store that sells VR products. You deliver in the US and need a customer persona to know how to build your website, ads, and more.
You can gather information about your customers through tools such as Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, or even social media insights.
This way, you discover that your visitors are primarily men working in the tech, finance, and media industries.
After checking detailed insights about your website’s visitors, you can quickly figure out your most common users are:
- Male;
- Between 25 and 34 years;
- Living in the US;
- Working in the tech, finance, and media sectors;
- Interested in VR, tech products, and video games.
You can find even more by analyzing only your customers instead of all users.
After creating a customer persona, you can personalize your content, especially for those interested in your products. Furthermore, you will be able to use your budget wisely.
Focus on the User Experience (UX)
If you are looking for a quick definition, you can think of UX as the whole experience users have with your brand.
UX is vital for both online and offline spaces. So, remember that anything you create, be it a website, an app, or a product, should facilitate the user’s experience.
The first thing you have to achieve by improving your UX is to deliver an A-to-Z journey.
As Peter Morville explained through the UX Honeycomb, to have a good User Experience, the information should have some essential characteristics:
- Useful;
- Usable;
- Valuable;
- Accessible;
- Desirable;
- Credible;
- Findable.
By aiming for these qualities, you will be one step closer to achieving customer satisfaction. And once you meet this goal, your sales will improve.
Also, from a user’s point of view, a website or an app should be as simple as possible. Don’t reinvent the wheel when there’s no need. Stick to simplicity and deliver a user-friendly product.
Increase User Sentiment
Being successful implies achieving customer satisfaction. And increasing the user sentiment will make it even better.
If you’re trying to understand user sentiment, you can imagine someone in the supermarket’s bread aisle. You may think they will choose their bread based on the expiration date or nutritional facts.
Nonetheless, they will also include their feelings in selecting the right product. As much as we try to use logical ways of choosing something, we will also be driven by emotions.
The user sentiment gives you more information regarding the experience customers have with your brand. Generally, advanced marketing strategies emphasize customers’ satisfaction. And that’s because a positive opinion about your brand will come with superior customer lifetime value.
While trying to stir a positive user sentiment, you can conduct surveys, try to get reviews from your clients, and even get ratings on their orders. It also helps to look at your customers’ live chats and calls. That way, you can find potential issues you should consider when working on improvements to your website, products, and the overall user experience.
Marketing Personalization
Marketing personalization involves using specific data to deliver personalized messages. Basically, instead of sending mass marketing messages, you craft your offer to a specific segment of your audience.
Advanced marketing techniques often underline personalization within strategies as it increases customers’ action, getting a higher ROI. Moreover, Medallia’s research shows that 61% of consumers are willing to spend more with companies if they offer a customized experience.
When it comes to personalized marketing, most businesses stick to mentioning the first name in an e-mail/message, but there is much more to explore regarding this not-so-hidden treasure.
Another way to deliver personalized marketing may be sending custom offers for products users might have left in the shopping cart, as well as an offer for products that need refills, spare parts, or replacement at specific time frames.
Get Your SEO Together, Especially Local SEO
When trying to improve your advanced marketing strategy, SEO is one of the most important things you should focus on. And if you are questioning SEO’s efficiency, just think it can reduce customer acquisition costs by almost 90%.
By optimizing for search engines, your website will be more likely to rank higher when someone is looking for related subjects.
Getting from bad to good SEO requires focusing on some basic things a user expects to find when searching for something online. And to see it clearer, let’s go through some tips based on a good vs. bad example.
You look for gifts and find a website with a weirdly looking link (thehouseofgiftsandotherstuff.com). When accessing it, the word “Gifts” is displayed all over the place. The category bar is not so suggestive, and many products are named the same but don’t look alike (e.g., 5 different products called “Gift for him”). Even worse, there is no additional information as the items do not have a description.
This is a bad example of SEO, and here is why:
1. Keywords are overused
Using keywords is good, but stuffing your website with too many can be a disadvantage. Use specific keywords to reach people who are likely to buy from you.
Moreover, don’t abuse this process. Using too many keywords will not rank you higher; however, it will make your content redundant, and users will not come back looking for you.
2. The titles are not unique
Using the same name for various items will confuse crawlers, resulting in Google marking your pages as duplicate content. For instance, if you have 5 different products for men, but they all are named “Gift for him,” Google will think those 5 product pages are duplicated. More importantly, it offers a less positive user experience and can affect your sales.
3. The product descriptions are missing
Not displaying product descriptions has a negative impact on both users and search engines.
First off, users won’t be able to find the information they require, so they’ll be forced to look for it elsewhere. Secondly, crawlers won’t have enough content to scan through, so they might not understand what your page is about, which will affect your rankings.
Moving forward from the not-so-helpful website, you find an online shop called simplygifts.com. The title and meta description are intriguing yet simple, and they let you know you can find unique gifts on their website. Looking for a women’s gift, you go to the “Gift for her” category. There you find the “Nude Eyeshadow Palette”; you access the product page, read more about it and see qualitative and detailed photos of the item.
We can agree that this is a good example of SEO optimization. Let’s see why:
1. The product pages are optimized
When opening a product page, everything must be suggestive. This way, the user has a positive experience with your site. Having a good title, an evocative description, suitable product tags, and a suggestive URL can help a customer quickly decide whether to buy the product.
