Basic Digital Marketing
An excellent influencer marketing campaign relies almost entirely on connecting with the right influencers for your brand. When done right, instantly, you can find your KPIs moving in a faster, higher direction.
Multiple studies have shown influencer marketing to be one of the most cost-effective forms of providing brands with an instant boost in revenues. On average, ROI for influencer marketing is $7 per dollar invested. In food, retail, and travel, these are the categories where the most effective influencer marketing exists. If you fall outside of these areas, no worries as influencers certainly have value. Any brand can tap into influencers, as long as the influencers is not in opposition to your brand’s image or credibility. Evidently, choosing the wrong influencer can be a waste of money and/or have dire consequences for the long-term health of your business.
Why influencer marketing is preferred so much more than other strategies is because of how simple and direct it is, particularly with its results. You don’t need to spend hours writing and posting blogs, sharing social media updates, connecting with customers one at a time, and waiting indefinitely for momentum to take shape. Going through an influence, you receive access to potentially millions of people in a single interaction from a voice they trust which thereby capitalizes on word-of-mouth. Because it’s coming from somewhere they know and trust, a consumer’s more likely to buy into a brand, product, or service.
Creating one-of-a-kind amazing copywriting for a website is a skill surprisingly more difficult to master than many imagine. Even so, it’s arguably the single most important skill you can have in ensuring your website’s success.
Think of all the writing a website and brand really has to have – blog posts, social media posts, email marketing, communication with customers and company stakeholders, etc. If you’re not committed to becoming a better writer, hiring a highly skilled copywriter, or developing better marketing copywriting, you may be unknowingly sabotaging your business.
A business writer in this capacity should have the skill to sell. Yes, you want to entertain, educate, establish brand awareness, and build an audience, however ultimately, all of this comes down to one’s ability to sell. If nobody’s buying, no product, service, or company’s going to stay in business. As if all this wasn’t complicated enough, how you write ads for a search engine will be different from what you write for Facebook or Twitter, and that will be different from how blog posts are written, and this will be different from how you build a landing page.
Digital marketing analytics data is a goldmine for any brand in any category of business. NBC’s used social media and digital marketing strategies, based around their analytics data, to drive almost 20 million primetime viewers to its Winter Olympics coverage in 2018. When one couple this with the more than 1.85 billion minutes of live stream digital coverage, NBC delivered the biggest Winter Games coverage there’s ever been.
NBC generated millions of social hits – and this is important – by inviting the audience in for a conversation. NBC didn’t tell anyone to watch but instead focused on creating a conversation around the athletes’ stories and the games. As an example, athletes like US snowboarder Chloe Kim’s stories were shared highlighting the sacrifices they made to get to the Olympics, family and cultural background, and using the athlete’s own narration.
In digital marketing, no one’s selling a product or a service – they’re selling a story. Analyzing the most successful marketing campaigns in the last five years, a commonality shared between all them is a focus on storytelling. It can be a hard skill to learn but if you’re able to tell a story that’s relevant to your audience and seamlessly blend in reference to a product or service inside, the advantage this gives you is tremendous over the competition.
Fifty years ago, marketing and advertising was all about peddling your products or services to consumers. Door-to-door sales was common, speaking direct to the population. Advertisements focused on specific menu items, prices, services, and more. What was being sold decades ago was a lot clearer to the consumer and the general public. These days, marketing’s grown more complex. You’re selling indirectly a lifestyle and a better version of the customer. This strategy’s been used successfully by health, wellness, and fitness companies for years, and now everyone from McDonald’s to The New York Times takes this approach.
Digital marketing employs a mix of business, technology, and traditional advertising approaches. Cultivate a community of passionate customers, potentially from a global audience using these amazing tips, tricks, and techniques.
Voice marketing.
Voice search and voice-related devices are creating a new era in digital marketing. As consumers communicate with devices to look and shop, and browse the Internet, marketers should find a way to match content to the sorts of questions and queries being asked.
Instagram Stories/Facebook Live.
Live streaming on social media is just as valuable in some instances as traditional posting. Instagram and Facebook are the top two social media platforms by far and on these, you can run contests, check in with followers, and build that level of connection you want.
