Basic Digital Marketing

 COVID-19 has changed social media habits and patterns in substantial ways. As a digital marketing firm, this has opened up major opportunities to feature brands in new and exciting ways.

If you still see social media as simply a communication channel for users to keep in touch with friends, you’re missing out on the multi-billion dollar value platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and others have.

Shift your priorities. Take control. Re-engage your business. Reinvent, innovate, and earn customers. Here are some of the biggest insights we’ve seen from the past year dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic on social media.

SEO, aka search engine optimization, is used by brands to attract sales, bring traffic to their website, and drive growth. It’s a key digital marketing strategy.

SEO has changed so much since the early days of keyword-loading and backlink-filling. More sophisticated and technical than it’s ever been, today’s SEO relies on a mix of on-page and off-page optimization strategies to place high-quality websites.

In this guide, we provide all the answers to grow your small business website with SEO best practices.

 COVID-19 has cut small businesses down. Some have had to shut their doors permanently. A marketing plan centered on social media is your opportunity to re-establish your brand and cultivate a following.

 There’s still time. If you haven’t yet optimized your social media marketing for this new environment, the benefits are still there and the effort will be worth it.

 Let’s look at how other businesses and brands have been using social media in the COVID-19 pandemic. When done successfully, you do two things – re-establish your brand and cultivate growth.

What Makes Social Media A Successful Strategy?

 Being active and having a goal-driven social media marketing plan. This is how you build presence.

 Brands who are using social media the right way have tapped into it as a customer service channel, are generating leads, expanding their audience, driving sales, increasing web traffic, and recording feedback.

 Set goals. Have multiple goals in mind that you can measure. If you don’t know what you’re looking to accomplish, there’s no way to know if a plan is working. Being active isn’t enough. Discover the objectives that would benefit you in the largest way possible.

 Do you run a business? If the answer’s yes, you should be selling online.

Are you looking to make the highest profits possible this year? If the answer’s yes, you definitely want to be selling online right now.

Do you sell products and services to customers locally or internationally? Once again, if the answer’s yes, you should be selling online.

Selling online is the art of eCommerce. Regardless of what kind of business you operate, eCommerce has room for every room. The consumer demand is there. Web design and digital marketing services are tailor-made for eCommerce websites. If you don’t already have a storefront online, get one. Here’s why.

Crucial to any marketing is its ability to connect. A brand can make anything it wants from the connection. From sales and revenues and profits to social media numbers and engagement metrics, it all comes down to how well a campaign connects.

A lot of marketers do it wrong. They don’t focus on the customer. They focus on making unsubstantiated claims. “We do it better.” “We are the best.” “We are different.” Though all important assuming what’s being said is true, claims don’t prioritize the consumer.

The ‘modern consumer’ is intelligent and experienced with ad campaigns and marketing messaging. As a brand, it is your task to target your audience, capture their business, and then nurture that relationship in the long-term to facilitate further benefit.

This article is about target-and-capture marketing with the modern consumer. Make it your business to successfully connect with your target audience. Do this and wonderful things can happen for your brand.

 Don’t look at 2020 as a write-off year. Too many have. It’s lazy and short-sighted.

 From the worldwide pandemic, no one expected the economic shutdown, it’s no secret that most businesses have struggled. With every new market, however, there breeds opportunity.

 Some brands have gone on the offensive in the last six months and are in fact thriving – not just surviving! The game hasn’t changed. The objective is the same. Profitability, revenues, more customers, more sales. What has changed, however, is consumer behaviour.

 There is a wealth of opportunity out there left for your brand to grab onto and maximize. Avoid the pitfalls of operating a profit-seeking business in COVID-19 by strengthening your brand representation, re-focusing on reaching and keeping customers, and investing in digital marketing.

Are You A Survivor or a Thriver?

 Before we move forward, ask yourself this exact question. If you just want to survive, good luck.

