We are living in interesting times where every aspect of doing business is slowly shifting to the online route. While some people are overlooking the dynamic and changing aspects of business, such as marketing, it is worth appreciating that there lies great potential in digital marketing. You must be armed with real-time tricks to keep up with this popular trend in the modern world.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, like any other type of marketing, is a way of connecting and influencing potential customers. The only unique aspect of digital marketing that distinguishes it from other methods is that it requires online tools like social media, email, and websites. Digital marketing helps businesses stay ahead of competitors by generating leads that in most cases, turn to conversions.
The good thing with digital marketing is that there are always platforms to support and guide businesses on how to go about it. One such legit platform that helps small businesses run their day to day activities and also plan on their long term goals and success strategies is Businessmarketingworld.com. As mentioned above, for a business to succeed in digital marketing, it must leverage up to date assets and strategies. Here is a detailed explanation of the top 10 digital marketing strategies.
1. Optimize Your Content for Your Audience
Content marketing not only provides a platform to help you share valuable information regarding your business but also to increase brand awareness. Content can be shared in many forms, all of which have a distinct purpose in attracting potential customers. Content optimization is a crucial feature of digital marketing as it helps your audience recognize your content. If the content is not optimized, potential customers will not see it and this will beat the logic of creating it in the first place.
The primary forms of content that you will, in most cases, use in digital marketing are text, images, and videos. All these optimizations must be done after assessing the business needs and audiences you wish to address. Here is how you can optimize each type of content:
Text Optimization
Title tags – Title tags are crucial as they indicate in a few words your business content. Since text subjects create the first impression of what your business offers, it would help if you make them precise and catchy.
Meta description – Right below the title tag is the meta-description, a feature that is displayed in search engine results. Again, let your audience know what they will get on clicking your business page.
Keywords – These are words that show the aim of a business page. You should include keywords and keyword varieties throughout your text, as it also improves Google ranking.
Video Optimization
Video content is being adopted highly in digital marketing as it easy to create and interpret. Your videos must, therefore, be both interesting to the audience and useful to the business. Optimize your videos by adding video titles and descriptions.
Image Optimization
Did you know that your images may appear on search engine results even when the content pages don’t? This makes images take the more substantial part of the visuals used in digital marketing. To optimize your images, consider reducing the size of the images without compromising their quality. You should also add descriptors in the form of image tags, alt tags, and filenames.
2. Leverage One Social Media Network
Social media plays a very vital role in digital marketing. The use of social media in marketing is an incredible strategy that helps you gain potential customers and retain current ones through improved communication. The 80/20 principle, also known as the Pareto principle, is used in business to mean that 80% of the sales a business makes come from 20% of customers.
Applying the principle in social media for sales and marketing purposes translates to the following:
- Please your best customers (20%) – Sometimes, people are carried away by the process of gaining new customers to the point that they forget their loyal and consistent customers. To be successful in digital marketing, you should always put the concerns of your best customers at the forefront.
- Deal with the difficult customers (80%) – You should not waste your time on customers who will not buy your products at the end of the day. These are the customers that ask senseless questions with the purpose of criticizing your business.
3. Create User-Centered Landing Pages
A landing page is a lead capture page that appears first after clicking a link on a search engine. The leads generated by landing pages are essential in digital marketing as they turn to conversion in the future. Although the internet has many rules that dictate how conversion rate optimization should look like, it is advisable to customize your landing pages to match your business products and users.
To create an excellent user-centered landing page for your content, here is what you should focus on.
Understand what attracts people to your pages – If you realize that a particular product is popular in your business and that it attracts a significant proportion of your customers, you should consider explaining it explicitly on the landing page.
Depict the turn-offs – Not all things you include in your business page attracts customers. You should go through your landing pages to ensure that there is no boring information, lengthy videos and large-sized images.
Persuade leads to convert – A landing page is the first section to convince your potential buyers through a call to action strategy. Here, you should take your time explaining why people should buy your products and why your products are the best.
4. Get Used With Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager
Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to see lots of information, including user sessions and bounce rates. The tool also stores data and generates reports about your website. The data used for the report is generated from event hits that are sent from websites to Google Analytics servers. The automatic analyses of sites help one assess the effectiveness of the current marketing strategy. The results are also an indication of when to change the marketing strategy.
On the other hand, a Google Tag Manager helps you manage call tracking, conversion tracking, and remarketing. With Google Tag Manager, you can choose on what pages and where to place these features. If you use your several websites and webpages for digital marketing, it may be overwhelming to add tags to all of them. Google Tag Manager takes care of this and ensures that your Google Analytics is not ruined. If you are doing social media marketing, this tools is also essential as it helps manage tags on websites updates that you don’t have control over.