2. The products have unique titles
If you display a unique name for each of your items, it can prevent search engines from considering some of your pages duplicate content. Furthermore, it is easier for a user to find what they are looking for;
3. The URLs are suggestive
URLs such as https://adtech.org/ad-network-vs-ad-exchange-vs-dsp/ are also named “keyword-friendly URLs,” and they are important when working on SEO. Firstly, they bring relevance to a search. Secondly, they offer a quick prediction of what a user is going to find when clicking on that link.
Last but not least, never forget about local SEO. Depending on the business you are running, you may want to target users from a specific location. So, why not make them notice you?
Try to make your brand easy to find through Google My Business. As a local brand, it is important to provide people around you with relevant information that can help them get to your brand.
Always be focused on getting as many 5-star reviews as possible and don’t forget to reply to your reviews, as it increases the user sentiment even more.
Automate Marketing Processes
Automating your marketing processes is a total time-saver. It gives you and your team much more time to focus on other goals you want to achieve. Moreso, 91% of marketers say marketing automation helps them achieve their objectives, says Exploding Topics.
Basically, when we say marketing automation, we refer to the use of software products that automate repetitive processes. It is important to mention that automating marketing actions does not deliver faded content to users; instead, it helps personalize the information.
Moreover, it helps companies focus on other complex strategies to improve the marketing activity of their brand.
Recently, marketing automation has become increasingly popular because of its significant benefits. To easily understand how marketing automation can help your brand, let’s take a simple example.
Imagine that you own a software development company and are trying to grow your customer base. In this case, marketing automation can do a lot of things for you.
First off, you should automate social media targeting. This way, when one interacts with an ad, they will be immediately added to the remarketing list. Afterward, you will have the possibility to retarget them on more topics, such as a promotion you have or a new product you just launched, all through an automated process.
Depending on what you want to automate, you can find many platforms and tools to help you. Some of the most known are Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, and HubSpot.
Analyze. Test. Repeat.
The next step after creating your advanced marketing strategy is to find out if it is working well or if you can improve it.
Check the Insights
First of all, try to analyze the insights of your efforts. Depending on what channels you used and what you included in your strategy, you can work with specific platforms to see how your brand is performing online.
For example, if you want to see how your website is performing, you can use Google Analytics. There, you can find more details about your users, their time spent on the website and particular pages, and even the things that attracted them the most.
If you want to use other analytics tools, you can try Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel, or Microsoft Clarity. The last one is entirely free!
Use Heatmaps
If you want to have a general view of how much time users spend on particular pages and which are the sections they frequently visit, you can try to implement a heatmap.
Heatmaps show you an overview of users’ website activity, based on a color code. Thus, where there is blue, there are not so many visitors; on the other hand, where you see red areas, it means that those are the most visited places on your website.
Moreso, you can use a scroll heatmap for seeing how many visitors go all the way to the bottom of your page, or a move heatmap, to see your users’ whole journey through your website.
Analyze the Customer Engagement
Another thing you should consider when analyzing your advanced marketing strategy is customer engagement. Customer engagement refers to the constant improvement of a brand’s relationship with its customers. It helps a company increase their clients’ loyalty, thus also increasing sales.
The metrics you can track include conversion rate, average session duration, customer lifetime value, and churn rate. Each metric offers valuable insights that can be used to increase user sentiment and customer engagement.
Try to analyze metrics from all the platforms you are using in your strategy. This way, you will know which channels are working best for your goal.
Consider Page Performance
Your website’s performance is vital for keeping user sentiment on the sunny side of the street. Thus, you can try to keep the page performance high and the bounce rate low. Page performance is all about the time spent while loading a website page. It depends on things such as the page weight, browser caching, or HTTP requests and is a considerable part of the whole user experience.
To measure your website’s performance, you can analyze metrics such as page load time, DNS Lookup Time (how much it takes for the Domain Name System to transform the domain name into the right IP), or Time to Title (the time it takes for the title of the website to appear in the browser tab).
There are tools that can help you check the website’s performance. Some of them are WebPageTest, Page Speed Insights, Website Grader, and GTmetrix.
Moreover, there are user-based metrics you can follow to measure a page’s performance, some of them being bounce rate, session duration, or conversion rate. If you are looking for some tools to help you in monitoring your website’s performance, you can try Uptrends, Pingdom, or Site24×7.
Test Your Strategy
You will never know if the strategy you have now is the best for your brand, as long as you don’t test other ideas. In the beginning, you can try to use different strategies simultaneously. This way, you can figure out which had higher engagement, and you can keep that active, while constantly improving it.
A good option is to A/B test. A/B testing is a method in which a brand uses two different strategies or makes slight changes to a product/website/app to see which version performs better.
According to Adoric, 77% of businesses run A/B tests on their websites. Through A/B testing, a business can improve the user experience and learn more about customers’ behavior.
Final Thoughts
Building advanced marketing strategies helps you stay creative and increase your conversion rate. Moreover, it’s easier for you to constantly keep the standards high.
Keep in mind that you are fighting for your customer’s satisfaction. Always think from their point of view and try to improve their experience with your brand and products.
Think big, but also local. Engage with people around you and try to make them feel that no brand is better than yours.
Make every customer feel special. Always know their needs and wishes; it’s the easiest way to make them loyal.
Don’t forget to test, use analytics and make the best out of your insights. Improvement is the key.