How to Level Up Your Digital Marketing Success
Marketing is an incredibly important and helpful part of running a business. It’s essentially how you introduce yourself to potential customers and put your brand in their minds. After all, if nobody has heard about your company, they can’t even consider buying products or services.
Companies have been using marketing techniques since commerce began. Traditional marketing techniques, like billboards, posters, and word of mouth, are still incredibly powerful and effective. It’s also helpful to get involved in local expos, both to market your company and to enjoy a potential boost in profits.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
However, the gold standard of marketing now is digital marketing. Good marketing is about making your company more visible, so it makes sense to market in places where people congregate. It’s why billboards are far more effective on busy roads than in back alleys. Nowadays, most people are found online.
Digital marketing also allows you to broaden your reach, while simultaneously targeting a specific kind of customer who will be more likely to be interested in your product. There aren’t any limits on location, so you can market to someone on the other side of the world. It’s so much easier to run an international business if you operate online.
If you want effective, personalized marketing strategies, digital marketing is the way to go.
Create a Marketing Plan
Before you can implement your marketing strategy, you need to come up with a marketing plan. Otherwise, your marketing efforts will be the digital equivalent of yelling about your brand from a rooftop. Some people might stumble upon it, but it won’t be very effective.
Before you can start planning in earnest, you need to think about market research. In a world where knowledge is power, market research is the best way to not only come up with an effective marketing strategy, but to continue to improve and refine your product and marketing strategies.
Online surveys are a great way to conduct market research. First, it helps to identify your target market. Let’s say you run a company that sells seeds. Typically, people who are interested in sustainability, self-sufficiency, and who have gardens are going to be far more interested in your company.
By targeting your marketing efforts, you can make your brand stand out more to customers who are likely to buy your products, rather than a generic strategy that doesn’t really appeal to anyone.
New and Repeat Customers
When marketing your brand, you want to appeal to two sets of people. First, you have potential customers. These customers have either never heard of your brand before or they haven’t spent money with your company before.
Potential customers are probably the most difficult set of people to market to, but growing your customer base is vital if you want your company to grow. More customers means more sales, which means more profits and opportunities.
Meanwhile, repeat customers shouldn’t be neglected. Because potential customers are harder to reach out to, it costs more to get someone new to use your product than it does to get someone to come back to your company, especially if that customer was happy with your service.
Email marketing campaigns are a great way to market to repeat customers, because you can let them know about sales and promotions. It’s also a good idea to encourage happy customers to leave a review. Word of mouth is a great way to appeal to new customers, as they trust other customers more than a company with a vested interest in making a sale.
Loyalty schemes are also a fantastic way to encourage customers to come back. Introductory sales promotions can win over new customers, but loyalty schemes keep them coming back for more.
Your Business Website
Your business website is an important part of your toolset, especially if you run an online business. Even if you trade in-person or have a local business, customers still often appreciate a website. If you run a local business like this, make sure your website is registered on Google Maps.
Your business website can act as an online store, a portfolio showing your past work, and a way for customers to get in touch with your company. But it’s also a fantastic marketing tool. For starters, make sure your business website is well designed and functional. A slow or buggy website looks unprofessional and can be annoying for customers.
Another thing to add to your website is content. Blogs and vlogs are interesting to customers and give them a reason to stay on your website. You can talk about your company and your product and make yourself a voice of authority.
You can also use this content to implement SEO (search engine optimization) strategies. In short, SEO makes your website more visible to search engines. Most people look for products and services by entering keywords into a search engine and then choosing from the top results on the SERP (search engine results page).
By implementing SEO, you draw people to your website. As well as using keywords, it helps to have links to other pages on your website and other sites. If you want to boost results, outsourcing your SEO can help, as experts can write valuable content for your website and make sure that each post implements these strategies.
Social Media
We mentioned earlier that one of the benefits of digital marketing is that it’s incredibly public and can reach anyone. Social media marketing shines in this regard.
As well as having a wider spread, social media marketing allows you to directly interact with your customers. It’s a great way to conduct market research and to market in different ways.
One of the keys to successful social media marketing is consistency and relevance. Post regularly and make sure your content is useful to your target audience. You can also take advantage of influencers and content creators by either sponsoring them or entering into partnerships.
In this case, use influencers who have the same target audience as you. So, a makeup company would benefit more from a beauty influencer than a gaming influencer.
