Basic Digital Marketing

For all the effort you’re putting into creating the easiest path for customers to make a purchase, common mistakes such as the following three could be wasting 1,000s of buys.

Ask yourself, are you converting the number of leads you believe your product is capable of – if the answer’s no, you might be unknowingly sabotaging your digital marketing efforts through the following 3 mistakes. Generating leads and traffic is a massive challenge in eCommerce, no matter how big or successful your brand is. Thankfully, if you’ve fallen into any of these traps, it’s fixable.

New social media platforms are popping up every day, by the dozens, and although they don’t necessarily hold big audiences yet, smaller and trendier platforms might be just what a brand needs to find their target audience.

Let’s not forget, in 2002, LinkedIn launched as one of the first social media sites and was alone in the marketplace at the time. Since then, we’ve seen sites like Snapchat rise like it did in 2016 trending at a faster growth rate than anything the Internet’s seen before and building a base of hundreds of millions of users. Then, there are brands like Etsy who got in early on a growing platform, which in this case was Pinterest and used pinning images on the social media platform to motivate a growth rate of 20 percent week over week for several months. The point of all this is that there are opportunities out there for social media platforms to capitalize on new, under-developed social sites. Needless to say, massive success could be awaiting you, just around the corner!

Spending some hours every week on executing social media marketing strategies can provide more website traffic, help improve search engine rankings, and increase overall conversions. Social media brands which are most successful know who to target and where. The channels chosen count for a lot. Every day, there are dozens new social media sites popping up and the dominating platforms are still pretty numerous, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and more. Where to focus your attention on though is simple and all about demographics.

What will your social media marketing objective be?

What you do on social media should link directly to an objective. Why you choose a particular channel and how you use it also should link directly to what you hope to achieve. For brand awareness social media strategies, you want large, established platforms with sizeable followers, like any of the big names we mentioned. If you’re looking for lead generation in a B2B environment, alternatively, LinkedIn is a champion for social media ROI in this category. Early on, establish your objective clearly and use it as your guide.

Realtors and real estate agencies use digital marketing every day to overcome the competition and reach their audience. Considering these days, more than 90 percent of people buying properties begin with an online search, how they market digitally is key to their success. For non-real estate businesses, there’s a lot to learn about what makes realtors successful and how this can be applied to your business.

Consistent branding.

Look at any successful realtor’s digital marketing strategy and you’ll find consistent branding throughout. Across every social media channel and every site on which their brand appears, they’re using the same logo, the same tag line, the same font, and oftentimes the same images. Consistent branding lets the user know they are in the right place and prevents confusion.

A staggering amount of attention in digital marketing is paid to SEO and that’s for a reason. SEO is a massive lead generator, brand visibility builder, and easily the best organic search strategy there is. If you have recently partnered with a digital marketing agency like Unlimited Exposure and/or are using a software to conduct an SEO audit, there are several things you should expect to see.

A comprehensive website crawl.

Any SEO website audit will begin with a full site crawl to identify any overarching issues which could be plaguing your SEO. A crawl provides a baseline for a site, scanning every URL and delivering an analysis on which the rest of one’s audit can be built. A crawl will locate on-page errors, including broken links, page titles, and duplicate content.

Content marketing done right will increase revenues, generate the web traffic you want, establish brand authority, help with brand visibility, possibly motivate influencer marketing, and more. An area many brands forget about exploiting specifically is link building – something crucial for growth, especially digitally.

Link building is accomplishable through writing guest blogs on other high-authority sites, link reclamation, connecting with high-authority outlets, through influencer marketing, and via press releases. The latter is one of the ways to build links while also establishing credibility, helping customers find you online, and improve search engine rankings.

Digital marketing takes on many forms. Chances are, if you have an online business or have a business website, you’ve probably participated in it at various times already. There are many things digital marketing can accomplish, including increasing revenues, getting more SEO attention, and boosting your social media numbers. Here are some of the biggest trends in 2019 in digital marketing and why it is still so important to success for businesses from all backgrounds.

Do you have no idea where to start with your content marketing campaign – here’s 6 examples from brands who have achieved mass success by personalizing their content to their audience. Although these strategies won’t necessarily work across the board in every industry, they may provide inspiration as to how to develop your own unique content marketing plan.

BBC

The BBC’s website digital marketing campaign is based around audience participation. BBC produced a ‘Your Life on Earth’ interactive info-graphic personalized to a user’s responses. They entered in birthdate, height, and more, and were shown interesting facts and figures about the ways in which the world has changed. Links were included, directing back to BBC videos and articles. They used completely unconnected content to link back to BBC content which was relevant and which would be meaningful to their audience.

Crushing the competition is a part of good business. If you want to maximize your market share, that has to come from somewhere. As challenging as it can be for new businesses to do, there are thankfully several digital marketing strategies one can use to generate revenues and gain an advantage over the competition.

Use the media.

The competition is there for you to monitor. Don’t ignore that. Set up a Google Alert to monitor your competition and any mention they receive on the Internet. Pay attention to who is talking about them. If they’re getting press from a specific media outlet, reach out to those journalists. Although you won’t be successful every time, when you are, you may be able to give your company some free press in time by cultivating relationships with online and offline media.

