After a chaotic 2020, businesses and organizations are wondering what may be in store for them in the coming year. Whatever 2021 may bring, it’s certain that digital marketing is going to play a crucial role. When many people are working at home, travel is restricted and live events must be reinvented as virtual events, you need to be more adaptable than ever before. In this guide, we’ll look at how creative brands and nonprofits can prepare for 2021.
A Review of the Current Situation
The events of 2020 have disrupted just about every aspect of life. The pandemic and its effects have certainly had an impact on how businesses and nonprofits operate.
These factors are combining to create an increasingly challenging and competitive environment, which is making digital marketing ever more critical.
Why Digital Marketing is Vital
The rise of digital marketing, like remote work, certainly didn’t begin in 2020. However, when the internet is often the only way to reach your audience, it becomes more important than ever. Several factors set digital marketing apart.
Cost-Effective
One of the main advantages of digital marketing is that it provides better value than traditional types of marketing. This is mainly because you can reach a large audience using techniques such as email marketing, social media, and PPC advertising. Many digital marketing tactics are very cheap to implement. Even paid digital ads are often more cost-effective than traditional paid advertising due to better targeting options, which brings us to the next point.
Easier to Reach Your Audience
The ability to reach a large and targeted audience is probably the single most impressive benefit of digital marketing. With pay-per-click ads, for example, you target specific keywords that your audience is searching for. On social media sites, you can target people by profession, gender, age, interests, and other criteria. The contrast between traditional and digital marketing overlaps with another distinction,. Traditional outbound marketing such as TV commercials, print ads, cold calling, and direct mail is expensive and not well targeted. Inbound marketing, on the other hand, focuses on providing people with helpful information that motivates them to contact you.
Digital marketing makes it easy to track your results. You can use free tools such as Google Analytics to track metrics such as traffic, conversions, time spent on web pages, and much more. Social media sites all have their own tracking tools such as Facebook Analytics and Twitter Analytics. Email marketing services such as MailChimp and AWeber have their own built-in analytics as well.
One of the most valuable types of testing you can do on digital platforms is the split or A/B test, where you can test specific variables such as your headline, image, or call-to-action. This type of testing lets you tweak your approach for better results. Tracking results with traditional advertising is much slower and more complicated, making it harder to see what is and isn’t working.
An Overview of the Top Digital Marketing Strategies
Let’s look at the most effective digital marketing strategies that will continue to be relevant in 2021.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is essential for many reasons. It builds brand recognition. It lets you establish yourself as an authority in your niche or industry. It’s a cost-effective way to get leads. There are many ways to leverage the power of content marketing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is closely related to content marketing as it’s your content that you’re trying to rank. SEO is a rapidly changing field, largely based on Google’s latest policies and algorithms. Here are some points that are especially important right now.
Social Media Marketing
remains one of the best ways to connect with your customers, supporters, or donors. Choose the platforms where your audience is most active. You can combine organic content with paid advertising. Don’t overlook some newer and more popular features on sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Stories are a good way to engage people with timely content. Live-streaming on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube is also good if you want to connect with your audience in real-time.
SEM and Paid Advertising
Search engine marketing (SEM) can be a solid investment if you’re looking for a way to get targeted traffic quickly. Paid ads are an effective way for businesses to generate leads. They also work for nonprofits that want to attract new members and donors. An ad can also publicize an upcoming event such as a fundraiser. You can consider many types of advertising. Here are some guidelines to keep in mind.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest types of online marketing yet still very relevant. Demand Metric found that, which is quite a bit higher than other promotional tactics such as PPC and social media. The great advantage of an email list is that it provides you with a way to stay in touch with your subscribers without having to advertise. Of course, you do need to promote to build your list.
An engaging newsletter is one of the most powerful tools for a nonprofit or creative brand. You can make it look professional and consistent with your branding by using templates and interesting images. What’s even more important is to deliver compelling content. This gets back to the importance of storytelling. Your emails are also useful for sending traffic to your website and social media pages.
2020 was the year when many live events were either canceled or re-imagined as virtual events. It looks like this trend will continue well into 2021. Fortunately, there are some key advantages to virtual events. They are cheaper to organize. They let you reach a wider audience as geography is no barrier.
Digital Marketing Traps to Avoid
There are certain pitfalls to avoid with digital marketing. These mistakes can cost you money and convey the wrong messages to your audience.
Marketing without a Strategy
You need a strategy for your marketing campaigns. This includes clear goals for your actions. For example, before you advertise, create content, or post on social media, you should identify your objective. This may be to drive traffic to a certain landing page, build brand awareness, and get people to sign up for your newsletter, or attend your event. Without a strategy, you have no focus and there’s no way to measure your results.
Lack of Expertise
It’s important to be familiar with the tools and platforms you’re using. If you’re just starting in a certain type of marketing, take the time to research your strategy. If you’re posting on a certain social media platform, make sure you know what the audience expects. For example, users on Instagram tend to be younger, visually-oriented, and prefer entertaining content whereas LinkedIn is a platform for B2B marketing where users expect more data and a business-oriented approach.
Not Measuring Your Results
We already mentioned that one of the benefits of digital marketing is that you have many ways to measure your results. If you don’t track your results, you won’t know what’s working and what you need to improve. It’s important to track as many metrics as possible for each campaign.
Roles and Responsibilities
To execute successful marketing campaigns, you need to allocate tasks and responsibilities so that everyone knows their role. In most organizations, you’ll assign tasks to a variety of individuals and departments based on their experience and expertise. This includes areas such as:
Depending on the size of your organization, you may have separate departments for one or more of the above. In some cases, tasks may overlap. People handling different tasks must stay in touch. If one person is creating the email newsletter, they should be informed about upcoming events to write about. The same goes for anyone creating blogs, videos, or social media posts.
Getting Started: Planning and Execution
Here are the steps you need to get started with your marketing campaigns.
Outline Your Goals
As we mentioned, you need a strategy for every marketing action. Create an outline of short, medium, and long-term goals. Create goals for each type of marketing. For example, you may be using blogging for SEO and traffic, social media for brand awareness and paid advertising to build your email list.
Determine Your Budget
You need to allocate funds for different areas of your marketing campaigns. This may include outsourcing costs for building a website, advertising, purchasing software or services, and any other expenses.
Establish a Baseline
When measuring your results, it helps to have a baseline so you know what to expect. If you fail to meet baseline numbers, test different elements to identify the reason. As you refine your methods, you can increase your baselines such as website traffic, subscribers, donations, and other important metrics.
There are several steps involved in executing your campaign.
These steps must be repeated as you create campaigns, measure, and adjust. Your digital marketing is never a finished product as you constantly have to test and refine while responding to new conditions.
Get Help with Your Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a rapidly evolving and multifaceted process that requires lots of planning and research. It can be challenging to start, measure, manage and adjust your marketing campaigns when you have so many other tasks on your plate. When so much is going on in the world and you have to keep up and adjust to the latest developments, it’s even more difficult. You may want to consider getting help from a marketing agency with experience in these areas. ArcStone provides WordPress web design, SEO, SEM, storytelling, and more for nonprofit organizations and thoughtful brands. To learn more about our services or to schedule a meeting,
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