Your marketing plan should be considered like a road map.
A digital marketing strategy for 2024 is essential for all businesses of all sizes. Marketing, and especially digital marketing is constantly evolving. Therefore, you need to to have a marketing plan in place for 2024. This will help you adopt the most relevant strategies for your business.
With a robust marketing plan in place at the end of what has been a rubbish year for most business for the dawn of the new year. You will be in a better position to allocate your time, money and other resources. By having this it will help you prepare to take steps for business promotions and growth. Because you will also be able to make your company stand out from your competitors.
This is the second part of a 3-part series of articles looking at how to develop a robust and deliverable digital marketing strategy for 2024.
Check out 5 more of the best ways to update your marketing strategy in the list below.
To offend or not to offend, that is the question.
- Disruptive & controversial Marketing
There are two types of market disruption
- New-Market Disruption— targets customers who have needs that have been unserved by existing companies. Apple’s iTunes application is one such example.
- Low-End Disruption— targets consumers who don’t need all the features valued by customers at the high end of the market.
Its key to use disruptive marketing techniques by keeping mobile as the dominant platform first. There should be more transparency in business-customer relationship. You should set a standard with the help of engaging content, more so the user-generated content, as well as by building social networking as an ecosystem to rival the original internet.
Controversy in marketing can be an effective way of getting noticed, which is why some brands purposely look for ways to create a splash. They recognize that if you want to stand out, you can’t always play it safe. … If you can nail it, a controversial campaign can propel your brand faster than nearly anything else.
What is Controversial Marketing? Controversial marketing is also known as shock advertising. This basically means that the brand deliberately offends or takes its audience by surprise by violating the norms of social values, personal values, and morals.
Ensuring your local reach is set up is more important than ever.
2. List Your Business in Local Business Directories
2023 has continued to see a massive increase in online search. The general trend had been increasing but now, if you haven’t done already is the time to get your business online. Traditional products are now, being used less (but not completely phased out). And seemingly people prefer to conduct a quick search on one of the many popular search engines or online directories. Given that Internet search has become the primary tool to find businesses today, it has become important to list your business on all applicable online directories.
The good news is that the majority of them are FREE to list. The downside is finding the time to get a listing created and keeping it up to date.
The other advantage is that these listings create a “backlink” to your website, which sear engines like Google see as a good thing and accordingly improves your rank with them. The more genuine backlinks you have the better.
There is some clever software and products out there that can help you with this and this all links into improving your local SEO profile and rank.
Essential elements in customers decision making are reviews.
3. Ask for reviews
It is now abundantly clear that reviews are a key factor for Google. All the promotion and noise coming from Google HQ is pointing towards reviews for local businesses.
There are many platforms that you can use for reviews including specialist sites like Trust Pilot & FEEFO and there also some industry specific ones. Google has its own review section on the Google My business profile, Facebook has the functionality and sites like Yell.com also have key review functionality that is indexed by search engines, these are all FREE to use.
Consumers are increasingly reading and trusting online reviews. As many as 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendations and this number is increasing all the time.
To make your digital presence a success, reviews are a key ingredient. By not requesting user reviews or by ignoring them as a potential marketing opportunity, you are missing out on a key conversion metric. Reviews are a key part of the buying process – whether its online or offline!
Websites are like cars. Get an MOT and get it optimised.
4. Optimise Your Website
When people upgrade their site or have a new one built, the perception for many is that it is the silver bullet for their business. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this is just not the case.
A website is nothing without traffic! There are three ways of generating traffic; Social, organic and Paid.
The best traffic is organic, people who find their way to your site naturally through search engines or through referrals/word of mouth. Optimising your website can help you achieve this.
If you have a grasp of the technical elements of your website. Elements like, having meta descriptions on each page with keywords and phrases can be added. Alt tags on images supporting the content on the site. Ensuring all the internal and external links go to a proper web page.
These three elements are key and if you manage your site yourself – these are the key three things to check and fix.
If that last section was not you then speak to your web developer or speak to someone like Bluespace Media and how we can help
The last major Google algorithm change was specifically for the benefit of those websites that are mobile friendly. Effectively meaning anyone without a mobile optimised site will fall down the Google page.
5. Competitor research
A key element to your digital marketing strategy for 2024. Is understanding what your competitors are doing. An amazing number of businesses operate without any idea or concept that there are others doing what they do. Understanding the playing field is an essential part of having a successful marketing strategy.
Analysis of your competitors helps discover weaknesses and identify opportunities and threats for the organization from the industrial environment. Effectively creating a SWOT analysis of not only them but also your own business.
Look at what they are doing, where are they successful? Where are they not promoting themselves. All of these things can have a major positive impact on decisions you make around marketing and promotion for you, your business, products and services.
When putting together a strategy or a plan, business owners and key decision-makers should consider the strategies of the company’s competitors. A competitor analysis helps an organisation in measuring where it stands amongst its competitors.
But I don’t have competitors, my product or service is unique. There are always competitors, there are few in any monopolies on any product or service. Yes you might have unique selling points, or be the first or one of the first, to market with an idea so it is very new. However, both will have competition from elements somewhere. Ultimately be critical of your product/service and look for competition to it no matter how vague it might seem, it might just provide an answer.
If you would like more information or understand how Bluespace Media can help you and your business with your digital marketing strategy for 2024 Get in touch via our website
You are also welcome to a FREE copy of our “How to make your small business an online success.” Send an email to hello@oldsite.bluespacemedia.co.uk It is available to buy on Amazon for only £3.99
