A good digital strategy is not something to be ignored. Investing in internet marketing can contribute to anything from building awareness to increasing sales. The following are a few tips for keeping up with the competitive pace of digital marketing:
- Do research about your target audience to discover where they are congregating online… don’t just guess! Many businesses know they should be incorporating social media into their strategy, but do not know how to make these channels work for their business. Whether you are trying to make sales, build up an email list or “activate” your brand awareness, digital marketing is a vital tool for achieving these in most markets.
- Establish SMART goals. Just to review, goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Making sure your goals are SMART means they are realistic for your resources and complete.
- Develop personas. Persona development will help you become laser focused on your target audience or audiences. Assess their pain points, their demographics, their psychographics and where they can be found online. While this information may seem obvious at face-value, having it in one place and giving your persona a name will allow you to bring this person to life.
- Invest in your digital strategy. Just like any other aspect of your marketing mix, your digital presence will not
But, it’s April… thrive unless you give it your all. Nothing looks worse for a business than a rogue social media profile or an out-of-date Google ad.
- Reward people for following your business. Maybe you announce a sale to your Facebook followers first, or your email subscribers can access special discounts when upon logging in to your site. Customers like feeling special, and “perks” are an easy way to do that.
- Listen to feedback, and take it seriously. Being present online allows you to somewhat control the narrative of your business. If there are issues, you can learn about them as they come to light and hopefully limit the damage. Also, you can also contribute to the perpetuation of positive feedback by social media users.
- Pay attention to the sentiment of online conversations. It’s exciting that your business may be the topic of conversation online, but are you paying attention to exactly what people are saying? While you definitely do not want the conversation to be negative, if your sentiment is neutral, this means consumers do not know much about you or do not have an opinion either way, which also says a lot about your company. Tools are available to help you automate this process and create visual representations, which can be helpful for sharing with colleagues.
- Keep it cohesive. All roads should lead home. Social channels should link back to your website, and your website should list all affiliated social channels. A social media profile could be the gateway for a prospective customer to make a purchase, and if they cannot locate your website through that social channel, the journey might end there.
- Be discoverable with SEO. Your website, blog and other outlets should be designed with SEO in mind. Is your site designed with quality, updated content? If so, you will rank higher organically in a search and, thus, be more discoverable
online. This goes for certain social media platforms as well, notably YouTube and Pinterest. It’s getting harder to BS search engines with low-quality content. - Be mindful of mobile. An overwhelming amount of users are searching and
engaging on their mobile devices and tablets, as opposed to desktop computers. Websites and content must be optimized for mobile viewing, or potential customers either will not see it — or worse — will not enjoy it! This is a huge chunk of the audience that you could be missing out on.
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