In today’s world of online shopping, growing internet usage, interconnected social media, and targeted advertising, digital marketing isn’t just an advantage but a necessity for any business wanting to thrive in the digital space. While many businesses manage to achieve the bare minimum required for maintaining some sort of online presence, only a few manage to master digital marketing completely.
Digital marketing is an evergreen skill that every business can benefit from. Since running a business can be an extremely challenging task in and of itself, many brands may struggle to pour in the time and resources necessary to take their business to the next level with digital marketing.
If that’s the case, one can always rely on digital marketing companies or advertising agencies to do their digital marketing for them. While hiring top digital marketing companies isn’t for everyone, there are still a few simple ways every business can leverage digital marketing.
Top 7 Ways of Growing Your Business With Digital Marketing
Here are some of the easiest yet most effective ways in which your business can leverage digital marketing
1. Create Great Content
Content was, is, and will always be the king of digital marketing. It is the foundation of your brand’s online presence. While every business has some form of digital content online, most of what we encounter on the internet is just the equivalent of white noise.
In other words, great content is rare. But, it isn’t impossible. How to create great content, you ask? Well, content creation is just an extension of market research. All brands try to figure out a good product-market fit, requiring in-depth market research. Post research, you’ll know exactly what your users need, which will inform your content marketing efforts.
In other words, creating great content starts with understanding your customer’s needs and pain points and addressing them in the best way possible. With content marketing, brands are almost always better off adding value to their audiences than promoting themselves.
2. Multichannel Marketing
The ‘channel’ in multichannel marketing simply refers to a medium a brand may use to spread awareness about itself or to get in touch with its customers. That said, multichannel marketing means using multiple channels simultaneously to execute a cohesive marketing strategy.
In today’s fast-paced, online world, users interact with various platforms and mediums, and brands must ensure consistency across all these channels. Brand consistency across multiple platforms helps build trust and can be beneficial when developing deeper customer relationships and upselling.
For instance, targeted ads can help users grab lucrative deals, while social media campaigns can help build relations and explain your brand’s message. In brief, brands need to leverage a bunch of different marketing channels to make their campaigns more effective.
3. Personalized Marketing
Personalized marketing has become central to digital marketing in today’s world, where technologies like Big Data analytics and artificial intelligence are readily accessible to businesses. Users do now wish to interact with brands that are irrelevant or out of touch with their needs. This means brands need to tailor their marketing to meet the user demands; or in other words, they need to personalize their marketing campaigns.
There are several ways of doing so, but by far, the most common approach is building buyer/user personas. These are generalized personas that best represent your target audience/customers. Personas are mostly built by attributing basic demographic data to a brand’s ideal customer persona. For instance, a women’s fashion brand may come up with a customer persona with a specific age, ethnicity, income bracket, location, etc.
Personas help brands understand what their users want and allow them to personalize their marketing campaigns.
4. Targeted ads
Targeted ads are the next step to personalized marketing. The reason why some of the most popular and influential tech giants are built on an ad-based revenue model, is because targeted ads simply work. In fact, they are so effective that not utilizing targeted ads is a certain loss and a missed opportunity for any business in the digital age.
How targeted ads work is by utilizing customer data available to a brand. Using these ads can help companies streamline their marketing efforts and ensure a greater ROI. Customer data allows companies to understand exactly what their users need, which can then help brands serve custom solutions to specific users improving both conversion and customer satisfaction.
Running multiple targeted ad campaigns across different marketing channels can be difficult for your typical SMB, which is where hiring advertising agencies can make your life much easier.
5. Influencer Marketing
Another incredibly effective and popular approach to marketing is influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is simply about sponsoring influencers within your preferred niche.
Brands are often seen with distrust, and smaller companies can have a hard time gaining a following; here is where influencer marketing becomes relevant. It gives you access to a larger following (depending upon how ‘big’ your influencer is) and allows brands to leverage the trust influencers have earned with their audience.
6. Watch Out For Your Marketing ROI
When marketing, it’s easy to dump out a budget for ads and branding and forget about it. But companies need to be cautious of how they spend their cash, especially when marketing. Not every marketing channel is right for you, and not every strategy yields the best result for your brand. Companies, therefore, need to iterate and optimize their marketing campaigns.
The best, most practical way to achieve this is by calculating your ROI across all marketing channels. This is easy for certain channels like PPC ads while significantly difficult for something like content marketing. However, the more precise brands can get at calculating their marketing ROI, the more effectively they can optimize and convert their audience.
When starting out with a new campaign or channel, design your plan with ROI at its core. Let further campaign-based decisions depend largely upon your ROI and campaign performance..
7. Use Marketing for Up-sells and Re-sells
While much of marketing focuses on customer accusation, especially for growing businesses, leveraging digital marketing for upsells and resells shouldn’t be ignored. When a customer makes a purchase from a brand, the trust has already been established; what companies need to do now is to build upon this trust further using their marketing channels.
This can be achieved with as little as simply reminding customers of their past purchases or by exposing them to the rest of your catalog. You want to take this time to build a better relationship with your customers, and brands can do that by communicating with existing customers across various marketing channels.
Suppose a user has already made a purchase from your brand. In that case, there is a good chance you’ll have critical data on the said customer, which can always be used to further personalize and improve customer-company communication.
Conclusion
Effective digital marketing can be challenging, especially with so many marketing options out there. However, when implemented across the right channels, a smart and optimized strategy can yield amazing results for any brand looking for digital marketing success. How do you plan to leverage digital marketing to grow your business further?
