Marketing of yesterday was one-sided. Many brands used radio, television, and outdoor media to broadcast their messages. Today, that one-message to many styles of marketing isn’t as effective.
With the power of the internet having an online presence is imperative for any brand or business. Digital Marketing allows you to laser target your audience and gets your message to them where they digitally live or communicate the most.
In the competitive digital marketplace, You have to know what type of business you run and who your targeted customers are. Many digital marketing tools are available, but it’s important to know which can work for you and exponentially grow your business. By learning, testing and measuring results and the performance of the digital marketing tools that you are implementing you can see which work best for your business. In that sense, Our Forward Thinking team is sharing these guidelines that can help you find out the best tools to use for the better of your business.
Effective Digital Marketing Channels
To identify what digital marketing channels and tools will work best for you. We are going over a few of the most used channels and how they work.
Email Marketing
Every business needs to understand email marketing and how it can be beneficial in their business strategy from connecting with customers to understanding customer habits. As technology continually evolves and trends are constantly changing email marketing continues to dominate digital marketing and still remains one of the most effective digital marketing channels.
For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI it more users for less. This is best for business with in-house digital marketing teams because Email delivers the highest ROI for marketers and highly effective for acquiring new customers. Examples of email sent are newsletters, promotional content and welcome series.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Paid advertising channels such as Pay-Per-Click advertising can deliver targeted traffic right away. This method is simple, you pay to get in front of your targeted audience. Basically, your purchasing visits to your website as opposed to earning those visits organically. An effective PPC strategy relies profoundly on how strategically you choose keywords and also how much you’re willing to invest in bidding and ad placement along with, how much you are willing to pay for acquiring one customer.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO helps maximize the potential of your website as a business tool, build your brand reputation and establish your name as the leader in your industry. SEO has the power to change and better your business. If you are looking to increase the number of customers, sales leads and clients you have, you will need to be as visible as possible to your potential customers. 93% of all the online experiences began with a search. That means search engines can produce massive traffic and leads to your business if done the right way.
75% of all clicks on search engine results pages go to organic results. Organic search engine optimization drives traffic, boosts rankings, and content is what drives SEO. Content marketing is the foundation of every successful SEO campaign. Getting your website to rank on Google is not about peppering your pages with one or two keywords. Google’s algorithms focus quality content that engages, builds trust, and establishes authority. Our publishing house’s content marketing strategies are built around these concepts. Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to determine whether to rank a page for a keyword or not. LSI allows Google to associate related words to a specific topic instead of simply relying on the appearance of specific keywords or phrases. For example, Google can associate the phrases “golf bags” and “golf equipment” with the main keyword, “golf clubs”. Inserting these related keywords in your pages will make your website more relevant to users and in turn, Google will see your website as an authoritative website and index you appropriately, at the top of the SERP’s. Writing for LSI requires more than just basic keyword research and writing. That’s why our journalists and marketers that combine creative writing skills with proven marketing strategies to develop content that impresses human audiences and search engines alike.
Display Advertising
Display Advertising is a form of online advertising that can help businesses connect with customers on their favorite sites and apps. Display AD’s can appear on various types of websites such as blogs, news sites, LinkedIn, youtube, and many more. It can help businesses with marketing teams promote and generate awareness when people are browsing online. Using Display Ad’s analytics you are able to track the number of clicks, impressions, and conversions your ad has generated. Payments for these display ads are usually based on Cost-Per-Impression (CPM) which is usually more cost-effective compared to the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) scheme typical of PPC advertising.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social media has been one of the most dominant digital marketing channels in the modern digital era that business owners and new age marketers can leverage. Integrated social media marketing expands your reach and increases your brand presence online. New businesses can benefit greatly from social media and can create strong brand advocates while also driving up leads and sales.
The number of social media users worldwide will continue to grow in 2019 and expected to grow to 2.95 billion by 2020 increasing 13% year by year. As social media continues to grow, many businesses and digital marketing agencies are planning to increase their SMM budgets this year. Digital marketers should know what social media channels are most effective for their business along with, knowing how to use social media to promote their brand or business to their targeted audience. A simple guide to what social media channels business are using:
YouTube – If you want to build your brand’s identity, showcase products, or connect with your audience in fresh and exciting ways Youtube can be excellent for you
Facebook – If you want to target any general consumer you need to be using Facebook. On Facebook, It’s imperative that you learn what groups and pages your targeted customer is using.
Twitter – If you want to generate brand awareness around your business quickly. Twitter might be good for you. It can be used for businesses and brands to connect with a relevant and engaged audience
LinkedIn – Reaching out to professionals, business owners and other Business-to-Business (B2B) leads and targeted customers, then LinkedIn would be the perfect social network for you.
