Digital marketing is so easy to get wrong. This is for several reasons. Firstly, the stakes feel low, because digital marketing campaigns tend to be lower cost. That’s not the case – every single action that you do online has dramatic impacts on your brand. Even if you have a small audience, making a mistake can have dire consequences on your firm’s survival. Digital marketing can also fall flat on its face due to the fact that it causes false confidence in those who mistake using social media for experience in social media strategy. Implementing a strategy without thought, planning and careful rationale will likely just be a waste of time. The following strategies can deliver powerful, effective results for brands, but they aren’t cut and paste solutions – to deliver results, you need to work hard.
- Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing can be incredibly powerful, but it needs to be thoroughly researched and all influencers need to be fully vetted. The best platforms for an influencer marketing agency for your business vary depending on your brand values and customer segmentation, but the influencers you choose are as important as choosing the right channel.
That’s because fake followers in influencer marketing will cost businesses and brands about $1.3 billion this year alone. If you don’t vet the influencers you want to work with, you could be throwing money down the drain. There are simple ways to vet influencers – checking how many of their followers are fake is one way to do it easily and quickly.
A good idea is to have an influencer shortlist composed of a selection of candidates who fit most with your brand values and whose audience fit most with your target market. It can be a good idea to do a random audit of audience members to assess how well they fit with your customer personas after checking to see how many of their followers are fake.
- Email Marketing
You probably didn’t expect to see email marketing on a list of the most powerful brand strategies to integrate into your marketing campaign, but email direct marketing is one of the most effective direct marketing approaches out there. The trick to email marketing is to use a high-quality newsletter composed of people that have personally been down your conversion funnel. It can be tempting to just buy a mailing list from online, but this won’t make much sense. You need highly focused recipients that will find your content interesting and engaging.
There’s another deeply important part of email strategy implied in that: your content needs to be bang on the money. Don’t send your email list anything boring or anything uninteresting too frequently. You want to come through with engaging, high-quality content (exclusive booklets and discount offers are good ideas) on a semi-regular basis. The subject line will be the gatekeeper– make it catchy as you want to instantly draw readers in.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most talked about forms of digital marketing out there. It’s become almost essential for any business’ website to have a blog featuring high-quality content that people can stumble upon and enjoy. Content helps to drive organic traffic to your site and is an integral part of modern search engine optimization. That’s because search engines aren’t just looking for keywords anymore. They are developing increasingly complex algorithms that try to monitor not just how appropriate a search result is, but how much value a user will gain from the website that the search engine gives them.
As a result, content marketing helps to show Google and others that your site provides value. By posting original, well-researched content that your target market will genuinely find interesting, you will keep people on your site for longer and show Google that you’re not just a company website, you’re a site that wants to give its users the best experience you can. Speaking of SEO …
- Search Engine Optimization
SEO is powerful, but you likely won’t see your results too quickly (especially if you’re doing DIY SEO). It comprises of dozens of strategies – whether they’re technical improvements to increase the speed of your site or guest bloggers that increase your backlinking, SEO is surprisingly one of the most creative digital marketing arenas.
As previously mentioned, SEO is much more holistic than it used to be and is now all about providing the best experience to your users. As a result, it takes either money or time to really perfect. It is well worth it though. Say that a conversion on your site gets you $100, your conversion rate is 1% and your SEO efforts mean that you get 5,000 visitors a month. If that were the case, your SEO efforts would yield you $5,000 per month.
- Paid Ads (PPC Campaigns)
Paid digital adverts are like a power tool in the digital marketer’s toolkit. It’s not appropriate to use a power tool for every job, just when you need an extra injection of strength. It allows you to advertise online for a very low budget – you pay a search engine every time somebody clicks on your advert. The average click-through rate is about 1.91% according to HubSpot. The average cost-per-click is $2.32. If we use the same figures as above (1% conversion rate and $100 per conversion), PPC wouldn’t be worth it, so it’s vital that you understand when to use PPC in your campaigns.
It’s best used when you want fast results and have a high enough conversion rate for you to not lose money. Sometimes, you just need fast traffic. This might not be to get conversions; it could just be to give you that step up the ladder in traffic for your SEO results to really be worth it. PPC is also great when you want to attract a specific audience. If you get loads of traffic but it’s not coming from any of your customer segment targets, you’re just wasting the money you spent on your site. PPC can help you to increase awareness of your brand to a specific audience.
