According to Hostinger, digital marketing can reach around $1.3 trillion by 2033. This means digital marketing strategies have spread across industries and in every corner of the world. 

Digital marketing is vast. So is its scope.

All these facts together indicate the overwhelming buzz in the business world. This buzz can easily confuse entrepreneurs trying to come up with a plan for growing their businesses online. 

But you’re not the only one struggling here. As a provider of digital marketing services, we too have faced our fair share of struggle decoding the online marketing riddles. With our experience in this industry, we have come to realize how digital marketing works in reality. 

Hence, we’ll help you understand how to leverage the digital space to grow your business with tactical marketing strategies. 

This understanding is relevant for all businesses. We’ll share our work experiences in different industries and business niches. Thus, you can have a comprehensive idea of what you need, what you don’t and what you must change about your digital marketing understanding. 

So, let’s build a growth plan for your business with digital marketing strategies. 

Evolution of Digital Marketing: Tracking the Changes 

Everyone wants to see the peak of the giant mountain. But you can’t do that when standing too close. So, let’s take a step back. 

Looking at digital marketing’s past will help you understand why we do what we do today. 

Digital marketing has evolved to provide intangible brands with a distinct persona. It transformed the relationship between a seller and a buyer from simple transactions to a meaningful experience. 

Birth of Search Engine 

This is where it all starts for modern businesses. Since the World Wide Web launch in 1991, the Internet gained users, giving rise to Google’s search engine between 1990 and early 2000s. 

Search engines came with the unique element of web crawlers. These crawlers align data with users’ search queries to show results that match the search’s intent. 

This element became a timeless hit in the marketing world. Digital marketers started leveraging the web crawler by feeding brand information to it. They tracked search keywords used by their target audience.

Incorporating these keywords into their webpages, they boosted their brand visibility on search engines. This process came to be known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) while the new marketing technique got the name of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). 

Consumer Data Accumulation 

A key milestone in digital marketing history is the dependence on data for developing targeted campaigns.

This gave rise to business processes like Customer Relationship Management (CRM). It helps brands build long-term customer relationships through data-driven marketing activities.

CRM tools allow for iterative work based on performance analytics data. This facilitates predicting customer purchasing habits, refining target audiences, and enhancing overall customer satisfaction.

Social Media and the Connect 

The mid 2000s gave us social media. Marketers moved from feeding information to building connections.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others became collaborative platforms. Here, brands would directly engage with their end users. 

Consumers could directly message a brand with their queries and feedback. Advertising became a two-way communication with the advent of social media. 

The Mobile-First Approach 

Google’s initiative, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), aimed to optimize the web for mobile users. With a huge surge in mobile phone usage, this project necessitated developers and marketers to create mobile-friendly websites and marketing campaigns. 

It aimed to enhance the user experience for smartphone users. 

This came both as a new challenge and a scope in the digital marketing world. On one hand, brands had to adjust their online presence to fit into the new protocol. At the same time, it brought with it a new scope for developing mobile apps. 

Interactive and Contextual Approach 

The future of digital marketing is approaching a transformative phase driven by rapid technological evolution.

Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are transforming brand-audience engagement. These technologies provide immersive, interactive experiences that engage customers in innovative ways.

VR and AR, for example, enable the development of compelling three-dimensional marketing experiences. It immerses users in virtual settings or superimposes digital information on the real world.

Moreover, AI is transforming digital marketing through advanced data analytics, automated decision-making, and personalized content delivery. All these together is making marketing efforts more targeted and effective. 

The Importance of Digital Marketing for Business Growth 

1. Increased Reach and Visibility 

Digital marketing enables you to reach a global audience beyond all geographical boundaries.

Online advertising, search engine optimization, and content marketing are key strategies that help businesses connect with diverse markets. It helps you target specific customer segments around the world.

2. Targeted Marketing 

Digital marketing has ways to inform who’s interested in you. Thus, you can target potential customers for your products or services.

