If there is one thing that the whole world has come to know during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, is that every business needs to go digital, RIGHT NOW!
Traditional stores and other places where people like to flock to do their shopping, were closed or had restricted access.
People had to purchase goods and services online.
Businesses that did not have a vibrant online marketing channel in place lost a lot of business. They did try to catch up, but it was at a huge cost.
Looking into the future, it is best that you protect your business from such events, and make sure that you have a digital presence that can carry your business in the event that such restrictions reemerge again.
In order to help you get started in building a digital marketing strategy, we have come up with a list of tips and tricks that you can use to promote your business online, and also be able to sell in a digital environment.
Let us roll up our sleeves and get started.
The first thing we are going to look at is what digital marketing is, what are the variables you should consider and what benefits you will get from going digital.
Remember, the only way you can fully implement the tips that we shall lay out later in the article is if you have an understanding of what digital marketing is, in the first place.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is the type of marketing that uses online channels for brand product and service promotion – this is the reason why it is also called online marketing.
Digital marketing channels include email, social media, online advertising, written content, and visual content.
Basically, whenever you use digital tools to promote your products and services, you are engaging in digital marketing.
However, this is just a blanket description, so let us look a little deeper.
Digital Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing
There is a good reason why many people confuse digital marketing with inbound marketing.
They both use similar tools in their implementation, such as emails and online content.
Both are created to get the attention of the target audience, take them through the buyer’s journey and then convert them into paying customers.
However, inbound marketing and digital marketing follow different paths when achieving their goals.
Digital marketing looks at how each tool it uses converts people into paying customers. A brand may use a number of digital platforms to get people to convert, or simply use one platform in order to get the same result.
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is holistic in its approach. The first thing considered in inbound marketing is the ultimate goal.
After the goal is determined, the tools required to achieve this goal are selected.
Then they are all assigned to the various parts of the buyer journey and eventually convert generated leads into paying customers.
As a marketer, you have to keep in mind that you don’t have to choose between digital marketing and inbound marketing at all. In fact, they are found to work better when they are used together.
The inbound marketing part will give the purpose and structure that is required for an effective digital marketing campaign., and it also makes sure that every digital marketing channel is geared towards attaining the final goal of the inbound marketing strategy.
B2B vs. B2C Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is done for both B2C and B2B companies, but the way they do so differs quite a bit.
In B2B situations, the clients take longer to make a purchasing decision and therefore need a longer sales funnel.
It is better to build a relationship with such clients, before making a sales pitch. B2C customers tend to make decisions faster and that is why they need a short-term marketing effort.
In a B2B marketing scenario, logic and evidence are the driving factors of the buying decision. In the B2C scenario, emotions play a big part in the buying decision.
Basically, the customer must have a feeling of doing something for him or herself in the B2C scenario, but in the B2B scenario, the decision-maker is out to benefit the company and not an individual.
In B2B scenarios, the decision may need the input of several people, while in B2C scenarios, the decisions tend to be personal. However, they are also influenced by user reviews and recommendations.
However, whether you are doing digital marketing in the B2C or B2B scenarios, your ultimate goal is to meet the needs of the end-user. When you are selling a car to a company, you will need a different approach from the one you would use when selling the same car to an individual.
The Various Types of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is composed of various specializations, and we shall look at them so you can be able to know how to implement them when creating your digital marketing strategy.
Here are the key specializations of Digital Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Many people think of search engine optimization, or SEO, as a form of digital marketing all on its own, but it is actually a marketing tool.
There is an art and science of how to go about SEO.
The science part of SEO requires you to conduct research into contributing factors, such as keywords, in order to get the best ranking on the search engine results pages or SERPs.
The Artistic part of SEO requires you to think of the design of a web page so that it loads quickly, it is easily readable, the CTAs are clear, etc.
Some of the most important aspects of SEO are:
- The Quality of the content used
- The level of engagement that a page can generate
- The mobile-friendliness of the page, since most people use mobile devices to browse the internet
- The number and quality of inbound links on a page.
The strategic manner in which you have to implement these factors makes SEO a science, and there is also an art in the unpredictable nature of the results that you will get.
You cannot make exact predictions, because Google is constantly changing its search algorithms, but you can come close to making a prediction by closely monitoring the changes and how they affect the ranking of your pages, and making changes as required.
Content Marketing
Now SEO plays a great role in content creation for content marketing purposes. It helps create a strategy that will help distribute valuable and relevant content to your target audience and also get you ranked high in the SERPs.
The ultimate goal of content marketing is to generate leads, which will be converted into paying customers.
