At the turn of the millennium, more and more business owners have discovered that they need to adapt to the digital age to ensure the continued success of their brick-and-mortar companies and stores. The digital age excludes no man or woman, no matter how well-adapted or not they are to emerging technological trends.
There are 7.75 billion people in the world, and 4.54 billion of them use the internet. That’s a 59% penetration and to ignore that would be abysmal for any business. As a result, digital marketing strategies have emerged and are continually updating in support of companies big and small.
An excellent digital marketing strategy can make or break your online marketing campaign, so which ones are the most effective to help your business?
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Hire a Digital Marketing Coach or Consultant
Business owners tend to pinch a penny here and there whenever they can. When it comes to digital marketing, yes, you can do a lot of DIY or do-it-yourself marketing, but the learning curve can be high, and it can take a long while for you to get profitable results. You can hire a digital marketing expert to set things up in the beginning, so your marketing strategies are more targeted and sensible.
If you cannot hire one, invest in getting yourself and your marketing team adequate training. Upskill investment in this regard will prove very profitable in the long run if you and your team know better what you are doing.
You can also inquire about someone who can help you. Some online retailing tutors and advisors give insights for free, or for a minimal training cost. A lot of them offer personal consultation and even a support group for their premium members.
For your strategies to grow high and produce lasting fruits, your investment in learning and training have to grow deep roots. It’s also good to invest in books and other materials to further improve in digital marketing know-how. There are a lot of ebooks available that can serve as a definitive guide for you and your team regarding the topic.
Use SEO Strategies that Work
If you want to see significantly profitable results from digital marketing strategies, then you better use Search Engine Optimisation or SEO.
Google and other search engines have at least 200 factors in their algorithm to measure how relevant and valuable your website is to match audiences’ search intent.
For example, an SEO strategy that is a pillar of any digital marketing is content marketing. It still works better than paid search, getting three times more leads per $1 spent. Content marketing produced lower initial costs but more profitable long-term benefits. Content marketing also gives three times more leads than outbound marketing, at 62% lesser costs. So it’s not only cheaper, but it’s also more effective.
Organic SEO has both immediate and long-term benefits in lead-generation by helping people to find your site better through search intent. Search engine marketing and optimisation help make your pages appear on Search Engine Results Pages or SERP. With a strong SEO strategy, your website will become linked repeatedly with the keywords used to find your products or services. Improving your SEO strategies will significantly increase your business success.
Invest in Web Design
Webmasters need to see web design as a marketing tactic because good web design can help a website attract more visitors.
You need to have an aesthetically pleasing website that also delivers excellently in function and giving the visitors a positive experience. A good web design should have the following:
- Clear Goals: with a clear focus on the theme, identity, content, and target market.
- Intuitive Design: The User Interface or Design (UI) and the User Experience (UX) should be impeccable and user-oriented. Higher UI/UX ratings mean higher SEO rankings. Hence, the design should be well-thought-of, pleasing and user-friendly, navigable with easy-to-find contact information and simplified options for visitors.
- Persuasive Call to Action (CTA): Your campaigns and other content must have a well-crafted CTA designed to drive action.
- “About Us” Page: A link to your company’s story strengthens that trust as your readers learns more about you and why you do what you do.
- Contacts Page: You have about 10 seconds to convince a visitor if you would be of value to their search intent or not. They will dwell longer if they do find the answers they are looking for on your page. If they are skimming through results, you need to convince them at least that you are worth bookmarking for later reference. Make sure it’s easy to see and includes details like phone number, mobile phone, toll-free hotlines, email addresses, and a contact form, and your complete address including a map locator. Make fantastic contact pages that work to help you maximise the conversion power of this webpage element.
- SEO-Friendly, High-Quality Content: High-quality content is meaningful, trustworthy, and useful content that adds value to the lives of their consumers. Content creators and web developers need to create relevant content that provides what consumers in their niche are searching for. The content will not be relevant if it is NOT what the customers want. Even in choosing what content to deliver, the customer is always right. Maintain your website’s freshness with regularly updated articles, including multimedia like images, video content, infographics and the like to make your posts more engaging and share-worthy.
- Social Proof and Testimonials: Social proofs like users’ comments, pictures, and testimonials, along with peer reviews from other reliable brands in your market, help build consumer trust and brand credibility. Include citations such as awards you received, logos of prominent clients, industry partners, security seals, certifications, and the like, even number of followers and social shares.