By optimizing your content and advertising for SEO and mixing local and international strategies in your digital marketing plan, you can create content that resonates with your targeted age, gender, parental status, or income.

3. Cost-Effectiveness 

Most of the digital space comes free of cost. For instance, you don’t need to pay anyone to send out emails or talk about your brand on social media. 

Digital marketing is a mix of organic and paid strategies. However, cost difference remains to be the biggest leap between traditional and digital marketing. 

A Digital Marketing Strategy for Business Growth 

Business growth demands a comprehensive strategy. It begins from knowing your audience. By the end of your strategy, this audience becomes your loyal customers. With that, you have a digital marketing strategy that helps you grow. 

1. Understanding Your Audience 

The internet is full of noise and clutter. As a digital marketer, no matter your goal, your first step is to break through this noise and reach your target audience. 

Your target audience must reflect through the colors, images, tone and voice of your digital presence.

Hence, you must create a buyer persona to understand your customer better and adjust your content creation and editorial calendar accordingly. 

You can use different templates to record your buyers’ personas.

Source: https://bit.ly/411H5ef 

Understanding your customers also makes it easier to create valuable content that they will find easily.

Developing a customer persona can improve content effectiveness greatly. This makes it a worthwhile strategy to implement. 

2. Pick Your Marketing Channel 

The digital space comes with an exhaustive list of marketing channels. However, no business needs everything to ensure growth.

Especially small businesses must make this choice. When you spread your presence throughout every channel, it just becomes thin.

Therefore, it is important to recognize where your target audience is. Also, you can pick up channels as you keep growing.

Nevertheless, the most important factor is to recognize the most appropriate digital marketing channels for your business.

A highly effective method to evaluate your channels is by conducting a competitor analysis. It provides ready-made information when competitors gain recognition, engagement, and conversion on a specific channel. 

3. Create Your Conversion Funnel 

This is where you mix all your spices to create the aroma. 

You know your audience. You know the best marketing channel for your business growth. Now, you must figure out the tactics to change your target audience into loyal customers on the recognized digital channel. 

Let us go top to bottom on the marketing funnel:

Top of the Funnel 

The primary goal of this initial stage is to capture the user's attention. Here, you must ensure they recognize your business and offerings.

Thus, you must identify the primary channel where the buyer persona of your Buyer persona and concentrate your efforts there. Here are some recommended tactics for the initial stage of the funnel are:

It is crucial to maintain activity across these three channels throughout the strategy to support users at various touchpoints. 

Middle of the Funnel 

Potential customers reach the middle of your funnel, but it's your responsibility to guide them toward the bottom. You must decrease bounce rates. Thus, work on your barriers to entry. 

For this, your website must provide a smooth user experience. Easy sign ups, relevant FAQs to answer their queries and high-quality visuals help you decrease the bounce rates. 

Here are some important digital marketing elements and tactics for your consideration stage:

Bottom of the Funnel 

At this stage, you must curtail abandoned cart situations. Optimizing your payment process and pricing is one of the most important factors when it comes to conversion. This is a generic tactic for all marketing channels. 

But the funnel doesn’t end here. 

Digital marketing-specific tactics come in once more when you want to build brand loyalty. Digital marketing gives you innumerable space to retarget and re-engage your customers.

Here are some tactics you must explore: 

Measuring Success: Analytics and Metrics 

Failing to measure and monitor your marketing campaigns may lead to budget waste. Therefore, tracking your campaigns to assess digital marketing success is a non-replaceable activity. 

Digital marketing has several vanity metrics. Metrics like followers and pageviews may appear impressive but do not demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Therefore, you must use Google Analytics to monitor your marketing performance centrally.

To set up Google Analytics, create an account, configure your property, and add the tracking code to your website.

Here are some important metrics you must monitor: 

Monitoring these metrics will enable you to assess the effectiveness of your digital marketing initiatives. 

Now let us talk about some of the major analytics tools that can help you track your marketing performance: 

Google Analytics