 Unfortunately, that’s not the type of results digital marketing is in the business of making. Presumably, find help elsewhere.

 If you want to thrive, now’s the time to overhaul your marketing, double down, and commit. Forward-looking projections should prioritize how you’re going to overcome and transform, adapting to new consumer behaviours and a new disruption.

 Don’t just keep up. Step up. Stop sitting back and set the foundation for your brand’s future. Disruptions happen all the time in the marketplace. Successful brands remain successful by evolving. Like Darwinism, only the strong and smart will survive. Even major corporate industry-leaders are faltering because they haven’t made the right moves. Here’s where to start.

SEO has changed significantly this year. It’s grown even more competitive in the COVID era.

Businesses are seeing more value in moving operations online, opening eCommerce stores, marketing via search engines and social media, and continuing to see revenues even in a pandemic.

To outpace your competition and rank high on search engines like Google, a small business website SEO strategy is needed. Let this be your intro to search engine optimization.

What you will read in this article are tested techniques that will maximize the likelihood of not only a first-page ranking but a first-place ranking. Here is what all businesses need to know when building their COVID-19 recovery digital marketing strategy.

 2020 isn’t the year any of us were expecting. Every business on the planet has seen disruptions somewhere. Customers have disappeared. Profits that once were skyrocketing have now bottomed out for many corporations and small businesses. Some have even faced the worst – permanent closures.

Though the coronavirus pandemic is still in full swing and with no end yet in sight, the initial shutdown has faded to reveal a partial reopening with new rules and safety policies. So companies have reopened. Great news! However, this doesn’t mean the customers, profit opportunities, and revenues have returned.

Make no mistake. It’s a tough time. Making money on top of breaking even will be a goal and beyond that, projections on profitability aren’t even worth making with the volatility of the environment right now. Despite all the bad, opportunity is still there. A business that works proactively today sets them up for success in the future.

Content is marketing’s secret sauce. It’s why people click. It’s how new brands establish themselves. It’s how existing brands sell more products than the competition. All industries are reliant on quality of content.

Content marketing is increasing in value. Even as consumer behaviour changes, content is something every business needs to learn to specialize in. Here are the best content marketing strategies and guides on how to do content marketing.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is your best form of advertising. It’s an ‘ad in disguise’, in a way. The vast majority of Internet users are using some sort of ad blocking software. Your traditional Internet marketing PPC ads no longer work.

Can social media marketing make you money – if you deliver your campaign correctly, it absolutely should.

Social media is a favourite subject of new businesses. After all, it’s free advertising. You make a post. It goes out. Potentially, thousands of users will see it and maybe way, way more. Unfortunately, to get the best results, it’s not this simple.

You have to get noticed. Dozens of brands like yours are already on social media. They have audiences feeding likes, shares, and attention. How you get your target audience locked into your brand on social media requires nothing short of strong, effective, and focused social marketing.

Your customer’s your best promoter. A great customer’s worth their weight in gold. A customer willing to promote you to their friends and family, or leave a positive review, can pay off in dividends.

Word-of-mouth advertising in digital marketing trumps all. It always has in marketing. It’s the ultimate ‘new business’ generator. When we hear an opinion we trust give their approval on a product or brand, it knowingly and unknowingly influences our decision-making around said brand in a number of ways.

So how do you turn your customer into an influencer marketing opportunity – there are several ways.

When you sell, you survive. Sales are how business gets by. Next year, eCommerce sales will increase to $4.88 trillion globally. A large reason why is SEO.

Search engine optimization is about getting visibility in the cutthroat world of the internet. Competition is always learning. New digital marketing trends are on the upswing. SEO has not gone away.

SEO gets you noticed. It helps you convert prospects into customers. It gives a business momentum. SEO = sales.

SEO best practices have changed a lot over time. If you don’t know what works for SEO in 2020, don’t worry. We’ve got it covered. Here are the best SEO strategies to maximize sales and increase revenues.

