Explore Different Marketing Avenues
Technology has given businesses several different ways of reaching new potential customers that would not have been available otherwise. Exploring these different methods will help your business reach new groups of people. Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is the most commonly used digital marketing avenue. This is because PPC advertising is fairly straightforward and easy to execute if you have the money to do so.
With PPC a website or search engine will include an advertisement and a link back to your website. When someone follows that link back to the website, the website will be billed for that traffic. The cost of a single click depends on the level of competition for the campaign’s keywords. Common forms of PPC advertising are advertisements before online videos, the ads you see while surfing the web, and any link at the top of a search engine results page that has been labeled “Ad” by the search engine.
Another common form of digital marketing is email marketing. The primary advantage of email marketing is how direct it is. With email marketing, potential customers will receive direct advertisements through their email that they can access without ever having to follow a link or search for your business. The only caveat with email marketing is that it requires some personal information about the potential customer. The people receiving these marketing emails need to voluntarily give a business their email address before they can be marketed to.
Leverage Social Media’s Strength
Social media is another avenue for businesses to promote themselves, but it deserves its own section because of how strong it is in digital marketing. Every business should include social media in its marketing strategy. There are three key reasons for this: the number of people you could reach, the two-way communication that only social media allows, and the fact that it can be free to use.
The number of people a business can reach through social media is staggering. Facebook alone has over one billion active monthly users. If you consider advertising on a few different platforms then it is likely that your advertisements will reach at least a few million people. And social media shows no signs of slowing down. If anything these platforms will continue to grow their audiences, making it a smart investment for digital marketing.
Social media is also the only form of digital marketing that can truly facilitate two-way communication. A business can promote a new product or service and individual consumers can respond to that business publicly. This two-way communication can make it easy to build a personality around your business and engage with consumers more directly. It is also a powerful tool for understanding brand awareness and how consumers perceive your company.
The final reason social media is so powerful is the price tag associated with it. Of course, paid advertisements are available on social media platforms, but they aren’t necessary. A great deal of attention and traffic can be earned simply by making a free account for your brand and engaging with people consistently.
Develop a Strong Workplace Culture
A strong workplace culture will do wonders for your marketing efforts. It can improve brand awareness and encourage consumers to view your company positively. Recently, consumers have begun to go out of their way to support companies that treat their employees well and care about similar social movements. For example, environmentally conscious consumers will advocate for and support companies that have actively shown interest in protecting the environment. Consider implementing a leadership development plan that aims to improve the skills and confidence of your senior employees. This will give them the skills necessary to build a strong workplace culture.
Site Optimization and Advanced SEO
Search engine optimization has been gaining traction in recent years because it is a long-term method of organically growing traffic to your brand’s website. This works by making on-page and off-page changes to your content that aligns with Google’s webpage ranking system. Search engine optimization is a long-term method of digital marketing, meaning the optimizations you make to your website will have a lasting impact on your website’s traffic. For example, Google has begun to take a mobile-first approach to webpage ranking. So by optimizing your site to display properly on mobile devices, you can begin ranking consistently higher than webpages that do not.
Furthermore, website optimizations improve the overall user experience and make it more likely that users will return to your webpage at some point. Improvements to the user experience are generally done by anticipating consumer needs and meeting them before they become an issue. For example, if your business ships a large number of products to consumers then include a USPS shipping calculator so that consumers can easily find the cost of shipping without having to jump through hoops.