If you don’t think you’re getting the mileage you want from your blog articles, you might be right. The simplest SEO mistake can cost a website big. If your website’s failing and you’re not ranking where you want, from a blogger’s perspective, here’s where to start.

XML sitemap

The easiest instant change to make that will have a great impact on your website is to ensure you have an accurate XML sitemap set up. This is a roadmap of your blog, indicating to Google the structure of your site and the content ahead. Installing the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in is recommended as it will increase your post indexing rate, and make it easier for spiders to crawl/find your posts.

There is so, so, so much focus put on millennials, and their wants and needs, that few businesses are prepared for the incoming Generation Z. This is the first generation who grew up with smartphones and social media, and they’re a whole different set of people than millennials. If you’re serious about maintaining a young audience, you need to shift your attention towards sustaining popularity among Generation Z.

Generation Z now accounts for approximately 40 percent of all consumers. They’re much more advanced in their knowledge of technology and the digital world. Generation Z are generally referred to as having shorter attention spans and are thus more difficult to impress. If you haven’t made an impression in seconds, you’ve lost them and probably for good. Generation Z expects to be curated too, consistently. They also highly value influencers, particularly on YouTube and Instagram.

A small business can generate a lot of revenue these days if they know how to exploit social marketing just right. Let’s be clear in stating that social media marketing is not just about gaining followers and likes. In fact, sometimes the objective is completely different. Strategizing a digital marketing plan, here are 9 secrets that all the top players are using.

Creating bulk content.

There are going to be some days where you don’t have anything to post. That’s natural. Set a schedule where you bulk up on social media posts and blogs ahead of time. That way, you’ll always have something to post. Craft a week’s worth or a month’s worth of content at the same time.

Every company participating in video marketing wants their content to go viral. When a video goes viral, big things happen. A brand instantly boosts their social media followers and can generate millions off a single video. Going viral is very, very tough. It doesn’t come natural in video marketing. So few videos end up actually going viral that it’s a high bar to aspire to. Here are six examples of brands who have done viral video marketing right however.

Always

Always’ #LikeaGirl campaign showed children and adults contemplating the phrase ‘like a girl’. Its message was positive, inclusive, and creates an emotional connection with Always’ predominantly female audience. Always also took extra steps by encouraging others to share their own examples on social media and including the #LikeaGirl hashtag.

There’s a lot to focus on with an eCommerce company, with so many digital marketing channels and platforms to consider. For many businesses, marketing their products or services online is challenging because of how time-consuming it can be. If you’re looking to maximize your time, keep up with the competition, and show continued growth in your business numbers, here are 5 eCommerce digital marketing opportunities you should be capitalizing on.

A blog.

Overproducing irrelevant articles in an attempt to improve SEO is a bad move overall. When executed properly however, a blog can be an easy and cost-effective way to educate and highlight products. The key is relevance. An article should resonate with an audience, anticipate their needs, and answer the questions they are likely to have. Avoid hard-selling. Instead, content should be presented with value and no agenda. Design how-tos and similar help-based blogs. The more you do this, the more value you create in the mind of the consumer on a product.

Is your SEO out of date – you’re not the only one. Too many websites are using older SEO techniques which could be unknowingly penalizing your website. If you’re purposefully using spammy techniques to attempt to trick the system, chances are it’s either not working or you’re going to inevitably get caught. In SEO, you’ve got to change with the times and search engine algorithms have changed in the last decade. If you want high quality, targeted website traffic, ensure you’re not following these five bad SEO strategies.

Publishing too much content.

Although you might think posting blogs will increase traffic to your site, increased output generally equates to lower quality. A website which contains too many blogs and text-heavy webpages are not viewed favorably. If you’re serious about SEO, you want to focus on publishing as many high-quality blogs as you can. Prioritize quality over quantity. Quality equates to traffic – not quantity.

Digital marketing trends and innovation are always an excellent source for inspiration for small businesses looking to get a leg up on competition. Fast food brands like Burger King and McDonald’s have launched some of the best marketing campaigns in the last fifty years.

KFC’s most recent digital marketing campaigns are some any marketer has got to be impressed by. In recent years, KFC came up with a digital marketing campaign that used influencers, professional wrestlers, and Hollywood celebrities to dress up as the Colonel. This created a sense of anticipation as to who was next in line to take on the Colonel retro look and was a playful manner to create awareness in the marketplace.

Then, a second digital marketing launched involved a live-stream approach, broadcasting four hours of cats climbing Colonel-inspired merchandise ranging from a small cat condo to a rug, pool floatie, fire log, and more. This was, again, a great way to get attention for the brand.

High CTR rates are an email marketer’s dream. That said, in an inbox filled with possibly hundreds of messages, it can be difficult for some brands to create enough of a reason to get a subscriber to open their email and then, to click through to your website.

If you want fast, easy techniques on how to improve your click-through rate, we can help. Using these strategies, a subscriber won’t have to put out too much energy or think too much about where to click or what to do. Within 3 emails or less, you should see your CTR rate improve tremendously.

Attractive, catchy subject line.

Increase your click-through rate by getting people to open your emails with a catchy subject line. Ideally, the right subject line should either create a sense of mystery or intrigue, imply a sense of urgency, or are unexpected and unique. You want to get their click in 5 seconds or less!

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.