However, content marketing, unlike traditional advertising, does not concentrate on the features, or potential value of a product or service but offers free value in the form of the interesting information placed in the content.
There are a lot of statistics that bolster the fact that content marketing is crucial to the success of any business. Here are some of them:
- 84% of target customers have the expectation of reading entertaining and valuable content about a product or service before they make a buying decision.
- 62% of companies employ at least 5,000 people to write content on a daily basis
- 92% of marketers believe that the content produced about a product or service is an important asset.
Content marketing can be a very effective tool, but it can also be tricky to implement.
When writing content, marketers aim to rank highly on the SERPs, while also engaging people with the material they write. This way it will be shared by readers and expand the reach of the content.
When relevant content is produced, it forms a lasting relationship with the reader, which is then leveraged into cash transactions for the products and services laid out in the content.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing, in a broad sense, is the kind of marketing that is done on social media channels.
The largest social media channels used for this purpose are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. YouTube and LinkedIn follow closely.
Social media marketing has a unique feature in that it generates a lot of conversations on these channels, and this helps most brands understand just how well they are reaching out to their target audience.
When many people are talking about your products and services, then you are having a huge impact on your marketing efforts.
You have to decide which types of interactions get the best response, the social media channels that are best suited for your products and services, and the language to use when interacting with your target audience.
The number of shares, followers, comments, and the total interaction are the best metrics to analyze on social media to gauge your engagement rates.
In the past, direct selling was not the ultimate goal of conducting social media marketing campaigns.
The main goal was to create a buzz that would lead people to your website, where they could read more about your products and services before making a purchasing decision.
However, today many social media channels are enabling target customers to buy directly from their networks – what is now called as social selling or social commerce.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC)
When you conduct PPC marketing, you place an advertisement on a popular website and then pay for every instance that a person clicks on the advert.
It is quite complicated to know how and when your target audience views your ad.
On the SERPs, when a spot for an ad becomes available the search engine algorithms place a relevant ad on the page so people can click on it.
This process is like an auction, and the way that the algorithms prioritize the ads to show is based on the following factors:
- The Quality of the advert
- The relevance of the keywords used in the ad
- The quality of the landing age that the ad leads to
- The amount that you have bid for that space.
The PPC campaign should have 1 or more desired actions that the audience should complete when they click on an ad.
These are called conversions, and they may be transactional or non-transactional.
A transactional action is one where the audience is supposed to make a purchase after clicking on the ad.
A non-transactional action can be one where the audience is led to a page where they have to sign up for a newsletter or make a call to your business.
PPC marketing gives you tools that you can use to track the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the kind of marketing where a company allows people to sell their products and then offers them financial compensation for their efforts.
This can be in the form of flat fees, commissions, or a combination of both.
Basically, affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing model of selling products and services.
As an affiliate, you earn a commission for that sale, and as a merchant, you earn a profit from the sale and make sure you share part of that profit with your affiliate as a commission.
There are affiliates who prefer to sell a single product for a long time, and there are others who promote a wide variety of products.
You can join a program that is already designed to make the affiliate process easier, which means the rates of commissions are already set out, and you are restricted to selling approved products only.
You may also join a branded affiliate program, where you sell only one product for a specific brand.
If you are a retailer, then you can choose the programs which sell your products or services.
You may also start your own program and manage who can join the program, and where they can disseminate information about your products or services.
In any case, you will be tasked with giving the affiliates all the tools that they need to be able to sell your products or services.
You also need to give the affiliates some incentives to sell more, support them in every way, especially when potential customers ask questions, and also give them pre-made marketing materials.
Native Advertising
This is sometimes referred to as disguised marketing. Native advertising is designed in a way that it blends very well with the surrounding content, that it does not even seem like an advertising message.
The crafting of native advertising was necessary due to the cynicism that today’s customers have towards blatant advertising attempts.
Today’s consumers know that advertising is placed at a cost, and therefore feel that the owner of the advert may say untrue clickbait information geared to generating sales only.
This is the reason why blatant advertising does not generate as many leads as it used to in the past.
Native advertising goes around this cynicism by giving the target audience something interesting to read and then goes into a promotional message, which somehow waters down the advertising aspect of the content.
You can label the content as “promoted” or “Sponsored”. If you carefully conceal this disclosure, then you can get readers to go through the interesting content, and get them to the purchasing part without them ever realizing that this was a disguised advert.
Native advertising allows consumers to get more information about the product or service that you are advertising before they make the decision to buy.
Native advertising is not obtrusive like traditional advertising.
Native advertising is not deceptive.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation powers marketing efforts by using specialized software tools. They help in improving the relevance and efficiency of marketing campaigns.
