A great thing about marketing is that it always keeps on surprising you. Whether you are a big, established brand or just a startup, marketing is a game changer for both. The dynamic nature of marketing keeps things interesting and competitive in this field of clever content. With the advent and rule of the Internet, if your business does not have an online presence it is equivalent to having no business at all. Hence, the rise of digital marketing: a field of marketing that uses online platforms to attract and engage consumers into purchasing the products and services that companies are promoting.
With billions of people flocking social media, the importance of digital marketing has risen above other forms of traditional marketing tactics such as out-of-home (OOF) marketing since people spend more time looking down on their smartphones than up at billboards. Marketing is an interesting mix of several components like product, place, promotion, price, and people. Top digital marketing companies across the globe keep updating their marketing mix and strategies to create a competitive advantage for their clients in the industry. To help you get ahead of your competitors, here are some digital marketing strategies relevant to boosting your business in 2022.
Mobile First Marketing should be the Top Agenda
You’re probably reading this article on your smartphone and that should be enough to explain the importance of following a mobile-first approach in digital marketing strategy for the new age. Marketers tend to follow the cues of consumers to generate great advertising and promotional strategies, and since the public is currently hooked to their mobile devices, what better way to get their attention than to promote on mobile-friendly platforms?
A survey by Google explains how much businesses have benefited from adding a mobile-first strategy into their digital marketing campaign:
- 60% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly from the SERPs.
- 59% of respondents favor brands that allow them to shop via mobile.
This supports the thought that the evolving pattern of purchase amongst consumers must be taken into account while formulating marketing and advertising strategies and businesses need to invest in developing mobile apps for their brands to keep their current customers happy and to lure future customers. Developing a mobile app is just the first step, you need to focus on developing content and marketing strategies that are smartphone optimized to get the best results.
Be a Game to Influencer Marketing
Influencers are mini-celebrities on social media platforms with a large number of followers. Contracting these people for endorsing your brand over various social networking sites is a great way to increase your outreach and promote your product, and brand.
Over the years the mainstream celebrities have been tied up with so many brands so often that it lacks a fresh approach that influencers provide. On the other hand, the use of content marketing to showcase the use and benefits of your product or brand makes the promotion highly believable to their followers and you can gain additional consumers than your existing market. The compensation you have to provide for the promotion can range from monetary contracts to exclusive product deals but at a much cheaper rate so you can hire multiple influencers for different social media platforms under a good budget.
The motive to choose influencers’ over-generalized self-promoting click or video ads is the factor of credibility. Since these people have made a name for themselves through hard work and their own content over social media, viewers display a high sense of reliability on their recommendations which works positively for your brand.
Invest in Smart SEO: Don’t Boil the Ocean
The main purpose of marketing is to be seen by the audience. Investing in smart SEO tactics helps your brand gain a higher page ranking on the search engine which directly means more viewership, online traffic, and in turn leads. It is one of the most basic points to include in every digital marketing strategy to optimize your search engine ranking. You can either hire independent SEO experts or hire a digital marketing company that will have a full-fledged team of experts from all realms of the marketing field to brainstorm and execute a full-proof strategy.
Not only does SEO bring traffic to your website online but it ensures that the traffic is relevant to your content, products, and services so that the viewer feels a need to believe in the information you are offering. The no. 1 site on Google search ranking for any topic gets about 33% of all the traffic. This fact alone shows the importance of a few valuable words that can help you rank higher and be more visible.
Email Marketing is Evergreen: Press on
Although this form of marketing has been around for some time it is still highly relevant to keep your existing customer base interested in your business. Email marketing mainly targets the customers who have shopped with you at least once or have registered themselves on your website or mobile app.
Through emails, you can reach out to these customers and let them know about the new deals, products, or services that your business is currently offering or about to offer. There are thousands of brands and businesses today and a single person must interact with tens of them for any particular requirements. By emailing the consumers about the recent activities and updates of your brand, you can raise a sense of value and loyalty in them.
A well-crafted email keeps your consumers engaged with your brand as you politely remind them of sales and other incentives to keep them interested in your products. So in a race to achieve new customers don’t skip out on email marketing to keep your current customers happy and updated.
