What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is any business activity that aims to promote or sell products, services or environments to an online audience. This can be achieved through any of the available online avenues ranging from social media marketing to email marketing. Digital marketing continues to explode in popularity and has become a must in order to create a successful brand.
A successful brand will be able to better deliver its products or services due to its clear identity. Having an identity ensures that all of your content is consistent and relevant to a specific audience, problem and cause. This clear image of who you are as a business elevates you past being a provider of a product and into being THE provider that everyone knows and loves. However, this level of success can only be achieved through the following marketing strategies.
1.Content Marketing
This strategy employs the agenda of creating valuable content that is consumed by a target audience. The content is formulated in a way that attracts attention in order to build a brand identity. Having a brand allows you to grow closer to your customers in a way that would not be possible otherwise.
Content marketing is a very flexible digital marketing strategy that allows you to employ many different tools and approaches to achieve your goals. These tools include mediums like blog posts, videos, podcasts and infographics. Having such a wide array of choices on what kind of content you can make greatly widens your potential audience. Depending on whether a specific type of content is best suited for you, you could create brand loyalty and stronger customer relations.
This also raises the concern of being too broad with the content that you try to produce. All this means is that the more types of content you produce, the more likely you are to stray from your brand identity. Losing your brand identity can be harmful and less effective than creating well curated content for your customers.
Expanding on concerns brings us into the best practices for content marketing to avoid making these errors. One best practice for marketing has to be identifying the key demographics and having accurate user personas to base your content off of. Knowing your audience before you post content can help you curate content that matches their needs and wants. These particular needs and wants can vary from the tone of your campaigns to the length of videos being produced. Being able to create a healthy mindset of adapting your content to the needs of your audience is another key practice. That’s why we recommend getting comfortable with a variety of different formats and mediums to remain fresh and engaging for your audience.
2.Social Media Marketing (SMMA)
The marketing landscape has changed drastically with the introduction of digital marketing.This change has opened the door for a new strategy known as social media marketing. Social media marketing makes use of the vast amount of users on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and more. Social media currently boasts an active user base of 4.41 billion in 2023. This is around 55% of the world actively using social media. Having such a large audience can certainly boost your brand if certain conditions are met.
In order to create a large following, it is important to follow the same steps of having a clear idea of who your audience is. After analysing your audience you will have to create content for that specific group. However, despite marketing to a specific group it is important to understand that there are universal standards and know-hows that should be followed no matter what.
These include
- Optimise content to the platform: Knowing what works best on which platform is extremely important. For example, an important thing to note is that short form video’s perform the best on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
- Be authentic, create content that is able to be recognised for its good intentions and efforts to push a positive message.
- Being consistent: A consistent marketing strategy will keep your audience from pressuring you when it has been a while since your last past. Consistency also promotes planning and practice that will boost your SMMA skills.
Another thing to note is that social media marketing holds supremacy over any other strategy with how easy it is for customers to engage with brands. Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook follow a structure that allows an audience to interact and like with a post to show how they feel. Furthermore, social media is a place where individuals spend around 2.5 hours every day on social media platforms. This immense amount of traffic and visibility promotes great amounts of customer to customer interaction (C2C). The essence of C2C is the customers interacting with other customers through shared outlets of feedback. This self automated engagement generator is priceless and can save large amounts of money on customer support. Check out our other blogs on social media marketing and discover how you can tackle the platform.
3.Search Engine Optimisation
With the rise of digital marketing and social media marketing has created a need for a hub of information. For many businesses, this is their website. A website is able to contain a wealth of information about a business and its products and services. For some, their website is a link that they mention in every social media post or have attached to QR codes on posters that they mass produce. However for some, websites are the focal point of their marketing strategy with most conversions being the result of a good website.
But what does that have to do with SEO? Everything. Search engine optimisation is a strategy employed in order to boost the visibility of your site as well as your brand. The strategy as a whole is simply creating a website that search engines like google are fond of and in turn are boosted higher resulting in more visibility. In order to gain this higher visibility, you must first optimise several key problem areas in most websites in 2023. These commonly occurring issues include:
- Bad keywords – Keywords are short terms that are frequently searched. Creators of a webpage are able to link a keyword of their choice to the page in order to have it indexed with that keyword. Choosing a bad keyword means that your page will likely not be searched by many people and will have a hard time reaching the top.
- Slow web pages – Slow web pages kill SEO scores. The response time of a website correlates directly with user satisfaction making it a must to be optimised.
- No mobile responsiveness – A website that is not mobile responsive will instantly receive a hit to SEO due to the high demand of website friendly sites. Many site builders make it extremely easy to create responsive sites so it is only right for search engines to create this penalty.
- Bad hierarchy – Not having headings ordered correctly creates confusion for search engines making it hard for them to analyse the page and understand its correlation to the keyword.
We strongly recommend employing this strategy as websites have proven themselves to have great returns on investments for many businesses and growing brands.
4.Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a strategy that has been around for many generations. The general principle is paying a person with a large following a sum of money in order to be promoted amongst that large following. We see this tactic every day when we see ads on tv with famous athletes promoting a pair of shoes for example. Despite appearing to be the perfect strategy it is important to recognise the difficulty in working with a worthwhile influencer. We suggest following this framework when attempting to work in this field.
- Identify influencers that work best with you – There are many influencers with large followings, but it’s important to choose one that shares an audience with similar needs and wants.
- Clear goals – A partnership is an agreement where both parties aim to grow together and help each other reach their goals. So it is important to set out goals for both you and your influence to help each other understand how you can help each other.
- Leverage user-generated content – User generated content helps achieve your goals with the help of a large audience. Being able to influence an audience into believing that your content is worth sharing will in turn create a larger audience that will potentially do the same thing.
- Measure and analyse – Your content will always have results, maybe not the results you want but the ones you need to work with. In order to create a working strategy you must acknowledge that your efforts must be justified in their expense in order to be seen as a success. The level of success you see will help you adjust your strategies to create improved strategies that work for you.
5. Email Marketing
One of the leading signs of a promising lead is one where they have engaged and are now part of your email list. Having an email list is equal to having a consumer base that enjoys your products or services. They enjoy them so much that they want to see your brand on a regular basis. Email marketing can promote anything you like to this loyal base of customers which is why it is important to curate content that does not destroy trust and good faith in the brand. Email marketing commonly manifests in these 3 common updates:
- New products/services/features
- Featured blog articles/news
- And important changes to business operations
It is important that emails be created to be engaging and unique in order to not be sent to spam or unsubscribed from. Every email should be considerate of what clients are expecting from you, this can be found through demographics research.
Conclusion
These strategies are all valid strategies that a business can use to grow their brand and establish their online presence. As mentioned throughout the blog, digital marketing strategies should all aim to produce content that is engaging enough for an audience to enjoy enough to the point it becomes worth sharing. For more in-depth coverage of each of these strategies please check out our blogs and read more about how to make use of these digital marketing strategies.
If you are interested in establishing a strong online presence, give us a call and see how Upward Consulting can boost your brand. Call Dorin today at 0412811072 or email us at info@upwardconsulting.com.au and get in touch today!
