Digital and online marketing has certainly taken the business world by storm in recent years, with many businesses choosing digital marketing strategies over traditional ones like TV and radio.
More and more companies are opting to reach their target audience online with the help of technology and expert digital marketing strategies. As the number of online marketing campaigns continues to increase, so does the difficulty of making sure your marketing campaign succeeds in such a saturated space.
Without the experience, skills and knowledge needed to stay afloat, many digital marketing campaigns are lost in a sea of similar campaigns that don’t have the capability to target the customers they need to.
To avoid this fate with your business and devise a strong strategy, take on this advice and incorporate it into your own methods.
Optimize Your Website
First and foremost, your website should be up and running smoothly. Your business’s website is the hub for its online presence; your presence elsewhere should always feedback to your website and online store if you have one.
Accessibility
An accessible website is a good website. Ensure that your website has a coherent color scheme and style, ideally reflecting your business’s brand image and logo. A website that is unpleasing to the eye will discourage customers from returning or staying longer than they need to.
Navigation should also be easy and straightforward. Links to your ‘About Us,’ ‘Contact Us,’ online store and other pages should be easy to find and click on. Small fonts and multiple clicks to reach a page should be avoided to optimize the accessibility of your site.
To put it simply, if a customer struggles to find what they are looking for, then they will most likely not find it, leave the site and take their business elsewhere.
Mobile Optimization
More customers than ever use their mobile phones to make purchases than ever before. If your site does not work well on mobiles, then you will lose a significant chunk of customers from the get-go.
A site with a simple layout that navigates well and translates well to mobile phones is the best choice.
Speed
The speed that your site loads is another factor that plays a part in accessibility scores. If your site is slow, it is not providing a great customer experience. To avoid slow loading times, include smaller images rather than larger ones and don’t over-saturate your site with widgets and add-ons.
Think of your site as another version of a physical store. If a customer does not have a good experience, they will leave, and the same principle applies to your website.
Social Media Advertising
The key to digital marketing in today’s business world is targeted advertising using social media. Even without a significant following, a business can reach hundreds if not thousands of potential customers using this method. It is extremely useful for getting your business’s brand name and image out there and directly attracting your target audience.
Promoted Posts
Posts can be promoted across various social media sites, including but not limited to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
A post, such as one promoting the latest offer or new addition to your store, can be promoted and used to target your audience using keyword algorithms. These sites use an algorithm to determine which of its users are searching key terms that relate to your business and choose to promote your content to those users. By targeting specific users using an algorithm like this, your marketing budget will be worth every penny.
Unlike other tactics that don’t or cannot specialize, your marketing campaign will only target those who will be interested in your business. Mass marketing may reach lots of people, but targeting advertising reaches your customers.
Scheduled Posts
Customer interaction, related to customer behavior, peaks at specific times which naturally means there are optimum times to post your marketing content.
Some sites and apps, like Facebook and Instagram, have integrated scheduling options for posts that allow you to draft and plan your content ahead of time and take advantage of those peak times. Others, like Twitter, require a third-party business option like Hootsuite to schedule posts.
Scheduling posts also means that you can keep your business’s social media accounts updated regularly and consistently. For higher performance and customer interaction, active accounts generally accomplish more than those that post infrequently.
Analytics
You must regularly analyze your business’s social media performance through engagement, impressions and analytics software. Facebook and Twitter have integrated features that allow you to see which content is performing well and which needs improvement.
The success of your social media campaigns lies in how your customers respond to it. If a tweet has reached a substantial number of users, but only a fraction of those interacted with the tweet itself, then the content of that tweet should be revised and optimized for better content in the future.
Links
The purpose of your business’s social media is to curate a following and divert that following to your site in order for them to make a purchase or hire your services. To do this, your followers must be able to access your site from your social media accounts easily.
When tweeting or drafting a promoted post about one of your latest products or services, make sure to include the link to what you are promoting. This creates synergy between your site and social media accounts and directly drives traffic to your site. Once again, accessibility for your customers is the key to securing sales from digital marketing.
Links to your business’s social media accounts should also be included on your site. Embedding a Twitter feed to the home page creates synergy between the two and promotes the Twitter account at the same time.
Social media advertising requires a global outlook and awareness of your customers. MBA programs at Suffolk University can provide you with the knowledge and perspective you need.
Play to the Algorithm
All of digital marketing relies on the algorithms that underpin all of social media and the internet as a whole. For your marketing strategy to succeed, you must play to the algorithm; otherwise, it will fail.
Blogging Effectively
You may have noticed an increase in the popularity of business blogs, and there is a reason for this. Google’s SEO algorithm favors websites with high activity and up to date content, which makes blogs the perfect solution for this. Regular blog posts allow sites to be updated consistently and increase the chances of it appearing in search results.
To take advantage of this for your business, write blog posts that are relevant to your industry and your business’s specialty. The secret to successful blog posts is relevant keywords and links.
Within the title and first 100 words of your article, make sure to include key terminology that relates to your business and market. This will increase the chances that it will appear in relevant search results and drive more traffic to your site. Reliable external links prove to the algorithm that your content is informative and trustworthy, another factor that plays into SEO.
Blog posts can also be promoted across your social media accounts; this kind of synergy increases your business’s presence across the internet and will be the main reason for traffic driven to your site.
Be Prepared for Changes
Just like every other area of business and marketing, algorithms change, and this will affect the way your content and digital marketing strategy as a whole performs. Google makes changes to its algorithm regularly to make it perform better and more effectively, and you must be prepared for these changes to occur.
While it is impossible to know what changes they will make to the algorithm, it is important that your marketing strategy remains flexible so that, when a change does occur and impact how your content performs, you will be ready and willing to make alterations to your tactics to better favor the new algorithm. The openness to change is essential. The internet is constantly evolving and, therefore, so are the algorithms and customers’ behaviors.
Digital marketing has already transformed tremendously since its conception 30 years ago, and it will continue to do so as technology advances. Your business must be ready to adapt to these changes when they happen.
Never Be Stagnant
Following the sentiment of algorithm changes, your marketing strategy should never be stagnant. Your business’s online presence should be constantly updated and improved upon to keep it fresh and relevant in the fast-paced world of the internet.
If you have an online store, update product descriptions, especially if some are time-sensitive. Descriptions that contain copy that says ‘new this year’ when it was, in fact, new last year, can be accidentally deceiving to customers.
Tweet regularly and make regular Facebook posts. Keep your business’s name relevant in the eyes of your customers on social media. An inactive and therefore forgotten business will immediately be taken over by a new one in this digital age.