Multi-Channel Promotion Strategy is the New Keyword: Make the Most of it
As the name suggests, multi-channel platform promotions help you increase your global outreach tremendously. The content over social media gets automatically filtered as per the preferences of the user and also the trends currently circulating in that demographic or geographic area. You can get the data for where your competitors get their most traffic from and join that platform for product promotion.
We can’t forget that higher visibility is the key to a good digital marketing strategy so don’t leave out any big social media channel for marketing your brand. Another important lesson is to diversify your promotional content for each social networking site according to what form of content is most likely enjoyed on that site. For example, since Twitter has limited words per tweet, an active and engaging Twitter account on top of paid advertisements targeting your customer demographic is a great tactic.
Nike is a great example of a brand that has mastered the art and science of creating multi-platform content. They have a slew of social media pages, including ones for football enthusiasts and fitness freaks. Their Facebook fan pages are filled with localized content and local personalities featured on the accounts as per geographic locations.
Content Marketing is Real Gold: Go the Extra Mile
All the above tricks boil down to one very important feature of marketing, content. The cleverness of a marketer is reflected by how well he can capture the attention of the audience with limited words and images.
With unlimited internet comes unlimited content, and the competition to gain traction for good branding and content gets fiercer. Here lies the importance of mixing SEO keywords within your content to optimize the ranking of your guest posts, blogs, or articles. In combination with good content, whether it be video content as popularized on social media platforms like Instagram and Tiktok or quippy one-liners for Twitter, it is also important to match the content with the consumer to have the most impact.
Content marketing does not mean coming up with just one good tagline or blog and sharing it on all media platforms. It means to create content that is relevant to the consumer not just today but day after day based on their preferences, current trends, and the platform. In short, it is a continuous process to keep the customer engaged.
A good example to display this would be, Expiring content that is only available for a limited time on your website or social media before being withdrawn as seen in the feature of 24-hr story format on Instagram. This creates a sense of urgency, which may prompt viewers to act fast. You can use a discount coupon that is visible for a limited period before being withdrawn to persuade your audience to use expiring content.
Voice and Visual Search Optimization: Stay A Step Ahead
As seen on a lot of websites and mobile apps in recent times, there is now an option to search for information through voice and images. You can download the photo of an outfit or a product that you like and upload it on different shopping apps on smartphones to come up with various results with different price ranges or an exact similar outfit/ product available for you to purchase without typing in the manual description.
People already use AI-powered voice assistants and tools such as Alexa by Amazon and Google Assistant for hands-free operation and flow of information. It is essential that you work on voice optimized search keywords to gain better traffic for your business and brand too.
Video Marketing is an aspect of visual marketing where consumers rely on videos to give them the information they seek. Videos are available for instructions on the use of a product or in the form of reviews of products but anyway they are immensely favored by the audience as they provide a near-live experience of the product or service that they are promoting.
Youtube is currently the second biggest search engine in the world due to the popularity of video content. You can do paid advertisements as well as instructional videos for your product on this platform with very little effort and optimize the link by using SEO.
The key takeaways from the tactics mentioned above that will boost your digital marketing efforts are as follows:
- Ensure that your marketing and advertising content is mobile-friendly as smartphones hold all the power in the world today.
- Hire social media influencers to promote your brand and products on various social media channels to gain business and loyalty from their followers instead of high-paid celebrities.
- Make sure that all the content that you are putting out, be it in the form of blogs or videos, is SEO friendly so that it has a higher chance of being discovered by search engine crawlers.
- In lieu of gaining new customers for your business don’t neglect your current customer base and keep them updated and engaged with your brand through email marketing.
- To increase your outreach, it is important to accept a multi-platform promotional strategy rather than sticking to only one online platform. Cover all bases and promote on all high-ranking social media sites.
- Content is King. To keep your audience invested in your brand, you need to keep them immersed in your content.
- Lastly, it is important to ensure your brand is voice search and visual search optimized this way your brand will have multiple channels to communicate with customers and gather insights about them.
To summarize this article, I would like to bring your attention back to the basic need of marketing, to beat your competition and come on top of the trends to establish the superiority of your brand. Marketing is an evolving field and digital marketing is the latest and most prominent form of marketing that encompasses several sub-verticals such as those mentioned above. It is essential to remember that all the strategies discussed above give the best results in combination with one another rather than being followed singularly. So pick your methods according to your budget and start brainstorming.