Let us illustrate this with some statistics:
- 77% of companies know about the value of real-time personalization, but only 40% of them know how to do this properly.
- 81% of consumers say that most brands do not understand them well and would prefer if they did.
- 90% of consumers feel that personalization is somehow appealing or very appealing.
When you employ marketing automation in your campaigns, you will be able to better meet this personalization aspect. You will be able to:
- Gather and analyze information gleaned from consumers.
- Craft high-targeted marketing campaigns
- Ensure that the marketing messages are posted at the right time and on the right channel. In order to get the attention of the right audience.
The marketing automation tools can be able to leverage prospect engagement, or the lack of it, in order to determine how to reach out to potential customers the next time.
They are able to customize marketing campaigns in real-time, and also be able to personalize these messages for every customer, without a considerable investment in time.
Email Marketing
This is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, and still holds a lot of sway to this day.
It is quite simple – you send a promotional message by email and pray that your audience reads the email and completes the action suggested in the email.
However, executing an email marketing campaign can be a complex task.
You first have to make sure that the emails are desired by the target reader, and this is why you must have an opt-in list of emails.
An opt-in list allows you to:
- Personalize the subject line and the body of the email based on the desire of your target reader.
- Have a clear indication of the types of emails that the reader wants to receive.
- Give the target reader the option to opt-out of receiving your emails
- Send promotional and transactional emails.
One thing that you must do is to offer value in your email campaign, rather than just asking them to make a purchase.
As we mentioned earlier, email marketing is still thriving to this day, and 89% of marketing professionals have attested to the fact that it is their most effective lead generation tool.
When you combine email marketing with marketing automation, then you will be more effective in reaching out to prospects using emails.
You will be able to segment the emails, as well as the time that the emails should be delivered for maximum open rates.
Why do You need Digital Marketing?
In this section, we shall show you why you need digital marketing within your business, by looking at the benefits that you stand to gain.
Basically, one of the main reasons that people use digital marketing is the fact that it can reach a wide range of people. However, there are many other benefits that you stand to gain when you leverage digital marketing in your promotional campaigns.
Here are a few of these benefits:
Expanded Geographic Reach
Unless you have limited your advertising or content to a specific region, the advert will be seen by people all over the world. This means that you can end up having customers from all over the world, and not just your home base, or country.
Cost Efficiency
The costs of performing digital marketing are much lower than those associated with traditional marketing.
When you consider the costs of running a television advertisement or placing an advert in a national newspaper, then you will see that the costs of digital marketing are very low – and you still get to reach more people, which is an added bonus.
With traditional advertising, you have no control over who will see the advert. This means that your advert could be viewed by people who have no interest in the products and services that you offer.
When it comes to digital marketing, you create one piece of content that will bring in people to your blog from all over the world.
You may also create an email campaign that goes to people who are really interested in your products or services.
You can easily customize when and how the emails are sent, which improves your open rates.
When you weigh the benefits, ease, and reach of digital marketing, you can see that it is cheaper than traditional marketing
Measurable Results
In order to know if you have an effective marketing strategy, you must be able to measure the results and see how many customers it brought in, and how much income it generated.
This is quite an easy task when you are performing digital marketing since there are tools that can easily measure these metrics.
How would you do that in traditional marketing? Perhaps by sending out a questionnaire and asking people how they got to know about your products and services.
However, for a company that cannot have a one-on-one meeting with its customers, this could be a difficult task to accomplish.
When using digital marketing, you can always measure the results of your marketing campaigns.
The digital marketing software and platforms available today, give you an easy way of measuring the results of your marketing efforts.
You can measure things such as how many times your emails are opened, how many people come to your site, how many make direct purchases, etc.
Personalization
When it comes to gathering customer information for personalization purposes, digital marketing offers you a better way to do so, than traditional marketing.
The information that you get from digital sources is specific and precise, which allows you to easily personalize your messages.
If you are a financial services provider, and you want to get in touch with people who have some knowledge about your products, you will get better results when you offer the product in a personalized manner.
You can then prepare a number of campaigns based on information that you gather online.
One can be targeted at young people, who are attracted to your life insurance products, and you may also target the other towards people who are considering having a retirement benefit plan.
The only way that you can collect data that enables you to personalize these messages is to have automated tracking, which is only possible using digital marketing tools.
The tools allow you to monitor phone calls, messages, customer profiles, message reading rates, and a lot more.
Digital marketing allows you to have a wide range of data at your fingertips, which allows you to be more personal in the communication you send out to your target audience.
Lasting Connections with Customers
With digital marketing, you are able to communicate in real-time with your customers. You are able to reach them when you need to and they are also able to reach you when they need you.
