Digital marketing can be one of the best ways to increase your business, as long as you put in the effort to make it work for you.
Whether you’re looking to gain more customers or spread the word about your company and its offerings, these 10 digital marketing strategies will get you moving in the right direction. It’s time to get started!
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) has come a long way since it was first invented. While early SEO efforts were centered around stuffing keywords onto pages, there is now an emphasis on producing high-quality content that will appeal to your customers.
To reap all of SEO’s benefits, you need to use many digital marketing strategies at once, including social media marketing and website design.
When you do, you will enjoy increased brand recognition, a better search engine ranking, and more traffic coming through your site.
Social media optimization
Most business owners are now familiar with what social media is, and that their company needs to be on some of these platforms.
However, many of them don’t have a strategy for growing and engaging their followers. The first step in creating an effective social media marketing plan is to find out where your customers spend time online.
Start by asking your customers directly where they get their news, and take note of which social networks they follow you on.
Once you’ve established where your target market spends time online, start by connecting with them through multiple channels.
Email marketing
It’s one of your biggest tools to reach customers and get them engaged with your business. However, keeping a communication channel open can be difficult without knowing what you want to say—and how to say it effectively.
To ensure that you’re not just sending out junk mail, take some time to create an email marketing plan before you hit send.
First, identify who you want to reach out to (prospective customers) and determine how frequently they should hear from you (once per week or once per month).
Next, decide which channels will deliver your message—be it email newsletters or push notifications on social media—and which days/times of day will work best for reaching them.
Video marketing
If you’re looking to ramp up your social media marketing, video is a great place to start. You need a phone and the ability to be online for a few minutes.
Just make sure that you have permission from whoever will be in your video before uploading it. You don’t want to get sued because someone was recording their property or likeness without their consent.
If you’re not quite confident on camera yet, no worries—you can simply describe what you’re selling in an informational post instead of producing a video. Also, be sure to check out Twitch and YouTube Gaming for some inspiration if all else fails!
Link building
Before you even think about marketing, you should focus on building your company’s reputation. Make sure everything that’s said about your business is positive, and make sure everything said about your competitors is negative.
Use social media to monitor what people are saying about you, then address any issues with satisfied customers directly. If a customer isn’t happy with something they bought from you, fix it—or work hard to make them happy again.
By constantly monitoring and addressing customer service issues, you can keep potential customers happy and prevent damaging rumors from spreading online. Also, remember to respond to reviews of your products or services (both good and bad) promptly.
Analytics
This might be an old hat to some, but if you’re still keeping tabs on your web stats with Excel or Word, it’s time to get serious.
Allocate a certain amount of time for digital analytics every day so that you can see how many people are visiting your site and where they’re coming from. You can use Google Analytics as a starting point; just make sure you have an idea of which types of reports work best for your industry.
For example, if you sell home goods online, a general report showing page views is not going to be very informative.
Reputation management
Developing and implementing a reputation management strategy is essential for any company looking to build goodwill with its clients.
Social media marketing is an especially cost-effective way to promote a brand and make sure that negative content doesn’t outweigh positive information about your business.
Although social media marketing has its benefits, it can sometimes do more harm than good if implemented incorrectly.
Brands should consider how much effort they want to put into managing their reputations online before making major investments in social platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.
Mobile applications
If you want to make money on your phone, there are plenty of apps that will let you do just that. From booking hotels to hailing a cab, these apps take advantage of what makes your smartphone special: it’s always with you.
That way, you can earn a little extra money or work on task-building if you find yourself with some free time in between other appointments. Many of these applications can also help you engage with your friends and local community and build a reputation for yourself through social media.
If nothing else, it’s worth downloading just for fun (or for resale later if they ever go out of style). The app-developing process is fairly simple but time-consuming; after all, building an app from scratch takes time.
Industry events
To get more customers, you may have to rely on your partners. Inbound marketing strategies like content creation and social media are effective, but they’re also an extremely resource-intensive way to drive traffic.
Partnering with other businesses that already have a good source of traffic can take some of that burden off you and allow you to scale up your efforts faster than would otherwise be possible.
These relationships should be mutually beneficial, so it helps if you’re bringing value to their business as well.
Building partnerships
Partnerships have become a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy. Even if you’re working with an agency, there will come a time when you need to reach out to another company to cross-promote your business or offer complementary services.
With that in mind, it’s important to choose your partners wisely: be sure they are aligned with your brand and aren’t blatantly trying to steal traffic from you by masquerading as a news source or another brand.
You don’t want customers confused about who they should trust—you want them to come back because they like and trust your brand.
Finding genuine and mutually beneficial partnerships is much easier than it used to be thanks to social media making connecting much simpler; just make sure not all that glitters is gold.