Marketing in today’s digital age is accelerating at unprecedented rates. In order to keep up with these rapidly evolving trends, it’s important to be cognizant of the factors that really matter and can make all the difference to your business. Online marketing strategies are imperative to understand in order to brainstorm and develop your own ideas. Let’s explore some tips to get you started and guide you along the way.
1. Ensure that your site pages are mobile ergonomic and ergonomic across all devices
This is really important, without which the users accessing your site from smartphones or tablets will experience compatibility issues. It’s essential to offer support across all major devices and OS environments. By doing so, you can ensure a great customer journey and subsequent experience. Happy customers mean great reviews and good feedback equals more sales. When other potential customers view such comments, they’re also inspired to follow suit and consequently boost your ranking. Plugins should work and text font size needs to be functionally visible for easy reading.
Don’t forget that nowadays, mobile phones are becoming increasingly commonplace to surf the web, make online purchases on e-commerce platforms, and do just about anything! Using Google’s mobile usability report, you can track the volume of impressions and monitor trend data plus statistics. Validate your progress and fix errors for seamless performance throughout and every time. Entrust your customers to increase incoming traffic and remain competitive, engage people and be accessible to them. Keep things responsive and contribute to Google’s ranking factors to qualify for the top spot! Convert more leads, become faster, and benefit from greater flexibility whilst saving money (than compared to developing a new app altogether).
2. Embed interactive content within your site pages
Implementing interactive elements in your website or social media is the ideal method to engage customers, understand their needs and make them feel valued. For instance, in the case of a bank or financial institution, you can deploy an interactive loan calculator on your site. This way you can gather further data to help profile them and offer customized quotes or offers specifically for them. This is another online marketing tip to definitely try out.
Furthermore, tests, surveys, games, and videos for simulated visualizations or competitions, blogs, whitepapers, and content hubs serve educational plus consulting purposes.
Competitions are an effective way to quickly grasp an audience and boost your visibility. Utilizing your existing customers to distribute social media posts of suchlike is another way to convince and persuade newcomers to come aboard. They can act as your brand ambassadors and this can even be extended to a referral scheme wherein word of mouth is incentivized with lucrative returns. This increases ROI by creating new revenue streams.
3. Google Listings and Local SEO
It’s important specifically for small setups that their local listings are verified and updated on all search engines. This is because businesses that source their customers locally rely upon Google My Business listing to share important details, such as operating hours and location (these may be subject to change owing to the pandemic). These vast volumes of directories only augment this. This is yet another online marketing idea.
Establish and define a demographic to appear in ‘near me’ searches, as most search engines prioritize suitability in their algorithms. By doing so, you’ll have a better standing within your locality, and updating any changes in your operations is also useful.
4. Social Media for engagement and retention
Remember to invest further in social media from now onwards. You may wonder ‘but why?’ – well the pandemic is your main answer. Marketing teams prioritized customer retention with the advent of the remote working and learning model. This obviously has led to people spending greater time online not solely for leisure but also for informative, work, and educational purposes too.
This new trend has paved the way for marketers to boost their audiences and reestablish ties with loyal customers (rekindling their brand inclination). A nominal amount of money can really help you take strides in developing a content plan, creating frequent post material, track and drive customer replies (as well as acquire new business). In case your small enterprise has been procrastinating using social media, it’s never too late to begin!
5. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Optimizing this not only drives sales but makes the entire process of doing so more efficient. PPC marketing deploys search engine advertising to draw people to your site. This helps to garner warm leads, primed and ready to convert. Novices or amateurs should never overlook this method to entice customers and germinate their interest. Furthermore, this medium offers benefits including time targeted advertising, great ROI by only shelling out payments upon actual execution of your ad, and of course, moderated spending. It doesn’t just end there, as the results are quickly visible, and statistical intelligence assists in honing other marketing tactics. Just be mindful that such schemes can be pricey, hence always consult an experienced person to implement conversion-driven strategies.
6. Content marketing
This is imperative for businesses at present, irrespective of whether you’re operating inter-business or directly with customers. Such strategies are impactful, as it follows the customer journey with a roadmap where you can target audiences by addressing their issues. This entrusts people and boosts conversion rates, not to mention brand visibility as well. You can also establish sustainable relationships with customers, promote your business, gain credibility, and be recognized as an autonomous figure in your respective field. By taking ownership of your campaign, you can drive both SEO and SMO to curate material for your site’s blog and social media posts. Now you can drive your sales statistics!
