If you haven’t carved out a fully-fleshed out digital marketing strategy yet, don’t worry, you’re not exactly behind the curve. But you will be soon. As business is primarily conducted via the Web, or at least with an online presence, your marketing efforts need to expand past traditional methods and include all the ways customers can interact with your brand while online. Encompassing more than just email communications and a website presence, a true digital strategy is designed to move customers through the buying funnel while simultaneously yielding new leads.

To get started, check out the four tips below to consider when developing your digital marketing strategy.

Content Marketing
At its core, content marketing is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Emailing a simple, conversational message with tips and a strong call to action can work wonders for a ready-to-buy customer. But if they are like many, and still learning or in an awareness phase, it’s going to take a strong campaign with real deliverables that considers where they are in the funnel. Tell a story that generates demand rather than expecting a purchase from the first, and only, message. Great content marketing delivers relevant and interesting information but keeps the customer’s interests in a higher focus.

Marketing Automation
Why make things harder on yourself if you can automate it? Marketing automation software simplifies your digital marketing needs and generates results that would take much longer by manual standards. From automated email campaigns (drip and triggered), to website lead scoring, to social media interaction, marketing automation delivers results to you to gather new opportunities and leads.

SEO
While generating great content that your customers want to read is certainly a big part of your digital marketing, you’ve also got to make sure they can find it online. Having a website or content on a blog that isn’t optimized for search engines can bury your site in Google’s secondary search pages. If readers can’t find your site then your traffic will suffer. By optimizing your web pages and content with keywords and linking strategies, you’re site will rank higher. So, make sure your brand and all of your content is optimized properly to match the most-used terms your customers will search for.

Lead Scoring
Now that you have your content optimized for the web, and you’re consistently delivering great information at the right time to the right people, you’ll want to make sure you have a method for measurement. Lead scoring allows you to keep track, often through automated methods, of who engages most with your content. Once a threshold score has been crossed, you can choose to reach out to your “lead through next-level marketing. Be it a phone call or automated message after the reader has opened four emails, lead scoring takes engagement measurement to the next level and transitions a cold lead into a warm one.

Closing
Considering the above elements when crafting your digital marketing strategy will create a customer-centric focus as well as ease many of your processes. Remember, digital marketing should be part of your overall marketing strategy and deserves as many resources, staff and time as possible. If done properly you’ll know more about your customers, when and what they are buying, and how best to market to them.

Jennifer Clark is a Content Strategist at ScanSource.

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