- Mobile-Friendly and Mobile-Responsive: Your website needs to be responsive to different mobile devices so it can adapt the content to resize and suit different screen sizes without any distortion. In 2018, 52.2% of web internet traffic happened on mobile devices. Having a responsive web design is something that web developers must prioritise at the onset of website creation.
- Secure Hosting Platform: You need to be a trustworthy and secure website, so it’s essential to use reliable web-hosting companies with excellent content management systems. Blue Host or GoDaddy are popular among small business owners. Get total protection against cyberattacks, so you don’t compromise visitors and customers that come on your site.
- Marketing Strategies with Metrics and Reviews: There are a lot of digital marketing strategies you can use to monetise your website, apps, and even social media accounts. Go for the best one that fits your business and target market. For example, WhataGraph helps you monitor your website’s performance regularly, show how your account and campaigns worked and provides data visualisation with automated options for sharing client reports daily, weekly, and monthly.
Use Email Marketing
Digital Marketers still rely on is email marketing, because it leads the rest of content-generating channels in delivering the highest conversions, click-throughs, and list growth. An infographic by Campaign Monitor shows that email marketing delivers 89% success in marketing strategies.
It is not enough to just send out emails. You will want to acknowledge different email lists that cater to the specific needs of each individual and can present a personalised approach to your campaigns. Take a hard and transparent look at the purchasing habits of your customers and use that information to develop your strategy.
Build an Opt-In Email List
A website should be beyond stunning. Its design, functionality, and content all need to point to a clear goal—leads generation and conversion. Adding an opt-in email list allows clients to come to you and sign up to receive email correspondence.
Doing this will enable you to connect with potential customers and current clients right away and even customise that email correspondence based on the info they give you on the opt-in form. Different plugins allow you to create opt-in forms seamlessly. For instance, OptinMonster is an opt-in form builder tool for WordPress websites that helps you create multiple types of forms such as lightbox popups, floating bars, slide-ins, and sidebar forms, for your website.
It integrates your forms with email marketing tools. It uses an Exit-Intent Technology that pops up upon the visitor’s sign out or exit, to minimise cart abandonment, or get users to leave their email address or hit a social share button. OptinMOnster also includes A/B testing, page-level targeting, and built-in analytics, and works on every website, like WordPress, Shopify, HTML, and others.
Affiliate and Associate Programs
Affiliate programs, also called associate programs, are arrangements in which an online seller website pays affiliate websites a commission to send them traffic. With an associate program, people who believe in your business can share your advice and grow your company on an authority-based platform. If you do this, you can immediately see your marketing efforts advance without requiring to do more. Amazon Associates are popular among niche bloggers, but the commission payout is quite low.
Three of the highest-paying affiliate programs are Clickfunnels, with about 40% commission, followed by Hammacher Schlemmer where one can get $4,000-$5,200 commission, and Hubspot that can give commissions up to $1,000 for each product purchased.
Get Into Articles or News Stories
Work with a public affiliation professional to get your company into articles and news descriptions on topics according to what you do. It elevates your status to a trusted expert and propels your business to an even expansive base of the market. You can also sign up for free benefits that connect you with writers looking for sources, such as Help a Reporter Out.
Write Online Press Releases
When you use online press clemencies, you’re getting your information out there in a formal setting. Doing this allows newspapers, blogs, or other media sources to see your information and write posts about your company without you needing to put in the effort to connect and claim a story.
Hold Contests and Giveaways
Who doesn’t love contests and giveaways? Reward consumers for sharing your content or commenting on your webpage with freebies and giveaways. Doing these strategies also increases your acquisitions and even generates more leads.
Maintain a Blog
Adding a blog is a great SEO strategy for any kind of non-blog website. Having a blog allows you to post new keywords and optimise your search engine strategy regularly. Your blog becomes an avenue where you can offer guidance, share information, and connect on a more personal level with your clients.
You can let your primary team write different blogs, so audiences feel more connected knowing they are talking to real people behind the website. Having a blog may require extra effort, but it allows you to respond to your target market’s most trending queries and fosters a lasting relationship begins with them built on trust.
Conclusion: Online is Where the People Are
Businesses in this very cutthroat economy need all the edge they can get to stay competitive. In the natural, it is said that the success of a business is all about location, location, location. Online is where consumers are. It’s where more than half of them choose to interact with you.
Online is where the current buying process begins. And so, you need to add an online dimension to your brick-and-mortar business as well. You will need excellent digital marketing when you do so, to guarantee your website’s success in an ever-evolving, highly-demanding digital economy.