Social media is thought of as a ‘marketer’s dream’ but it is its’ customer service potential which too many businesses forget about. Like it or not, sometimes it’s as if social media is what makes the world go ‘round. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, and other platforms directly connect you to your audience. More than a phone line, email, or anything, social media is your most important form of communication with your audience.
Why social media is so important is because most people see it as a personalized, customizable place where they can speak with friends and family as well as connect with their favourite brands. It’s a place they feel safe to represent themselves, ask questions, and engage. Throughout the past decade, it’s also become a place wherein customers can raise queries, issues, or concerns publicly. If they’re disappointed, a negative comment on social media is your business’ worst marketing nightmare. If it’s a positive review or comment, that can also act as a form of social media marketing. After all, it’s the perception you’re putting out to the audience.
Generating leads for business is strategizing how to capture your audience’s attention and filter it through to a conversion. It’s not always straightforward. Every business is different and their audience might need to be cultivated in a unique way. If you want to build lead generation, there are five things you need to get going.
A website that gives you the chance to post blogs.
There’s a lot of articles out there. Writing a great blog is not easy but it can be very rewarding. Speak from your perspective and don’t simply re-write what others are doing. Find your voice, write on subjects relating to your business or industry, and set up a blog posting schedule. A great article is not only going to act as a lead generator through SEO but also, on social media. Use a click-friendly headline, use subheadings, and make every word count.
Choosing keywords, developing the visual content, structuring the location of your CTAs, and sharing your landing page is all a part of ensuring your marketing sales funnel leads straight to a conversion.
Among your most important elements in closing a customer is the landing page. This is an opportunity to speak directly to your audience. A landing page is where a prospective customer lands when they click on an ad. After you’ve got the customer on-site though, you can still lose them. There are terrible landing pages and amazing landing pages. Here are 5 tips on what you can do to maximize your conversions and turn a motivated buyer into a customer.
Your headline.
The first thing anyone reads on a landing page is the headline. A landing page headline should communicate clearly value, identifying what your offer is and how it provides value. You don’t want to make it too long or complex. It shouldn’t be more than a line or two. Remove unnecessary words. Remember, headlines are all about purpose and value, and should be communicable within three seconds or less.
The value of email marketing campaigns is all in the results. No matter your objective with your emails, if you’re not getting the results you want from it, you’ve got to figure a solution. Search engines and social media platforms cannot generate the same engagement as emails can. They’re very important to long-term digital strategizing. Here are a few suggestions on strategies that will provide you with high-value subscribers and a strong CTR across your email campaign.
Obvious call-to-actions.
If CTAs are not easily spotted, customers are not going to know what to do with your email. Therefore, keep it clear, succinct, and transparent. Guide them through the process to click and convert, and arrange your text, images, and links as appropriate.
Digital marketing can be all trial and error. It’s your analytics which will guide you. If you don’t know where to pay attention to and to what, it can be tough knowing how to move forward. Measuring ROI can involve many elements but if you’re looking at a starting point, here’s some areas you can look.
Knowing ‘why’.
The objective of your marketing campaign may be different from the next one. Knowing why and what you’re trying to achieve can help determine where you want to focus. It’s important all objectives are measurable.
Augmented reality is giving small business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations the opportunity to add value, solve problems in their supply chain or sales funnel, and enhance the user experience.
AR adds computer-generated imagery into a real-world environment, allowing users to interact with the digital realm. In shopping, entertainment, and work, augmented reality is making a difference.
Tourism.
Travel brands are using augmented reality to provide visitors information about their destination and related sites to see. AR apps are already being employed at international resorts to help guests navigate through the various amenities and local regions.
Construction.
eCommerce merchants invest a lot of time into generating traffic but they oftentimes focus on paid over organic. Even so, SEO eCommerce strategies are going to be key to grabbing customers from sites like Amazon and others.
Especially if you have products consumers can’t find anywhere else, you’re going to want to heighten the quality of your content, improve site architecture, and do whatever you can to increase search visibility. Here are 6 simple SEO eCommerce strategies to help you accomplish just that.
Optimize for fast load time.
Snapchat, as a social media platform, might seem like a hub of millennials talking and sharing pictures, texts, and video. Snapchat has not caught on as much as other platforms have. That said, it still serves an important purpose in branding and business.