However, how can you design great content regularly? Well, brainstorming these can be facilitated by using HubSpot, as it highlights stellar material for all keywords to gauge their respective effectiveness. What’s more, is it makes you more discoverable to convene with communities and forge potential partnerships. Just be mindful that this doesn’t bring fast outcomes and you need to patiently wait with some time investment, prior to realizing what a difference it’s made. Not only that but the effect is long term, yielding great success.
7. Email marketing
This is underrated for mistakenly being considered obsolete, however, this cannot be further from the truth. In fact, emails can drive ROI and upon analysis, can be more effective to the tune of quadruple that of other strategies. An inexpensive concise tool can be successful just by deploying the following:
An engaging subject line outlining the benefits of subscribing to a service, etc
refraining from using technical jargon but rather convincing and informing readers
Organizing your text into different sections for easy assimilation and be digestible
Mobile optimization to ensure full compatibility with all devices and OS support
Incorporate professional sign-offs to drive traffic and generate then convert leads
Moreover, neat features such as using an interactive HTML-based signature from the likes of Newoldstamp can sort any team member’s merchandising via a single dashboard. Sendinblue can plan and create emails, which can then be accompanied by automated solutions, such as autoresponder sequences. These can be set off upon users taking action. This is another great online marketing idea.
8. Artificial Intelligence
Want to personalize your responses to customers without having to always be online? Well, now you can, thanks to AI-based algorithms that use conditional processing to deliver just that. Be it (big) marketing data, machine learning for insights, or simply just automating processes, AI really does help your business to grow. Don’t forget though that this does come with its fair share of challenges, namely adoption of the strategy, navigation issues, data privacy, and accessibility.
Nevertheless, the advantages are vast which include higher ROI, customized material delivery according to specific demographics, improved monitoring, gauging, and tracking of progress. This enriches team performance and can be applied in messaging scenarios, smart (PPC) ads, intelligent searching, chatbots as well as continual learning with predictive analysis. Push notifications/alerts with CRO implementation, email/content curation, extrapolation, and image recognition are just some of the other features offered by AI to empower the user experience.
9. Affiliate Marketing
Harnessing the power of influence, this mode of marketing helps to drive sales lead conversions. This implementing it as part of your campaign is a good idea. You can have a remote passive view of this entire process and intervene when necessary. Nevertheless, you should always be cognizant of what’s happening by continuous active monitoring.
This working model is simple: you deploy affiliates (partners) to engage leads for you, akin to a salesforce working on a commission basis. It’s your prerogative how you pay them, be it the sales made or a fixed amount per entity. You can track the volume generated with personalized links shared with each respective affiliate. Subsequently, this is distributed within their social media circles which can utilize this and access your site to buy whatever.
Tools such as Google Analytics can formulate these customized links. You can always scrutinize each affiliate’s performance by tracking their progress for each link as well.
10. Online reputation management
This is essential to keep your brand image alive within the customer’s mind. This recognition and entrusting your company will help drive sales. With an increasing awareness of how important online reputation really is, a great amount of time and effort is dedicated to tracking such progress. When done regularly and with experts, you can audit and share useful reviews to captivate your audience. This can be combined with social media to create positive PR with carefully curated content and accessible contact details. Yet again, this is another online marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Always remember that as we voyage into a mid and eventually post-pandemic world, investing resources in social media and local searches. By optimizing your visibility and Google’s affinity for your site, you’re bound to attract more traffic, boost retention and minimize abandonment. Implementing more customized and interactive material also augments this process of increasing customer engagement. Ultimately, generating and converting more leads is what will drive sales, create new revenue streams and channelize your monetization with higher ROI. Grasping current digital marketing trends is critical to be successful in what’s becoming an evolving and tougher competitive marketplace.
Author Bio:
Deepak Chauhan is a digital business strategist and CEO of VOCSO Digital Agency based out of India, the USA & UAE. The web business strategist, who has 12+ years of experience, has worked with many small businesses and startups across the globe to help them build successful websites/applications and launch them online with his strategic consulting. When not working, he enjoys traveling, writing, photography, and satisfying his taste buds. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.