When you think about marketing on social media, it is satisfying to know that there are people who are viewing your last post. It even becomes better when they go ahead and comment on the post, or share it with others.
This is an indication that your social media post is generating the buzz that you need about your products and services.
Whenever someone else joins in the conversation, then you are really reaching more people who may have been out of your reach.
You can also add interactivity to your posts, which also brings in more customers.
When customers are active participants of a marketing caping, they are more likely to spread the word about your brand.
This sense of ownership in the conversation is what builds lasting brand loyalty.
Convenient, Simple Conversions
With digital, your target customer can respond instantly to your advertising message.
This is not possible when you use Tv and print ads. You can only hope that people will respond later and buy the product or service or make an enquiry using the contacts displayed on the TV or print ad.
But how can someone who is walking around on the streets, or doing household chores respond to a Tv ad that they saw last night?
When it comes to digital marketing, the person can instantly click on a link, save a post, and get moving down the sales funnel right away.
Even if they do not make a financial transaction right away, they will be connected to you and you have the chance to interact with them further and with ease.
This will increase your conversion, reduce the time it takes to convert prospects, and basically make it easy to convert prospects into paying, loyal customers.
Digital Marketing and Growth
You need to focus your efforts on creating a digital marketing strategy since it is a better, cheaper, and faster way of converting your target customer into a paying one.
There has never been a better way of maintaining constant contact with your customers and being able to personalize your communication with each of them.
When you embrace the full potential of digital marketing, you will be able to realize much more growth within your company.
21 Digital Marketing Tips for 2022 and beyond
Now that you know what digital marketing is, and the benefits that you can derive from it, let us look at 21 tips and tricks that you can use to make your digital marketing campaigns more effective.
Tip Number 1: Update your Website
Make sure that when you begin 2022, your business is not running on obsolete web design principles and techniques.
When you have an old dysfunctional website, you are losing out on a number of potential visitors who cannot access the website, or browse through the content with ease.
Obsolete website technology includes flash content which has been replaced by HTML5 content, bad coding, poor use of tags and meta tags, etc.
When you approach your target customer using an outdated website design, then it is like wearing tattered clothes to the first interview for a job.
Users do not spend a lot of time browsing a website, even in the best of conditions.
They will scan through the content and only stop when they come across something that pricks their interest.
You must make sure that your web design enables people to easily scan and view relevant information.
Use proper headings and use relevant keywords that will easily catch the eye of a reader scanning the pages.
Make sure that links are placed in a place that is easily accessible. You do not want people struggling to look for links to your most important content.
You need to know that you are dealing with impatient customers, so if your links to sales ages are hidden, they will simply leave the site and move on to your competition.
There are very many features that you need to consider when you are updating your website.
Tip Number 2: Have a Mobile-Friendly Website
During the pandemic, people increasingly used their mobile devices to make purchases online.
People were on their mobile devices reading information about the products and services that they could buy online since they were restricted to their homes.
Even before the pandemic, people were increasingly using their mobile devices for the purposes of getting information on products and services that they wanted to buy.
This is the reason why you should make sure that your website is properly displayed across all mobile devices.
The customer experience is an important part of marketing your products and services.
Google also considers the responsibility of a website when ranking it on the SERPs.
It is your duty to make sure that the experience is simple and convenient for your existing and prospective customers.
Time will fly when you are having a nice time, right?
This is the experience that you want your visitors to have.
They will be able to spend a lot of time on your website when your content is easily readable on mole devices.
They will also be able to make purchases on the move, which will increase your sales margins.
When you have a mobile-friendly website, you improve the Core Web Vitals that Google uses to rank your page.
This means that the speed of your site, the visual stability, and responsiveness of your website will be important when ranking your page in 2022 and beyond.
You should familiarize yourself with the Google E-A-T principles so you can understand more about Core Web Vitals and how they affect the ranking of your website.
Tip Number 3: Pay Attention to the Experience
Whether it is the user experience or the customer experience, you must make sure that you offer the best possible experience so your users can come back again and again.
Google knows that people want to visit websites that give them the ultimate experience, whether it is just reading content or making a purchase.
Again, the experience that you provide your customers has become an important ranking factor for Google.
When you make it enjoyable for people to read your content, or make a purchase on your sales pages, then you will be ranked higher.
Who wants to spend time looking through content that is difficult to read, or making a purchase from a difficult and long cart process?
You must focus your attention on giving the best experience possible.
When you give a great experience, people will engage easily with your content and will spend more time on your pages, and most probably come back to check on what new experience you have for them.