Even expert social media marketers sometimes don’t want to admit to themselves when something’s not working.

Why a strategy on social media isn’t working often can be tied to one or more truths. Despite changes in algorithms, platforms, and social media trends, some things just stay the same. Every brand needs to hear these. Here are some social media selling truths you can use to sell more, create more followers, and get more from your social strategy.

Your presence isn’t guaranteed sales

Creating a profile and making some posts doesn’t equate to success. Social media selling is science, art, and adaptability. You’ve got to move quick, be smart, and be willing to change what you’re doing according to what’s working.

Happiness and joy. Sadness and tears. Anger and frustration. Emotions invoke a response. They motivate action. When we build marketing on emotion, it connects!

Think about it. The most meaningful purchases a person makes are based on emotion. The products, brands, and companies we connect with most deeply on are an emotional level.

Emotion is in the art of storytelling. A brand tells a story and it humanizes them. Even a customer who might not see value or who may not understand how a product relates to them can connect with an emotional story.

It’s more effective than any blog or article. It has more impact than a professionally-done infographic or photo. We’re talking about video marketing.

Years ago, you had to spend tens of thousands to film video and then buy ad space for it. Technology’s made it possible to launch a video marketing campaign for as little as $100 or less.

Creating videos for digital platforms on smartphones as well as YouTube and Facebook is a science and an art. You want to capture attention and you want your content to get shared. Fortunately, users are looking for videos every day to watch.

Shares spread the word. More people see your posts and with that, you get more leads and conversions. You instantly expand your reach with shareable content.

Every day, 2 million blogs are published. Those articles are shared millions of times on social platforms. That’s a lot of noise to cut through. Shares only help. If you write your content right, maximize effectiveness. If you create share-friendly content, you maximize visibility.

Brands struggle with organic reach. If you aren’t getting the shares you want, find a fix. Change what you’re posting and how. Shares remain the most important target for brand awareness on social media. Here’s where to start with getting more shares on your posts.

Influencers are integrated into every social media platform. Instagram has them. YouTube’s filled with these personalities. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, and other sites love influencers.

Have you thought about hiring an influencer for your digital marketing campaign – if not, start. Influencers have a huge reach. They can drastically help increase likes, shares, followers, and revenues. Here are 21 reasons to hire an influencer on your next social media marketing campaign.

1 – Influencers are more relatable than celebrities

Celebrities live a privileged lifestyle. They can be very disconnected from an everyday person’s day to day. Influencers are considered more trustworthy, authentic, and relatable. Celebrity sponsorships have been happening forever! Leverage the newfound trust in influencers and generate an even higher return.

SEO is just as important today as it was a decade ago. Search engine optimization, aka SEO, is vital digital marketing. If you know what SEO is and you already have a strategy, you might think you don’t need to read this article – wrong.

SEO algorithms have changed a lot in the last couple of years. Mobile sites have priority. Voice search has impacted how sites rank. Some factors are not so important anymore. Elements are always changing around the algorithms that dominate what makes good optimization.

When SEO works, it gets more eyes on you. More visibility for your website. More leads. More conversions, if you set your content strategies right. You build brand awareness and position your website to maximize its potential. Here is what you need to be successful in SEO in 2020.

Do you ever feel like you’re writing and re-writing the same thing – this isn’t good content marketing. No one wants to read uninspired content marketing.

Even the best content marketers can get caught in a rut. When you have to turn out new marketing every week or two, eventually, ideas run short.

If your content lacks excitement or originality, stop. Assess where you’ve gone wrong. If you are not having any fun creating content, you can’t expect your audience to feel any different.

What is the best content marketing approach for engagement?

The best way to write content and create a content marketing campaign is variety. Switch it up. Move from content that’s info-based to opinion. Write out a range of different content types.