Snapchat has accumulated more than 190 million daily active users and has been around for more than a few years now. Originally, Snapchat made its name off allowing people to send messages which self-destruct, delete, and disappear after a few seconds. Today, it’s a hub of communications and maintains a huge audience among females between 13 and 34 years of age.
Are you struggling to generate blog traffic – you’re not the only one. It’s estimated that as many as 70 percent of blogs struggle with attracting an audience. Sometimes, there are outside influences keeping people from your blog like an issue with your digital marketing. At other times though, it might be just because nobody wants to read it. That’s tough to hear but if you’re only getting a handful of views, it might be time to consider you need to switch things up. If nobody wants to read your blog, here’s perhaps why.
You’re posting irregularly.
Nobody wants to read a blog if they don’t know when to click on it to see new posts. Blogs and content marketing are all about strategy. That involves posting on a regular schedule. Even if creativity has ebbs and flows, you need to post regularly. Whether it’s once a week, bi-weekly, monthly or whenever, you need to get this down.
eCommerce conversion is a priority for any online shopping site, no matter the product. ‘Selling’ is the name of the game. When you increase your conversion rate, you improve your revenues and profits. Even small changes in how you optimize a website can produce sizeable results in revenues. If your goal is to sell more, read on.
Home page optimization.
Your home page is your home base. Most eCommerce pages waste this real estate. Nevertheless, here’s where you want to add your top-selling products, trendiest products, special offers, and timely messaging to get people clicking. Identify a path you want users to follow and use a CTA to get them there.
Nostalgic marketing from the 1950s and 1960s are sometimes troublesome to examine. The messaging is oftentimes incredibly dated, sometimes offensive, and not always application to contemporary audiences. That said, there are some ways nostalgic ads are still used in digital marketing today and rather effectively!
An artful style.
Ads beginning in the early 1940s applied contemporary art trends, creating a visual style that was extremely successful at selling a wide variety of products. Similar and also, distinct from what has been used in the past, different geometric and symmetrical forms still work to this day although now we have typefaces, new shapes, and new designs to work from. A lot of contemporary advertisements playing off nostalgia such as Banana Republic’s 1960s-Esque Mad Men-inspired campaign utilized various artistic shapes and emphasis.
You don’t need to spend a fortune to generate big SEO results in the landscape of digital marketing. Although there’s a cost, what you receive in ROI if you plan it strategically can easily justify the investment.
Combining different digital strategies, there’s a lot of positive results to be had with SEO. For example, we know SEO conversion rates are roughly 10 percent higher than social media marketing and they rise by 15 percent on mobile devices.
If you’re looking for a list of SEO growth hacks, we’d like to share some that we’ve used to make the most from search engine marketing budgets. Using these, your conversions will cost less and you’ll run a smarter digital marketing campaign overall.
Interactive marketing is a form of digital marketing which prioritizes interaction to connect customers to the brand. It has proven to be highly effective with engagement levels and creating brand awareness. Using it correctly, you’ll hang onto their attention for longer, create more excitement, and a customer will be more likely to remember your brand afterwards. A key feature of interactive marketing is it gives users control over their experience, which evidently helps to customize and memorize the brand interaction. Here are some popular interaction-based marketing strategies used to give brands an advantage in 2019.
Augmented reality (AR).
The ultimate difference between amazing content and terrible content is performing. High quality, high-performance content is what every brand wants. A blog carries with it the potential to amplify your brand’s awareness in the marketplace and establish you as a thought leader. Brands experiencing trouble monitoring their efforts in content marketing can be referred to 5 apps. Although you may not find all of these to be particularly valuable, these are a great place to start in finding the right combination of oversight tools.
ContentCal
ContentCal is a calendar that makes it easy to market content across multiple digital channels. When promotion and/or publishing is challenging and you’ve got multiple platforms to manage, you can streamline everything through ContentCal. All data and social media efforts can be organized here including ideas, campaign information, planning out visual campaigns, and forecasting future efforts.
Influencer marketing campaigns are all the rage in digital marketing right now. Even so, sometimes, brands don’t get the return they hope for. So what differentiates the brands who succeed with influencers compared to those who don’t – well, the answer’s what determines whether influencer marketing is a waste of time for your website or not.