Once again, you should familiarize yourself with Google E-A-T principles and see how your website can provide an experience that Google will rank highly.
Tip Number 4: Answer your Users’ Questions
One of the best ways to make sure that people respond well to your content is to answer the questions that your users ask on search engines.
If a person scans your web page and does not find answers to his or her problems, then he will quickly move on to another website that will provide an answer
Similarly, when a user types in a query on the search engines, the algorithms start scanning pages for answers to the query.
If your website has the best answer, then it will be given priority and will be ranked highly.
There are many ways to answer the questions that users ask.
The ways that these answers are ranked and placed on the SERPs will also depend on how you write the content.
For instance, there is a way that you should write an answer if you want it to appear in a featured snippet.
This is a favored position since it does not consider the ranking of your website in the traditional SERPs.
Even if your website is ranked on the second page, but it has the best answer to a particular query, it can appear in the featured snippet area.
The way that you answer questions can also make you get featured in the “People Also Ask” section of the SERPs, which will increase your visibility on the SERPs.
When all is said and done, you cannot do effective digital marketing if you do not provide answers to the problems and questions that people need to be addressed.
Tip Number 5: Leverage Paid Ads Properly
If you have not yet started creating paid adverts, then it is time that you do so.
In the past, businesses used advertisements on TV, print, and other media in order to reach out and get the attention of a wide base of prospective customers.
The pandemic has rained a heavy blow to these traditional methods of advertising.
On the other hand, advertisements that were disseminated using digital media were not affected by the pandemic.
Actually, for a long time, it has been better to advertise on digital media than traditional TV and Print media.
Today, you will find advertisements running on YouTube, that you have not seen on your TV. This is because businesses have seen that people spend more time watching videos on YouTube than on their TV sets.
Given that smart Tv sets can also access the Internet, adverts have now moved to streaming services like Netflix.
So, if you have not yet embraced paying to have your adverts placed on digital media, then you are losing out on a great opportunity to get your target audiences’ attention.
Paying for advertisements on digital media is also less costly, and more effective when it comes to reaching out to the masses.
You will get a huge bump in the number of people who visit your website if you are able to create enticing adverts to run on Google SERPs and other high-profile websites.
Advertising on digital media will increase your profits, without you having to spend a lot of money. Now how can you pass up such an opportunity?
Tip Number 6: Leverage Marketing Tools
As we mentioned earlier, you need digital marketing tools so you can get a proper understanding of your target customers.
You need the tools to collect data so you know how you can reach out to your target customer.
You also need these tools to measure how effectively you are reaching out to the customer, how they are reacting to your outreach messages, and how the messaging you use is converting them into paying customers.
When you are performing digital marketing, you cannot avoid the use of these tools.
Some of the basic tools that you need for digital marketing are:
- A Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) – This is a tool that enables you to collect constant information for your target customers when they opt-in to your email newsletters. You can also use the tool to interact with your target customer.
A CRM can also be used to monitor sales, conversions, and a lot more.
- Reporting and Analytics Tools – these are the tools that you will use to analyze data collected from your existing and prospective customers and create reports that will help you understand your performance better.
The tools will help you direct our efforts to areas that are not performing well, and also see how you can tweak those that are performing well, to perform even better.
Remember, digital marketing is a fluid discipline, and you must observe your performance on a regular basis. These are the tools that will help you do so.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – as we mentioned earlier, this is a critical part of content marketing. You need to ensure that your content is optimized and readable so it can be ranked highly on the search engines.
There are SEO tools that will help you optimize your content with very little effort. All you need to know is that SEO is an ongoing process and it may take some time to get to the top of the SERPs.
Some of the SEO tools that you can use are Yoast and Rankmath when you are using WordPress.
It would definitely be a very challenging task to optimize your content without using these tools.
Tip Number 7: Embrace Automation
As we had mentioned earlier, automating tasks will help you save time and enhance prioritization when performing digital marketing.
When you leverage marketing automation, you can quickly improve the efficiency of your digital marketing efforts and improve the results you get.
Here are some of the areas where you should leverage automation
- Email Marketing -You can schedule when your emails are sent, choose the contacts that the emails are sent to.
You can also set up a series of emails that will automatically guide prospective customers down the buyer’s funnel till they finally make a purchase.
Personalization is easy when you automate emails since you can set up emails based on the needs of each customer segment within your email list.
- Automate Notifications – You can also automate the notifications that you get so it is easy to make follow-ups to people that have replied to your emails or asked for more information.
- Automate Social Media Posts – with automation, you can create a series of social media posts and schedule when they will be shared. This is a great way of employing your sales funnel on your social media channels.
