Have you ever heard of ‘Rumble in the Jungle’?Â
It is touted by many as the most memorable event in the history of professional boxing. The event hosted two of the biggest names ever in professional boxing: Mohammad Ali and George Foreman. Foreman was the undefeated world heavyweight champion of the time, but it was Ali who would cement his place in history.
While the event garnered global eyes for its unique packaging and unfamiliar venue, it became a part of sport folklore for the ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy employed by Mohammad Ali against his rival.
What is Rope-A-Dope?
Rope-a-dope is a boxing strategy wherein a boxer leans on the ropes pretending to be trapped. In this case, the other fighter, George Foreman, spent his energy punching on the arms and body. The loss of energy proved vital, and as was the case in ‘Rumble in the Jungle,’ Mohammad Ali went on to win the match.
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Digital Marketing: A Rope-A-Dope Landscape
The ever-evolving digital realm can also have a rope-a-dope effect on your marketing efforts. More often than not, you will end up spending a considerable amount of marketing budget with no real substantial results to show.
You can save your marketing efforts from the digital rope-a-dope with a well-planned digital marketing strategy. It will help you generate quality traffic with high purchase intent and deliver instant results.
Benefits of a Digital Marketing StrategyÂ
Effective audience targeting is not the only benefit of having a digital marketing strategy. A strategy will allow you to track and monitor your marketing campaigns continuously. The insights will help you to further refine your marketing campaigns for maximum impact. Moreover, a strategy will help you adapt quickly to changes that occur far too frequently in the digital realm.
15 Digital Marketing Strategies With Example
To help you create digital campaigns that deliver on all your business goals and objectives, here are 15 digital marketing strategies that you must try in 2021.
Marketing Strategies for SEO and Content
SEO and content will continue to add shine to your online visibility. Follow these three tips to enhance your SEO and content marketing efforts further.
#1. Make the Most of Featured Snippets
Google will continue to show more featured snippets in SERPs. Snippets appear at the top of the SERP results. Also known as position zero, you can get your snippets featured by writing concise and valuable answers to research-intent queries.
#2. Create Content to Serve All Stages of the Buyer Journey
A piece of content that’s attracting significant traffic but has an equally high bounce rate indicates that the material fails in meeting user expectations. Remember, people never buy products or services based on first impressions alone.
The customer goes through multiple stages before making a purchase decision. Hence, the content must offer potential customers the right boost at different stages (Top, Middle, and Bottom) to move towards a purchase.
#3. Fuel Your Efforts with Collaborative Content
Partnering up with a different brand can be an excellent opportunity for expanding your reach, but you have to make sure you’ve chosen the right brand. At the end of the day, you need to make sure that the content you put out with your partner is engaging, and you also want to make sure that your audiences understand why you’re partnering up.
An excellent example of collaborative content that made an immediate impact is the Uber & Spotify Car-Music playlist partnership. The collaboration allowed premium Spotify users to connect their Spotify to the Uber cars radio and listen to their favorite music. The association gained instant hype for the personalized and unique experience it offered.
Marketing Strategies for Social Media
Social media platforms have undergone a considerable makeover over the last decade. They are now more feature-rich and command the speed and reach of information on the internet. In 2017 one million people joined a social network every day. These are staggering numbers that perfectly highlight the power of social media.
#4. Host Contests For Added Value
Contests are an effective way to garner your target audience’s attention, turn followers into community members, and collect valuable feedback. You can offer attractive prizes and benefits for contest participants. These contests can be used to achieve almost any business goal you can think of. You can use a contest to promote your product, promote your brand, perform market research, attract new customers, and so on.
For example, Mission Foods, a famous American manufacturer of tortillas and tortilla-related products, used a ‘voting’ contest to learn more about customer preferences.
#5. Don’t Underestimate Video Content.
Following the explosion in popularity of video-sharing apps like TikTok, most social media platforms have added a video-sharing feature. Video is easy to digest and allows brands to be versatile and trigger the right set of emotions and create a strong impression on the audience. If planned right, video marketing can generate massive ROI from advertisers. Given these advantages, video is going to have a substantial impact on audience engagement in 2021.
Here’s a perfect example of how a video can connect with the audience at much more emotional levels and help the brand shine.
GoPro’s Fireman Saves a Kitten
#6. Be Relatable
Whether you are sharing a single post or live streaming an event, your content must strike a chord with your target audience. No matter which platform you target, if your content is authentic, accurate, and offers excellent value to your audience, it will not be long before you garner a following and name for your brand or business.
Strategies for Paid Advertising
Digital advertising allows you to expand your reach beyond your existing audience and reach out to prospects that have shown some intent or relate with your products and services. However, this in no way guarantees that you will gain followers or sell your products quickly.