Influencer marketing is in itself a clever invention. In the past two decades, something horrifying happened in the marketing and advertising industry. It was found, as consumers become desensitized to ads online and in-person, they would ignore them and/or wouldn’t trust these advertisements. As companies looking to advertise, what is there to do if most marketing isn’t going to work – well, enter in influencers. Although some people don’t trust online ads, what they do trust are recommendations from friends, family, and faces they know. All in the name of reaching an audience, the market opened up for social media influencers to sell posts to brands looking to connect to their audience. This proved to generate some absolutely massive returns for a lot of brands!
Competitive advantages are hard to find and achieve, in digital marketing circles. Connecting with customers is an investment that takes time. Riding the latest digital marketing trends is an opportunity to create momentum you can sustain long-term if you know how to work it right. Whatever you do this year, don’t ignore any of 2019’s biggest digital marketing trends.
Geo-marketing grows.
Geo-marketing is to target digital marketing efforts by location. This allows companies to create awareness in a specific area without wasting money on customers elsewhere. Digital advertisements specific to mobile users seem to work most effectively in location-based marketing. In 2019, we expect to find it get even more detailed. For example, some business owners are now setting up a geo-mapping target advertisement for a quarter-mile around a competitor’s location. Any time a customer’s in the vicinity, they receive an ad for your business. Approaches like this may be seen as a low-blow but they produce high engagement numbers.
Blogs, articles, and content you’ve developed covered by a newspaper, magazine, blog, or influencer is a big get. Whether it’s as a part of a feature story, a quick mention, or something more extensive, this can potentially expose you to a big audience. The problem, of course, is it’s incredibly difficult to get picked up by the media. Distributing a press release, few publications may notice. Launching a press event, as an unknown brand, you’re unlikely to attract enough attention to generate any significant interest.
Despite the trouble, if you understand how journalists and influencers think and what they’re looking for, you can help naturally market your content to these people. For example, journalists routinely find stories online to write about or highlight. Depending on the category of the writer, technology writers go to a select number of sites to find stories, business bloggers will focus on certain hashtags and certain sites, and it goes on and on like that. Chances are if you can get one journalist’s attention, you can probably get more – potentially hundreds. So seek out the communities where journalists are picking up stories and submit to these communities your content.
Competing against established, strong websites with large financial backings and already with seemingly infinite momentum from Google is tough. Nevertheless, low-cost video marketing campaigns through YouTube can help generate enough brand awareness to put you in the game.
YouTube’s the second largest search engine in the world, with billions of searches monthly. No matter what service or product you’re selling, there are plenty of possible YouTube videos you can create – how-to videos, customer testimonials, explainers, behind-the-scenes looks, and more. If we haven’t sealed the deal yet, let’s share one more thing. Contemporary consumers are watching more video than they are reading blogs.
To small businesses, organic traffic is highly valuable and key to sustaining a website’s growth. Investing in the right SEO tools in 2019 can help support your organic search engine marketing strategies. These are some of the best SEO tools to use for things like keyword research, search engine traffic analysis, competition analysis, and link building.
Moz Link Explorer
Moz Link Explorer serves to identify issues that exist in your website’s structure. For example, Link Explorer can see whether all your links are being indexed by Google, how backlinks could be impacting your domain score, and what your competition’s link structure is like. When it comes to SEO link building, this tool is almost essential!
Others’ social media campaigns are where you can learn a lot about how certain marketing strategies work and how they can be adapted to your brand. The power of social media is undisputable. After all, 78 percent of businesses have a dedicated team working their social media. If you haven’t figured out how to maximize your campaign and achieve your social media goals, here are five successful social media campaigns to pull inspiration from.
Red Bull
Using Instagram, Red Bell sought to increase brand awareness and extend the brand to new audience segments. They specifically targeted the selling of their ‘Summer Edition’ energy drink through Instagram color-coded filters portraying lifestyle events in the summer. They then connected this filter with the product. Red Bull routinely jumped on several summer-related hashtags as well. The result – 1.2 million consumers reached. When you leverage the massive audience on a platform like Instagram, the results are real.
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