- Automate your Lead Flow- When a user signs up to download a resource, then you can instantly send them a link that they will use to download the resource.
Additionally, you can continue with communications after the person has downloaded the resource, giving more information on the topic so you can help them make a purchasing decision.
- Automate Analysis and Reporting – When you want automatic analytics and reports, tools like CRM and Google Analytics can be of great importance.
These are tools that will help you understand how your business is performing and how effective your digital marketing campaign is.
Tip Number 8: Create valuable content
We had mentioned about creating content to answer questions that people are posing on the search engines. Now, this tip is about creating content that people will find valuable whether they are aware of the need or not.
This is where keyword research and Google Analytics, and Google Alerts data come in.
You will be able to get the keywords that people are searching for and then create content that has the keywords.
The content can be entertaining, informative, or serve any other purpose, even if it was not initially crafted to answer a particular query.
This is how you create blog posts and other resources that can easily be found through the use of keywords.
The goal at this point is to create quality and valuable content.
You can also repurpose content to increase its reach. You can write a blog post for your blog, and create a supporting video, and post it on YouTube. This increases the value of the content tremendously.
Basically, at this point, you are creating content targeted at maintaining the connection and interaction that your current and prospective customers need to stay connected to your brand.
In marketing, the first step that you need to take is to create a relationship with a prospective customer, before you make a sales pitch.
Creating valuable content will meet this objective.
With valuable content, you gain trust from prospective customers and they will be primed to make a purchase when you ask them to.
Credibility is created in this way, Make sure that you do not create click-bait content that promises more than what you offer.
Tip Number 9: Use Video on Social Media
In the year 2021, social media marketing increased tremendously. A large proportion of people spent a lot of time on social media, communicating with their friends and family during the pandemic.
Brands focused their advertising on social media to enable people to see what they had to offer.
On the other hand, consumers spent a lot of time going through video content, more than written content.
This is a trend that will continue in 2022 and beyond.
Social media channels are also enabling people to create more interesting video content on their profiles.
YouTube is one of the leading social media channels when it comes to using video content.
However, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others have also embraced posts that have video.
Social media channels like TikTok also offer a great way to reach out to your target customers, especially those of the younger generation.
Digital marketers have attested to the fact that video is now preferable to written content.
So, if you want to create a tutorial, it may be better to create is=t as a video tutorial, rather than a written one.
You can also embrace interactivity in your video content so people can view links on the videos and click on them to access your website or blog.
This interactivity creates a user experience that is currently attractive to many people on social media.
Actually, surveys show that people prefer interactive video content as opposed to traditional videos.
With interactive video content, people can decide which segments of the video they would like to see, a feature that is now common on YouTube videos.
Tip Number 10: Go Local to Boost Sales
You can also increase your sales by targeting your local consumer base.
You can create digital marketing campaigns that are targeted at local customers.
The first thing that you should do is list your local business in Google My Business.
A survey done by HubSpot showed that 72% of consumers first look for a solution locally before they look for solutions provided by companies that are more than 5 miles away from their homes.
With a Google My Business page, you will instantly be ranked high on the SERPs when people conduct a local search for your products and services.
A Google My Business page also provides a strong backlink resource that can bring people to your website or blog.
Once you have a Google My Business page, you can also use geolocation services, which market your products and services to your local target audience.
Geolocation data allows you to send personalized messages to a small group of people, with the goal of getting them to visit your local store.
A great campaign could be based on the pride that people have in supporting local businesses.
Someone would rather buy from a local business, even when they feel they can get a somewhat better product or service from a provider or supplier who is hundreds of miles away.
So, if you want people to visit your local or online store, from within your locality, you must embrace digital marketing that is targeted at the local populace.
Tip Number 11: Leverage Digital Sales Communication Tools
Today’s consumers are an impatient lot, as we had seen earlier. They want instant gratification at all times.
When a consumer interacts with your sales team, he or she wants them to interact at that moment and not have to wait for a sales call later.
You should try and use the digital sales tools that are available today, to make it easy for people to communicate with your sales team.
Here are some of the communication tools that you can leverage:
- Chatbots – With chatbots, customers can start live communications with your sales team at all times.
Chatbots can be configured to automatically respond to a given set of questions, after which they direct a user to a human representative.
You can also use Drift Video prospecting to put a face to the chatbot. With these videos, the user will not know that he or she is communicating with a bot.
You can also add CTAs to chatbot messages and have users schedule an in-person call if they want to get more information.
- Pre-recorded demos – You can have pre-recorded product demos, which your prospective customers can look at before they reach out to your sales reps.
