10 Digital Marketing Tips and Tricks from Top Brands

There is no doubt that digital marketing or online marketing is crucial when it comes to the success of any business no matter what industry you are in. Unlike the past where businesses used traditional advertising, today, they are not as effective as online advertising and this has pushed many businesses to adopt online advertising to reach customers. Online marketing is the way to go if you want to reach and create a connection with customers.

Gone are the days when it was difficult to understand what customers want. Today, with the increase in tools such as analytics and digital marketing software, it is far easier to guess — nay, estimate — customer behavior… and cater to it! Online marketing has enabled businesses to gain treasured insights to customers’ minds.

When implemented in the right way, digital marketing will enable your business to target and reach its customers, classify new ones, increase sales, and experience lasting growth.

These digital marketing approaches will make your business visible to your existing customers online and connect you with new ones.

What is Digital Marketing Today?

Digital marketing is the use of the internet and electronic devices to make your business known to your existing and new customers both locally and internationally. It is a means of advertising done through digital platforms like social media, email, mobile apps, websites and search engines.

It today’s digital world, marketing is about connecting with your prospective customers in the right place and at the desired time, selling them with goods and service they need at the right time. This means that you need to target them where they spend most of their time and in this case, it is the internet. Digital marketing encompasses a range of marketing activities such as content marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, mobile marketing and more.

That being said, below, we’ve compiled a list of the digital marketing tricks used by all the famous business brands in the world.

1. Combine SEO and Content Marketing

SEO used to be a function of coding. Today, most of the metrics included in Google’s algorithm have to do with content and the engagement you win through the distribution of great content. Using various types of content (visual, text, video, infographics, audio, etc) does much better than using a single type of content.

As more businesses embrace content marketing, competition continues to get tougher. Everything you do online is drowned in noise and information overload. If it’s SEO many businesses are doing it. If it’s posting good and original content, many are doing it. So, to beat them, you need to publish better and more content. According to HubSpot data, publishing at least once a week is critical for ROI and ROI drops pretty precipitously when you publish less frequently. However, it’s not about quantity or quality, but an ideal mix of both.

Valuable content – Content should be entertaining, informative, or make the reader feel something. Valuable content encourages subscription to your email, sharing, comments, and other actions that contribute to ROI.

Original content – Content can be audio, video or text but when you decide to use one or all of these digital content, ensure it is good and original. If you can’t create unique, compelling and good content by yourself, you can hire an expert to create content for your website and social media platforms. This is where you will need a powerful content marketing plan like never before.

Appropriate content – As you can see from this infographic from Occam’s Razor, you need to produce content that’s right for each stage in the conversion process (and your metrics need to match your goal with each piece of content).

Knowing where a visitor is in the conversion process isn’t always easy, but, if you’ve done a good job of coding content (applying tracking codes so you know what type of content drove them to visit your site) and use tools that let you track where visitors have been before, you can make an educated guess as to what content they need. By delivering the right content at the right time, you’re more likely to convert visitors.

Reach is important. The more visitors you bring to your site, all things being equal, the higher your ROI. This is one of the reasons it’s important to have several social platforms and have links on your content so visitors can easily share your content. You should share your content once it’s published and here’s a schedule recommended by Kissmetrics:

In addition to sharing your own content, you should share content created by other great companies/ experts. Many experts recommend you share 20% your promotional content and 80% other valuable content you find.

2. Have a Visible Presence on Relevant Social Media Platforms

Being seen online is the key to success for every business, especially in today’s world where almost all businesses have gone digital. It is one of the ways to stand out from the crowd. For this reason, you need to build your online presence on social media networks of relevance. Note that there are plenty of social networks available but you need to identify where your customers spend most of their time and target them there. Pick those that are relevant to your business and prospects and build your online presence there.

3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile-First Browsing

To ensure your content is mobile friendly, your website and social media networks are accessible on desktops and mobile devices. Customers are currently using smartphones and tablets to access the web. So, it is crucial to make your website and content accessible to users on all screen sizes.

4. Use the Right Tools

Digital marketing is an amalgamation of different strategies aimed at a plethora of channels, like SEO, PPC, social media, and so on. In order to ensure that you have an integrated marketing mix, you need the right digital marketing tools to help you run effective campaigns. You also need to develop expertise in using them and applying the insights in the right context.

