Essential Tips to Improve Your Digital Marketing Plan

Choosing your marketing strategy online is one of the most vital elements in exposing your brand, product or even service to your target market. In fact, according to Nielsen’s, “member communities” are now used by more than 67 percent of the global online population.

In today’s booming social network environment, it is necessary for businesses to be more resourceful with their time, and even more effective with what and whom they connect with. There are two specific types of “social networkers” online, the posters and the seekers. It is mandatory for your business, the poster, to post information, resources, tips and offers on a daily basis for your customers, the seekers.

Sounds pretty simple, right?

This process actually requires you to check your current site and campaign performance, to do competitive research and to test assumptions about your audience demographics by confirming their media, property, channel, device and other consumption preferences through research tools.

Using these 4 Effective Tips to develop your business’ online marketing plan can improve your digital strategy and expose your business to a larger portion of your target market.

Connect your business with multiple FREE Online Communities

Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Xing are massive online communities filled with potential markets. To get started, set up your profile and become more familiar with the different social networks’ offerings.

Social networking isn’t the only way to build relationships, but it can expose you to additional markets, followers and fans through blogs. Interactions on message boards and blogs are as influential as social networking sites. It is very important to not only join and monitor within these groups and discussion areas, but to also engage in conversations as well. Knowing how to respond or comment your seekers, writing engaging content onto your social media sites and finding the time to do this daily is often the most challenging part of social networking. Interacting with your followers can help you gather all of the pros and cons of your products or services, influence more viewers to become new customers and collect endless amounts of information describing your market.

Helpful Marketing Tools:

• Technorati
• Google’s Blog Search
• Blog Search Engine
• Sites focused on helping people find great blogs and content specific to their industry or topic.

Locate your High-Level Networkers before pinpointing the target market

Many community projects aim to target broad groups, however, that is not the most effective way to approach the influencers. Your business should concentrate its efforts on a specific market at the expense of others. High-Level Networkers (HLN) are the influencers of your community and as such, they need extra time and attention. They are the most active seekers online, with at least five hundred connections and a completely filled profile. According to the Pareto Principle (The 80-20 Rule), building positive relationships within the smaller groups will improve your brand awareness among the chosen market and increase overall sales within your business.

Your business will have to identify influencers through popularity and expertise by locating higher levels of reach and credibility. By asking yourself the following questions, create a list of exactly who you want to reach.

• Are they male or female?
• What generations do they belong to?
• Where do they live?
• What do they do for a living?
• What do they all have in common?
• What or who impresses them?
• Who are they trying to impress?
• What are their biggest concerns?

Knowing where your influencers are in terms of your brand is also an essential factor in targeting your HLN. Once you have completed your list, you will be ready to engage and increase their involvement with your business.

Helpful Marketing Tools:

Klout
Allows you to find influencers based on topic or hashtag.

Measured by:

• Klout Score: The measurement of your overall online influence.
• True Reach: The size of your engaged audience.
• Amplification Probability: The likelihood that your content will be acted upon.
• Network Influence: The influence level of your engaged audience.

Proceed towards researching your Target Market Connections

Once you have finished examining your smaller group of influencers, you are ready to broaden your search. Target Market Connections (TMC) are a larger group of seekers who are represented as your company’s consumers or clients. They can be found by using keywords that characterize your selected group in social network search sections or the previously stated blog search engine websites. As you connect with your target market, make sure to clarify that the invitation was sent because of similar interests and your expansion of your professional network.

A similar way to find potential TMC is to investigate your competitor’s marketing methods. Check out their social networks, blogs, websites or any other channel of media they use to connect with their markets. Check how broad their online community is with all their clients who follow and communicate with them. This can allow you to not only level with your opponents, but also move ahead of your industry and attract more clients. But always remember NEVER to try to target EVERYONE, or else your marketing strategies will dilute and have no effect on your market.

Helpful Marketing Tools:

Cotweet and Tap11
Comprehensive, web-based social media engagements, managements and reporting solutions. Helps companies of all sizes engage, track and analyze conversations about their brands across the most popular and influential social communities today: Twitter and Facebook.

Hootsuite, Postup and Flowtown
Helps you save your time and sanity by managing multiple social networks through one client. Contains improved visualizations, link statistics and graphs to show not only a summary, but also individual message statistics.

Start using Search Engine Optimizations

A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) improves your company’s visibility by moving your website to the top of the results page on search engines. It is necessary for your company to focus on your broader market when brainstorming on the most effective, frequent keywords used.

• Upgrade your Domain Name and Titles to use more important keywords and key search terms.
• Replace your ‘Old-Fashion Corporate Slogan’ with a more keyword driven one.
• When designing your website, use key terms as your picture and page file names.
• Ask other sites that link back to your company to use related text as anchors to your website.

Helpful Marketing Tools:

Attracta
A SEO plugin that allows you to gain access to a wide array of tools to get your business found naturally online. Through HostDime’s partnership with Attracta, we are able to provide you and your clients a free trial of their software which includes one XML site map submission to all the major search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo!).

Google’s Traffic Estimator
Determines the most popular words and phrases customers use to search for your key products or services.

Share your knowledge

Are there any tips or tricks that you’ve learned and would like to share with others? Post them in the comments!