Writing emails is hard. This is why a lot of email marketing campaigns don’t always get results. You don’t want to come off like a spam email. You want to be persuasive, have a message that’s well thought out, and which contribute value to the reader’s life.

If you are not getting replies to your email marketing, this article will help you improve your writing skills. The objective may be to get a click but the underlying purpose of an email marketing message is to start a conversation in the head of a reader. If your response rate is lower than expected, here’s what to do.

Communities are born and bred off hashtags. International movements, from #metoo to #blacklivesmatter, all began with a hashtag. They’re the single most influential thing you can type into a social post.

If you want to attain success on social media as a new, unknown brand, or as a company already established, it’s through hashtags that you’re going to reach people. Use hashtags correctly and you can light up social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

What’s great about hashtags is that they don’t cost a thing. It’s all on you to choose social media hashtags, create your own, and use them to entertain, inform, and participate. This article’s to help you get a strong grasp on what’s the right approach to hashtags on a social media campaign.

Social media marketing is vital to digital branding. Every year though, things change. Updates roll out regularly and consumer demographics are always fluctuating. On a month to month basis, there can be massive changes in how to administrate a social media marketing campaign.

To save your budget, time, and effort only for the platforms that matter, we wanted to accumulate basic social media statistics from 2020 that show you who is using social media and why. After all, if you don’t know who is using a platform, you can’t expect to successfully target the user.

Every platform has user needs and habits. Once we have a grasp on those, it becomes much easier to see whether Twitter or Instagram’s better social platform for your brand. Culled from sources like Hootsuite, here is the latest data on social media sites and where to focus marketing efforts.

Millennials, millennials, millennials. Doesn’t the world just love talking about millennials? While companies were busy figuring out a way to market to millennials, little did they know that it wouldn’t be long before the generation’s time passed.

This year, Generation Z – those born between 1996 and 2010 – will make up 40 percent of all customers. The first generation born into a world of Internet, smartphones, social media, and technology, marketing to youth under 24 years of age is a different animal altogether than millennials.

Just like the world once bet to the whims of millennials, it’s time to hedge your investment elsewhere on the next generation. If you’re a brand marketing towards young adults and teenagers, this article will help you. Here are nine strategies to help connect with and win this developing consumer base.

A digital marketing team. Do you have one – if not, you may want to make change that. Marketing’s exploding right now. It’s getting businesses clicks, sales, likes, shares, attention, rewards, returns, and money. Who doesn’t want these things – if you’re not in business to be successful, you won’t be. It doesn’t get more cut-and-dry than that.

What a digital marketing team gets you is expertise, power, and the ability to achieve your objective. Whatever it may be, the objective’s achievable when you put in place the players needed. If you know your objective, the next step is getting your team. Your digital marketing team can be a single person – if they have all the right skills – or it can be two, three, or a half-dozen, or more.

There’s a hub of activity happening around digital marketing right now. Marketing gets results while at the same time being a very confusion assemblage of literally thousands of potential channels. To make it easy for start-ups, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and corporations, this is your list of the players you need to take your brand to where you want it to go. At the heart of your marketing, these are some of the basic positions you want covered.

Influencer marketing is a sort of ‘celebrity sponsorship’ of 2020. It’s a way to maximize word-of-mouth, without going out of your way to promote yourself. There are 1,000s of micro-influencers and macro-influencers on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, blogging sites, and elsewhere. A successful, comprehensive influencer marketing strategy can mean a lot to a growing brand, instantly netting them the credibility and exposure many so desperately desire. But how do you know an influencer marketing campaign is working – let us help.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is when a brand hires an influencer to speak well about them. Most influencers do this by sharing links on social media posts that go out to all their followers, by sponsorships on a video or podcast, or similar means. There are all sorts of influencers out there, variations that go beyond what platform they’re on. It is important to partner with an influencer who is relevant to you and your audience, and who won’t jeopardize your credibility or harm perceptions around your brand. Done right, you can instantly get your name out to millions of people.