Creating Advanced Marketing Strategies for Today’s Digital World

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 regarding online platforms, it is nearly impossible for a brand to communicate on all of them actively.  

Thus, how can you choose the online channels that will bring you the most customers? And what should a brand post in the online space to stay relevant and successful?   

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 someone promotes their 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 regular step of the marketing strategy is taken one step further by researching even more and personalizing the content to acquire customers easier than before.   

This process is usually possible thanks to the surprising evolution of online platforms and marketing tools. Every channel used for marketing has evolved to offer a better UX, and advertisers can use newly developed features to personalize their ads, audiences, websites, and many more.    

Thus, advanced marketing helps marketers get better results without pumping more money into their strategies. Instead, they can optimize some steps of their strategy and build an even stronger battle plan to engage with customers. 

Who’s Your Customer? Creating a Buyer Persona 

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 the people you want to engage with, your investment will bring 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. Just as you have to be careful of the colors used in a painting, you should also pay attention to the data you are working with when building your customer persona.    

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 many more.  

You can gather information regarding your customers through tools such as Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, or even social media insights.   

When you check who your visitors are, you learn that those looking for your site 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 target more interested users and 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 a user has with your brand, website, social media accounts, and more.    

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 for all your online users.   

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 to have 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 is no need to. Stick to simplicity and deliver a user-friendly product.    

Nowadays, many websites implement user interface design trends, which is why you may feel that most websites look the same. It’s not about the lack of creativity – users expect to find certain functionalities in specific screen areas.    

Increase User Sentiment   

As you probably figured out, 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 the satisfaction a customer has when buying. 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 may also 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 out if there are any other issues you should consider when working on improvements to your website, products, and the overall user experience. 

Marketing Personalization   

Marketing Personalization

Marketing personalization involves using specific data to deliver personalized messages to a particular visitor. 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, Epsilon’s research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to choose a brand providing personalized experiences.  

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 of delivering 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.   

Looking for an online gift shop, you find a website with a weirdly looking link named thehouseofgiftsandotherstuff.com. When accessing it, the word “Gifts” is displayed all over the place. Navigating through the category bar, you cannot find what you want because the categories are not so suggestive. Furthermore, 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. This way, it will be significantly harder for visitors to find all 5 items.   

More importantly, it offers a less positive user experience and can affect your sales. Instead, try to name each product differently and add a small characteristic to the title. For example, if you have a bowtie, a tie, and a pair of cufflinks, name them “Satin Bowtie”, “Black Tie”, and “Silver Cufflinks”. This way, each of them has a different title that talks about what that gift represents and what special features it has, and users will learn all of this by just looking at the product’s title.   

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 by making your Google My Business shine. 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. 

Moreover, you can add a location page on your website. Over there, you should display your address and phone number, and even embed a map that shows the way to your location. And one more time, make your website mobile-friendly; according to Statista, in 2021, 55.22% of all global website traffic was generated by mobile devices (excluding tablets).  

Automate Marketing Processes  

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, 63% of the companies using marketing automation software outperformed their competitors, says Webinar Care.  

Basically, when we say marketing automation, we refer to the use of some 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 someone is receiving.  

Moreover, it helps companies focus on other complex strategies in order to improve the whole 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 a social media 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. However, if you just want to try a platform and decide afterward, you can look for the cheaper ones, such as Userfox or Customer.io. Good news: the latter also offers a free plan!  

Analyze. Test. Repeat. 

The next step after creating your advanced marketing strategy is to find out if it is working well or if there are some things you should improve.   

Check the insights  

First of all, try to analyze the insights of your actions. Depending on what channels you used and the actions you took in your marketing strategy, you can work with specific platforms to see how your brand is doing regarding its online activity.  

For example, if you want to see how your website is performing, you can use Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides you with all the information you need about your website. 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 point of view regarding how much time users are spending on some particular pages and which are the places 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, in order 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 provides you with important information that can be used in order 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 the 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 slow. 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 great 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 GT Metrix.  

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 Site 24×7.  

The monthly subscriptions vary between 9$ and 15$, and the good thing is that the last one mentioned has a 30–day free trial.  

Test Your Strategy 

Secondly, 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 the more considerable 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 is using two different strategies or is making slight changes to a product/website/app in order 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. This way, they can make the best out of a marketing strategy and get the sales to a whole new level.  

Testing is suitable for both new and old brands. It lets you know where to go from now on for your clients to always stay in touch with you. Even people change so often; thus, it is mandatory that a marketing strategy stays up to date and keeps its original touch.  

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.