Digital marketing is the blanket term for the many different facets of the way that marketers and businesses interact with people today, with the goal of turning them into customers. On the face of it, it may seem quite simple. All you need to do is put a few ads online, have sales throughout the year and you’re halfway there to building up a customer-base and growing your business – right? Wrong.
When everyone started to move online from regular marketing, the strategies may have been easier to roll out – but now that everyone is online, people have adapted, become savvier and expect more from marketers before they allow themselves to be converted into customers. Not only do you have to have a unique selling proposition that makes your products stand out, but you’ll also need to go the extra mile to entice them to finally buy.
Below you will discover a few tips and strategies that will help you to get on the right track towards expanding your business in a digital world.
Grow Your Online Presence
Growing your online presence isn’t only about gaining followers on your various social media accounts and posting regularly. At the heart of it, it all comes down to the way you engage your community.
Having a defined social media strategy and “voice” will help you to interact with your community better, and once you figure out the way you’d like to be known online you can start to grow your following. Entertaining them by being funny is a strategy that a number of brands have employed, but it all depends on your business. Being informative and positioning yourself as a “thought-leader” will also lead to people trusting you more.
Reach Your Target Audience Over Many Platforms
Having a target audience in mind and setting out who exactly you think will buy your products is something you would have already done when you were setting up your company. Now you want to use digital marketing to expand, and the best way to do this is to use all the channels and platforms at your disposal.
Some of the main places where brands interact with their potential customers right now are:
● Through organic and paid traffic via search engines like Google
● On Facebook, where people can be targeted by their interests
● Through eye-catching visual campaigns on platforms like Instagram
● Through personalized email marketing campaigns
Once you have built communities and lists of people across these platforms, you can create targeted campaigns geared towards your most profitable products or services.
Customer outreach has always been important, ever since businesses have existed. As business strategies have developed over time, so too has the way that we understand our customers. Learning about and knowing your customers is intrinsically linked to knowing your product.
You should always know who is buying your product and for what reasons. Then, by outlining key “customer types” or “personas” you can strategically position the way you talk to them.
Optimize Your Site For SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the way in which sites such as Google allow you to be more visible online when people are searching for products and services that match the ones you offer. As there are so many services out there that may be offering the same thing, having your site optimized for SEO puts you in a stronger position against other companies and brands.
And while there are fundamental best practices around SEO no matter where you’re located, you do need to take local preferences, cultural considerations and languages into account – especially if you’re looking to expand into different territories. SEO South Africa, for example, is going to be slightly different from your SEO approach in the US, or even other African countries.
Write Content That Is Consumable
Content creation is closely linked to SEO optimization, as your content should always have a few keywords, including longtail keywords, written into the body of text for the benefit of your organic ranking online.
At the same time, however, your content also needs to be consumable and fun for a new and ever-changing digital world. This means that your content needs to be varied and made up of videos, blogs, podcasts, infographics and anything else trendy that people can consume easily while gaining enough information about your brand from it that it attracts them to become customers.
This will take some trial and error as it is not always clear what your audience wants – but by having a varied social strategy that is engaging and entertaining you should be able to find out soon!
Spend Time On Your Website Design
Finally, the way that people interact with your brand has a lot to do with how they perceive you. After you’ve attracted them with your content and your social media strategies, they’ll end up on your website – but if it isn’t user friendly or responsive, then you’re likely to lose sales. It is crucial that your website is functional and looks modern and fresh to keep them on the page. Your website can easily become your best salesperson – so give it the attention it deserves.