5. Be Awesome at Design

Design underpins much of what makes digital marketing success. Whether you’re designing a website, a landing page or creating an image for your website, ad, or infographic, you need to have good design skills. Not all of us are whiz kids when it comes to design, but there are some tools to help.

Canva – is a great tool for creating social media images whether you need them for your profile or as images to include in posts. One aspect of Canva I really like is the templates that help design great looking images even if you know nothing about layout or what fonts go together. They’re constantly adding new images and tools, such as infographic templates, to help you out.

Photoshop – granted it’s expensive, but Photoshop is a great design tool. Luckily, you can now get the entire creative cloud from Adobe for as low as $29/ month if you’re in school and a little more to use for business. It used to be more difficult to use Photoshop, but now there are tons of tutorials on YouTube and Photoshop now includes little mini tutorials if you hover over the buttons.

Kuler – If mixing colors isn’t your forte, then Adobe Color is for you. It lets you import an image and get the colors used or you can choose a color to get colors that coordinate well with it.

6. Create an Email List

This should be done from the beginning of your business. If you are on the startup phase, you need to make an email list when planning. Ensure to gather people’s emails where you will be sending them any updates and progress of your business. Send them useful information but avoid spamming them.

7. Spend on Digital Advertising

Online advertising, including PPC (pay per click) campaigns such as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, social media advertising on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and mobile ads are great to support digital marketing success.

8. Use Infographics

People love infographics because they are attractive. Note that our brains can process pictures must quicker than text. A picture is worth a thousand words, and people will share them more often than texts.

Here are some examples of the best content infographics that awesome marketers have created and used to resonate with their audience.

9. Closely Watch Your Analytics

Almost the other end of the spectrum from creativity is analytics, but that’s exactly the combination you need for digital marketing success. Google Analytics is perfect for understanding critical elements of your website and how visitors navigate through it. If you’re trying to learn how to gain insights from Google Analytics, you can use the Google Data Studio to give it a test drive using data from Google’s e-commerce site.

For analytics outside of Google Analytics, a number of great tools exist. You can use individual analytics from each social network (ie. Facebook, Pinterest, etc), you can bring them all to one place by using a dashboard program such as Cognos (from IBM), or you can pay for a more powerful tool to gain more insights.

10. Integrate Strategies and Campaigns Across Channels

Integrating across these tactics can be really challenging, especially in a larger firm where different teams may manage different platforms or where different ad agencies handle different aspects of marketing, such as content marketing, paid, and social. But, integrate you must to achieve true digital marketing success.

A big part of conversion is frequency and unless efforts are coordinated, you lose out on frequency.

Let’s talk about how you go about integrating across these tactics that contribute to digital marketing success.

Strategic planning

The first step in integration is to have a strategic plan. Don’t have one, here’s a link to creating a digital marketing plan.

Coordination comes from strategic elements such as messaging, but even elements such as mission and goals help integrate efforts by creating an umbrella under which teams create posts, infographics, and the metrics used to assess them.

Creative meetings

Bringing everyone together is important. Everyone should have time to share elements they’re working on and get input from the group about ways to extend a particular effort across multiple platforms and creative efforts.

Having a style guide is a must. In the style guide, list the color palette, fonts, and approved variations so there’s consistency across your marketing efforts (including traditional advertising). Copies of various sizes and types of logos, images of the leadership team, and other graphic elements may be part of the style guide.

A master plan

There needs to be a point person in charge of digital marketing success and that person is key to coordinating efforts across teams. Some organizations have an approval process where the top person must approve everything before it goes live. I’m not a big fan of this approach because it can slow the process down and, unlike traditional advertising, digital media is a fast-flowing river where putting in a dam causes the flow to back up and allows accumulation of a lot of flotsam and jetsam, which is both stinky and further jams the pipeline.

A better strategy is to use a digital master calendar or another device, such as an app, to allow everyone to post what they’re working on, the assets they plan to use, and when the creative effort will go live. But, it’s not enough to post plans, but everyone should be required to check this master calendar every day to see where their plans fit into those already in the works.

For instance, reusing a graphic created by another team not only saves time and money, it creates a visual that helps consumers (customers and potential customers) associate the two efforts–and increases frequency.

Your Turn

Digital marketing is a must for your business success, and we hope our list of tricks will keep you headed in the right direction. These tricks are tried and tested and when you implement them effectively, you can get ahead of your competition.

If you want your business to succeed online in today’s digital world, then these digital marketing tricks will come in handy. What tips would you add to this list? Tell us in the comments below!