Paid advertising will only take you to the doors of your lookalike audience. Whether the door opens or not depends on many other factors. Here are a few tips to help you turn ads impressions into clicks and higher conversion:
#7. Behavioral Targeting
With behavioral targeting, you can ensure that ads reach only those audiences who are most likely to buy your products and services. A lookalike profile is created by collecting data of users who have visited your website or shown interest in your product and services.
#8. Contextual Targeting
In the digital realm, contextual advertising allows advertisers and business owners to display ads based on a website or app’s content.
For instance, let’s say you have an online rental service for tourists in Florida. Then you can use automated systems like GoogleAdsense to target websites with content related to your website. So if a user is on a Florida travel booking website, you can place your ad on the site.
Another significant advantage of using contextual targeting is that there is minimal dependency on online users’ data. With contextual targeting companies need to worry little about GDPR and user data compliances
#9. Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is changing the rules of online advertising. Instead of relying on real ad buyers, ads are purchased via AI-run machines. The automation gives marketers diverse, real-time targeting options such as locations, interests, language, demographics, and more.
An excellent example of programmatic advertising is programmatic audio where ads are inserted into online audio broadcasting content like podcasts, digital radio, music streaming apps, and more.
Strategies for Email MarketingÂ
With an ROI of 4400%, it would be naive to question the effectiveness of email marketing. Companies with a robust email marketing strategy enjoy higher sales, strong customer relationships, and unwavering customer loyalty.
Over 3 billion people use email services. It is still the most cost-effective tool for creating awareness, sharing product/service information, gathering customer feedback, promoting new services, and gaining customer loyalty. Follow these tips to boost your email campaigns in 2021.
Most people prefer to read and respond to emails from the comfort of their mobile. If your email campaigns are not mobile-friendly, they will never generate the desired results. For this reason, you want to make sure to follow these guidelines:
Do not exceed your image width and size beyond 600 pixels
The email font size should be at least 13pixels
Make sure that the call to action buttons are at least 40 x 40pixels
#11. Keep Your Message Short Yet Valuable
It’s unwise to bombard your users with too much information and aggressive design. Instead, keep the message short and simple. Moreover, ensure that the subject line is attractive, promises value, and convinces your audience to open the email.
#12. Do, But Don’t Overdo
There is no particular rule that states how often one should send marketing emails. At the same time, shooting emails day in and day out can backfire. Especially if you are selling products online, too many email campaigns may lead your subscribers to believe that your offers are too good to be true.
Most marketers agree that 2-3 emails in a month should be enough to deliver desired results. If these numbers seem small, consider monitoring your email metrics over time. Depending on your subscribers’ response, decide on the frequency of your email campaigns.
For example, here is a snapshot of a welcome email from ‘Taylor Stitch.’
The design is simple and pleasing to the eye. The message is clear, precise, and cleverly highlighted. The call to action is also equally prompting and strategically placed.
Integrating Emerging Technologies
Intelligent use of new technology can add wings to your marketing campaigns. However, the key is knowing the right technology to integrate. Here’s a list of the top 3 emerging technologies that offer immense potential to marketers in 2021.
#13. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality
Customer expectations and desires are always changing. AR and VR allow marketers to address these changes in a uniquely engaging manner. A well-designed AR and VR experience can trigger discussions and strengthen brand value.
#14. ChatbotsÂ
Chatbots remain uncharted territory for the marketing industry. However, a well-designed chatbot can prove to be an exceptional tool for improving website bounce rates.
Who would not love to spend time with a chatbot, which is AI-powered, has a sense of humor, and answers all relevant queries correctly?Â
#15. AI and Data Analytics
Marketers collect gigantic amounts of data daily. That said, turning this data into actionable insights is time- and resource-consuming. Thanks to the advances in AI and data analytics, marketers now have access to smart tools that can gather, identify, and analyze intent data quickly and accurately. This makes integrating data analytics and AI a top priority for the modern marketer.
The Secret to a Perfect StrategyÂ
In digital marketing, any strategy is a good strategy so long as it gives you the desired result. But to create the perfect strategy, you need to look beyond the dos and don’ts and first listen to what your customers are saying and then work backward.
Author’s Bio:-
Sean Davis is the Content Manager at DashClicks, a white label digital marketing fulfillment company that helps agencies satisfy their clients’ needs. He has previously written for Cracked, Shopify, and Harvard Student Agencies.
In his free time, he enjoys having heated arguments over capitalization rules. He really, really wishes people would stop misusing semicolons. When in doubt, a period works just fine.