With the pre-recorded demo, customers can pause, stop and rewatch the demo at their own will.
- Appointment tools – You can use tools like Calendly to enable customers to make appointments to speak to our sales reps.
- E-signatures and Online Transaction tools – you should use e-signatures to personalize your emails and other communications to your target customers.
You should also embrace online transaction tools to process payments securely.
Tip Number 12: Strategically Build your Brand
Every business person knows that first impressions matter. This is why you have to be very careful when you are building your brand.
From the colors you use on your website to the design of your logo; your branding must have a way of attracting your target audience.
This is where you need to engage the services of a branding expert who will guide you in crafting an amazing brand.
If you have a creative streak in you, you should use it carefully and come up with a brand that will stand apart from your competition.
Tip Number 13: Track and Analyze your Spending
You have got to spend money in order to make money.
That is a common saying in the business world.
Digital marketing and branding channels offer several benefits for your business. You will have to spend money, but you have to be smart about it.
Do your due diligence and analyze each platform that you want to use for your digital marketing purposes. Get to weigh the costs versus the benefits it will provide. You should then set achievable goals and then monitor the results.
This kind of analysis helps you know where and how much you should spend on each digital marketing channel.
You must be strategic when it comes to spending money on digital marketing campaigns. You want to spend as little as you can for the best benefit possible.
When you just spend money on a channel without tracking and measuring the results, then you will effectively be burning money.
The best way you can go about this is to start off by making a small investment in each of the channels that you want to use, and then see which ones bring the best results.
Once you have decided on the ones that have a great ROI, you can go ahead and spend more in these channels, and abandon the rest.
You still have to continuously monitor the results that you get and measure them against the costs that you incur.
At times, you may have to tweak the spending in order to get better results in a channel that you feel you have underutilized.
With time, you will have a digital marketing channel ix that works well for your business and you can simply fall back and monitor the results, given that you will have a steady budget for each channel.
Tip Number 14: Leverage SEO to Increase your Online Footprint
As we mentioned earlier SEO is an art and a science that marketers use to improve business rankings on the search engines.
When people type in queries using certain keywords, the best-optimized content for that keyword is displayed first.
You need to make sure that your content is listed on the first page of the SERPs, because very few people go to the second page, etc.
Now there are three main aspects of SEO that you should keep in mind at all times:
- You need to do research and find out what people are looking for in your niche.
- You need to create valuable content, that will be helpful in answering the needs of these users.
- You need to get valuable links coming back to your website from authoritative websites.
Successful SEO techniques will help you become visible and you will reach a lot of people in the process.
Having visibility, or having a large footprint, will boost your sales in the long run.
Always ensure that you are updated on the latest SEO practices, given that Google algorithms are always changing.
Make sure that the user is the central focus of your Sep practices, and avoid all forms of cheating when performing SEO on your website.
Buying links to boost your ranking can get your site banned entirely from the search engines, and this will spell doom for your business.
Like we had mentioned earlier, there are tools that you can use to perform SEO on your content – make good use of these tools.
Tip Number 15: Get to Know Your Customers
In digital marketing, you have to know your customers so you can create campaigns that will resonate with them
You need to know their personal pain points so you can address their needs on a personal level.
As you have learned before, getting to evoke emotions in your target customer will make it easier to convert them into paying loyal customers.
You also need to know the purchasing behaviors of your customer, so you can effectively pitch your sales message to them.
This is here creating user personas comes in.
User personas are fictional characters that represent your target customer base.
You need to factor in generational data, as well as first-party data to be able to understand them, their personal decision-making process, and a lot more.
You can also use Google trends to understand what makes people within your niche tick.
You can understand how to market to your target customer when you analyze data from Google trends.
There is a lot of research required in order to know your target customer on an intimate level.
Remember that you cannot market to an audience that you do not understand.
Tip Number 16: Generate Self Service Content
This is once again driven by the desire that customers have for instant gratification.
You can improve the customer experience that you provide by creating self-service resources that answer the questions that they may pose concerning your products and services.
Such resources keep your audience engaged and will improve the time they spend on your website, which will also improve your ranking on the SERPs.
Some of the self-service resources that you can create are:
A knowledge base
Rather than asking your target audience to wait for hours or days in order to get an answer to a query, you can create a knowledge base that has information that will adequately answer any questions that they may have.
The knowledge base can be crafted by collecting the frequently asked questions that customers ask, and then creating detailed answers for them
You should include images, examples, explanations, links to additional resources, etc., within your knowledge base.
The knowledge base will also be accessible through a Google search, and this helps improve your ranking on the search engines, especially when it comes to getting listed in the Zero-rank or featured snippets position.