Instagram – If visual and images are your focused point for promoting your personal brand or company products Instagram might be your best bet. Instagram now has more than 800 million monthly users and 80 percent of those accounts are following a business. To add, the average Instagram user can spend up to 1 hour daily on the app. Instagram as an SMM tool can add great value to businesses.
Content Marketing
To understand why your brand is so important, it can be useful to first consider the role of content marketing. The aim with any content marketing campaign is not only to gain more exposure by climbing the ranks of Google and by providing content that can be shared on social media: it’s also to try and help you build authority and trust with your audience.
Content marketing generally tends to refer to the process of publishing content on your own website so that you create ways to people to find your brand (through Google) and so that you can build trust and authority.
With the implementation of a good content strategy, you will see an increase in organic traffic to your website. It takes dedication and focus, there are no shortcuts.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the revenue sharing between online advertisers (and merchants) and online salespeople. Compensation and pay are based on performance measures, normally in the form of clicks, sales, and registrations. The advertisers and merchants are normally referred to as affiliate merchants, and publishers or salespeople are known as affiliates.
The many benefits of affiliate marketing include the potential for making lots of money. You can automate a lot of the advertising process and receive payment only for desired results, which includes sales, registrations, and clicks.
Online Public Relations
Online PR activity is closely associated with improving results from many of the other digital marketing communications techniques in particular social media, SEO (link-building), partnership marketing and viral marketing/word-of-mouth marketing.
Online PR can be a great, low-cost technique for making more people aware of your brand or website, but it requires a lot of hard work – there are no short corners.
The Selection Process
The digital marketing channels listed above are an amazing tool for business owners utilize independently or as part of an overall digital marketing campaign. The key to a marketing campaign success is to execute smart, measurable, achievable, reasonable and time-bound goals also known as smart goals by taking careful considerations of these important aspects below:
Determine your primary goals company that you would like to achieve.
Some of these goals that your business may need to instigate includes
Brand Awareness – A strong brand comes from a place of truth about what a business authentically represents, and about what its products mean to its customers. It’s not magic, it’s insight. If you’re looking to build a brand you should look into these digital marketing campaigns
Social media channels such as Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube or Instagram can help businesses increase brand awareness by engaging with their targeted audiences and developing a relationship with qualified leads
The strongest channel to promote visual communications are platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, youtube, and Vimeo. Participating in online and offline events can also bring strong brand awareness around your business.
Increase Sales Revenue – If your brand or business is interested in selling products online. Paid media is an effective way to increase traffic, engagement and ultimately sales which is perfect for any business looking to sell online.
Advertisement – Display Ads are good for using other websites, social media, apps, and blogs. Most Display Ads use banners through flash, images, and video.
Pay-Per-Click – Uses a combo of Google Ads, Bing Ads, even Facebook Ads for PPC campaigns.
Retargeting – Capitalizes on visitors who have already been to your website but may not convert and your ad appears on another web page that the user is visiting.
Social Media Ad’s – Between Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube advertising platforms you can reach over 1 billion people and target your audiences with a lot of options.
Paid content influencers – Building marketing campaigns using Influencer marketing or social media influencers to gain sales and/or brand recognition.
Paid content promotion – content promoted by a platform, another brand or business.
Lead Generation – If you’re looking to convert your website visitors into leads. For example; a combination of all digital marketing channels to generate traffic to a targeted landing page that gathers information from the visitor which allows businesses to communicate with that visitor directly.
Educating Customers – Educating customers in their beginner’s stage can be beneficial to businesses. Sharing valuable information to your customers can build trust between your brand and potential clients. A business can use content and visuals to explain to their customer how product or services can help them.
Generate Traffic – An actionable way to generate traffic can be done mainly by using long-term SEO and content marketing. All digital marketing channels can be traffic generators. We suggest you pick two channels to start marketing on to drive traffic.
Define your budget
Digital Marketing isn’t cheap but it doesn’t have you be expensive nor ineffective for you either. We recommend you budget around 12% – 20% of your revenue for marketing. Budget allowance can include but not limited to paid advertising segments, payment for content creation services, payments for staff etc.
Selecting Talent and Team
Maintaining a digital marketing campaigns..
Digital marketing takes full-time commitment and high level of expertise.
If you are looking to hire an in-house marketing team these are some positions you should look for when evaluating a team to grow your business:
- Copywriter
- Campaign Manager
- Graphic Designer
- Social Media Manager
If you don’t want to hire a Team:
Partner with a marketing team or digital agency: You will have the assurance that you need by having an expert behind you tracking, testing, tweaking, and making your machine work.
You must build a team around your strengths and weaknesses. It doesn’t make sense to have a business that owns you. Instead, you should own your business.
We recommend you choose your business objectives the pick two channels to reach your goals. We also suggest that you get started with Social Media Ads and SEO to drive traffic and build awareness.
