Before you begin your digital marketing strategy, there are a few key steps to get you started on the right foot.

First of all, you need to know exactly who you’re marketing to. Identify the personas for your campaigns — your core consumer base or “character” of your consumers (general characteristics, demographics, interests, habits, etc.) so you have an idea of who your digital marketing campaign is targeting.

• Next, a competitor audit is a crucial step to gain insight into what others in your industry are doing and to gain ideas about your own strategy.
• Then set goals for your campaign, establish your creative direction and review benchmark data for successful ad campaigns and leads to gather data points to test ads.
• Finally, make sure every part of your campaign is trackable — code, links, tags, analytics — so you can measure your efforts. With this, you’ll have the framework for an organized, targeted and measurable campaign primed to boost your business.

Read on for more valuable tactics to drive leads for your brand.

Personalized email marketing

Email is obviously a central element in the modern world, which makes it a prime medium for marketers.

To take it a step further, personalization has a huge impact on marketing effectiveness, offering a key to improve relevance, build loyalty and drive conversions. In fact, personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates. And in an effort to avoid being flagged as spam by new, more stringent consumer protection laws, personalizing email content is becoming even more popular among marketers.

Facilitated by new data collection and analytics technology, marketers have more tools than ever to gain insight into customer identities, attitudes, behaviors and intent. In short, this gives marketers a valuable toolkit to optimize customer experience — to appeal to specific needs and preferences, build strong relationships and make customers feel as if an experience or product is made just for them.

Personalized emails should include the user’s first name and feature unique content based on their history or behavior. There are tools for making email personalization easy, like Auto Pilot, a handy tool that allows you to engage at just the right time with personalized email, in-app messages, SMS and postcards.

Paid search

Everyone uses search engines, right? Paid search (PPC or SEM) allows you to use that to your advantage by paying for ads for your brand show up among results of relevant searches.

The main platform for this is Google AdWords, though Bing Ads and Yahoo! Ads also offer paid search. You can find detailed guides for each option on the platforms themselves, but there are also a few general tips to keep in mind when launching a paid search campaign:

• First of all, read all the documentation and gather a thorough understanding of the tool before you launch your ads. There will be some trial and error, but since you’re paying for each ad, you want to make sure your ads are as deliberate and researched as possible to avoid throwing money out the window.
• Then set a detailed strategy for your ads campaign, including specific goals and budget.
• When you’re designing your ads, pay close attention to keywords (a little research goes a long way here) to make your ads as targeted and effective as possible.
• Finally, test different strategies to see which approaches and keywords are most effective and above all, track everything. Knowledge is power (and leads), after all.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredibly powerful tool for lead generation. Major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! rank web pages and other content such as videos and local listings based on what the search engine considers most relevant to a search query.

If you’re not using SEO as part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing an opportunity to obtain more quality organic leads by attracting more traffic to your website.

There are several techniques to achieve improved search engine optimization. SEO tools like Moz or Google Keyword Planner are game-changers when it comes to identifying keywords that not only relate to your business but also are ones people are actively searching for on a regular basis. Keywords are the lifeblood of any SEO strategy — the keywords you choose to target will determine the type of traffic you get.

Once you’ve conducted the research and have identified the keywords that best fit your website’s goals, incorporate them into your page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, image alt text, and page copy and headings. These keywords should complement the online sales system.