Training videos
You can also create training videos that show your target customers how to use your products or services. Some web hosting services have gone the extra mile to show people how to design and host websites on their platforms.
Training videos show that you are a serious provider of the products and services that you sell, and will make people buy more from your business.
When you go to YouTube, you can find several training videos series offered by competing companies and then try to copy what they have done, but with a better twist.
Tip Number 17: Use Account-based Marketing
This is an emerging trend in digital marketing and is mainly used in B2B digital marketing environments.
Account-based marketing, or ABM, is a strategic and personalized marketing technique, which segments business accounts and markets to each segment separately.
A survey conducted by the Information Technology Services Marketing Association shows that 84% of digital marketing experts agree that account-based marketing yields the highest results when compared to other forms of digital marketing.
Tip Number 18: Personalize your Digital Marketing Campaigns
As we had mentioned before, you need to embrace personalization if you want to touch the hearts of your target customers.
The data that you collect will help you in personalizing your approach in order to get better results.
Your CRM is a powerful resource that helps you segment your customer base, so you can send personalized communications to each segment.
The CRM will give you information on their demographics, the websites they visit, the emails that they read, and the resources they have downloaded from you.
Businesses that have embraced personalization can attest to the fact that it improves the sales margins in the long run.
Here are some things that you should keep in mind when leveraging personalization in your communications:
- Keep sending relevant information based on their interests – Once a subscriber has downloaded a resource and submitted their email to your database, you should continue sending them more information based on the resource they downloaded.
This will give you an understanding of what they like to read about, and it will also improve the engagement and interactions rates.
- Address prospects by their names – when you send an email that says “Dear Sir/Madam”, then the prospect will feel like the email is a generic email written by a bot.
When you send an email using the prospect’s name, they feel like you are writing directly to them. According to research, personalized emails elicit a better response as opposed to generic emails.
Tip Number 19: Review your Budget and Strategy
As we mentioned earlier, you have to ensure the way you spend money on your digital marketing channels and tweak the budget to focus on performing channels and abandon those that have no impact on your bottom line.
You must also look at the amount of money that you have used on your digital marketing campaigns as a whole and then see where you need to make changes in your overall strategy.
Take a look at how much you spent on SEO, paid advertising, etc., and then weigh this against the results that you got,
Then you will be able to see where you need to tweak your overall strategy, so you can spend less and still improve the performance of your digital marketing campaigns.
Look at the new tips and tricks that we have laid out above and see how you can incorporate them into your current digital marketing strategy for better results in 2022 and beyond.
You must also tweak your budget so it can adequately fit the strategy that you come up with.
Tip Number 20: Make Use of Google My Business
We had already mentioned Google My Business when we were talking about marketing to your local customer base.
However, there are many other benefits that you can derive from having a Google My Business account.
You can post images, special offers, and a lot more information on your business page, and all these shall be indexed by Google.
Indexing by Google will improve your ranking for keywords used by customers within your niche.
If someone is looking for a “Pizza” and you have added a Pizza Menu on Your Google My Business page, then you have a high chance of being listed on the SERPs.
Add menus if you are a cafe, add the details of your location, add special offers and see your sales improve.
Google My Business is a free tool and there is no reason why you should not make the best use out of it.
The information that you add to this page will also help in listing your business on Google Maps.
Opening hours, website address, physical address, phone numbers, and a lot more information can be added to your Google My Business page.
Tip Number 21: Always be Authentic
Authenticity is a characteristic that is highly valued by customers. It is important that you think about authenticity from the customers’ point of view.
Do not create a brand that you think people will find authentic.
Do your due diligence and find out what would make your brand seem authentic to your customers and include that in your digital marketing campaigns.
If you have an authentic and sincere brand story, you can pull people to your business by creating content using the story.
It can be written, or in the form of a video.
Authenticity portrays an unmeasurable characteristic that has the power of drawing in customers in droves, so keep that in mind.
Tip Number 22: Learn from others
In digital marketing, you can benefit a lot by looking at what others have done before.
You can follow some of the leading digital marketers in the world and learn from their immense experience on how to go about creating a digital marketing campaign.
In Conclusion
Digital marketing is the only way you can be able to reach out to a wide range of customers in the world of today.
Everyone wants to get information on their mobile devices, and you should try and shift your marketing to digital channels.
Remember to create a vibrant social media presence, as this is one way in which you can communicate and engage your target audience in real-time.
You need to be able to reach more people, and use the least number of resources in order to break even in these harsh economic times.
Try out some of the tips and tricks that we have mentioned above and then let us know about your performance in the comments section below.