5. Follow Email Marketing Best Practices
Email marketing takes a significant portion of digital marketing. This method is one of the oldest options that has remained effective up to now. Studies show that if email marketing is correctly done, it can generate more than $35 for every $1 spent. Here are top practices that you should follow to be successful in social media marketing:
Avoid spammy content – Spammy content has irrelevant features such as too many exclamation marks and excessive use of capital letters. All these features scare subscribers away and reduce the interaction of potential customers with your brand; hence should be avoided. You should also make sure that your content is consistent with your brand right from your email subject.
Avoid excess code – Email, unlike webpages does not support CSS and JAVA as it uses HTML to structure your content. Your content excluding image files should not have elements such as pop-up windows and form submit buttons.
Make your sender name your brand name – People receive very many emails in a day. If you don’t focus on creating the first impression on your emails, there is a high possibility that they will not be read. To make your sender name memorable, use a combination of the employee name and the brand name and include symbols such as @.
Send emails at the right time – To make sure that your emails are opened, you should evaluate the right time and day to send your emails. Research shows that emails have a higher open rate at 9-11 am and 3-5 pm. It is also advisable to avoid sending emails on weekends as the likelihood of them being opened is low.
6. Start a Podcast
A podcast is a recording that a user can download and easily listen to on own device. A recording describing the products you are marketing helps potential customers understand them more. If you want to become an authoritative voice in the marketing field, you have plenty of whitespaces to do just that in a podcast. It is always wise investing in strategies that not many businesses are serious with, like the podcasts.
Podcasts, unlike other strategies, has the advantage of having a relatively cheaper entry threshold. When recording podcasts, you should consider the following:
Provide relevant content– Avoid being taken away by irrelevant content when recording voice episodes as it will be annoying to your audience. Your recording should again be tailored to the brands you are marketing.
Use keywords to tag your podcasts– The main subject in your recordings should be highlighted with keywords, especially if you will post your original podcasts on your company’s website.
Be precise– Similar to content optimization, podcasts should only capture the essential information that you want to convey about your websites.
7. Create a Freebie for Your Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a single individual that represents a portion of your audience. The representative person helps predict the behavior of the larger portion. Studies show that potential customers expect you to study their behavior and respond based on their behavior results.
The good thing with this strategy is that you can use tools to automate the creation process. Upon completion of the analysis of your customer’s needs, you are presented with a customizable persona document highlighting essential aspects of your audience. The buyer persona creation process must first involve in-depth research of your audience demographics and other important information about your customers.
8. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is a very common term in the field of digital marketing. SEO is a process that improves both on-page and off-page website and online presence. SEO enhances online presence by improving ranking in search engines. On-page optimization is mainly page optimization that involves improving its content and implementing the use of keywords and keyword variants. Off-page optimization includes previously discussed marketing approaches such as email and social media marketing.
What makes SEO a powerful tool in digital marketing?
- Many businesses and companies implement it – The larger number of people using SEO more than any other marketing strategy means that it actually works. You would only be left behind in marketing if you ignored such a tool.
- SEO boosts conversions – The conversion rate of SEO in marketing is around 14%. This is a very high conversion rate compared to traditional marketing methods that have a conversion rate below 2%.
- Help you rank organically in search engines – People like information that ranks naturally on the web. Unlike ads, the probability of people opening your SEO optimized websites in search engines is high.
9. Leverage A/B Testing
A/B testing is yet another vital strategy to improve your digital marketing. The strategy involves devising two versions of marketing on the same product. The conversion rates of the two approaches are compared to determine the better one.
This method is tailored to refine marketing, especially in companies and businesses that have been operating for a long time. To get most out of the A/B testing strategy, you should do it frequently. As stated at the beginning of this article, marketing techniques are dynamic and it would only help if you used the most current ones to be successful. To achieve this, leverage the A/B digital marketing strategy.
10. Start Your Own Community
Community marketing has proved to be a very effective marketing strategy, especially for small businesses. A community in business and marketing is a small group of passionate followers who are always behind your brand. If you build your community, you will benefit in two significant ways:
Increased customer retention -A business community is aware of the journey you have been through to provide the products you have now. This close follow up from a group of serious people means a clear understanding of the quality of the products you offer; hence, it is hard for them to leave in search of other products.
It is a source of ideas – If you have a team of people who always follow your brand, they will be a source of ideas on how to improve the current products or on the new products that should be introduced.
In conclusion, to be successful in digital marketing, you should evaluate your current methods and see if they are generating enough leads and conversions. If you feel that you are not satisfied with the results or in case you want to start your marketing journey, choose one of the above strategies and give it a try. Successful marketing must also involve a combination of several strategies to make sure that you spread risks that may arise on failing one. For more tips regarding small business growth, visit Businessmarketingworld.com.
