If you’re looking to grow your business and attract new clients, you need to sharpen your digital marketing sword. Plodding along without a digital marketing strategy will not bear much fruit in 2023.
So, if you want to float not flounder, let’s jump into the primary modes of digital marketing and some strategies you can deploy to squeeze as much juice out of it as you can.
What is digital marketing and why is it important?
Digital marketing is a broad catch-all label for all marketing activity that takes place in a digital format, including online.
This can include everything from social media and email to Google ads and websites. It also encompasses more slippery concepts like SEO and customer journeys.
In essence – it’s modern marketing as opposed to traditional marketing such as magazine ads, TV, radio and letter drops.
One of the key differences with digital marketing vs. traditional marketing is the way you can leverage data and make more informed decisions about targeting your audience, often to lead them down a path to sales.
Where to start with your digital marketing strategy…
- When designing a digital marketing plan, the goal is a list of marketing objectives that will be achieved with your marketing efforts. Know what your goals are. Eg.increase website visits by 20%.
- Understand your target audience and buyer personas so you target your efforts effectively.
- Track what works and what doesn’t, using data, then adjust your digital marketing efforts accordingly.
- Create a content calendar to map out your digital marketing strategy and deliverables in advance to stay on track.
- Stick to your brand and make sure you have a set of brand guidelines to make sure your content doesn’t stray too far from your brand identity.
Try to do more ‘unpolished’ video marketing
Video marketing used to be the bastion of well-funded larger companies. It takes a pretty penny to hire animation artists or videography specialists to create polished, high quality video content.
That’s changing fast. With the advent of YouTube came budget user created content – and it only grew from there. Now we see very unpolished video content exploding in reach and popularity thanks to Tik Tok, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.
More than this, we’ve seen the meteoric rise of ‘live’ and ‘story’ versions of such video content dominating social channels and gaining excellent reach, interactions, and exposure.
This is excellent news for businesses on a budget who want to harness the digital marketing potential of video marketing.
It’s as easy as busting out the iPhone and quickly firing short and authentic videos about your business or what you’re up to.
Think about this, according to Cisco,
“82% of global internet traffic will come from either video streaming or video downloads in 2022.”
Up your SEO game with social media SEO
We should all now know that being found online through SEO is a mainstay of digital marketing. But what have you done about social media SEO? Yes. That’s a thing.
entities like Instagram are currently paying a lot of attention to how searchable their content is. While hashtags have long been used to group and search for types of content, they are now turning their attention to untagged searchability. Back in 2020, Vishal Shah, VP of Product an Instagram, explicitly told the market that,
“Now you can search beyond usernames and hashtags for interests on Instagram”
This means using business related keywords in your posts and including social media in your SEO strategy is the new game.
Update your website regularly and make it mobile first
One of the easiest ways you can boost the visibility of your website and get involved in SEO is to update it regularly with fresh content.
Google sees fresh websites as good websites and will give them primacy of place. The best way to do this without changing web copy is to write regular blogs (which also double as great content to share on socials or email campaigns).
As Reckon’s Digital Marketing expert, Valentina Vurchio tells us,
“Writing regular blog posts about anything new in your business is seen very favourably by the search engines as each time you publish an article, it’s essentially viewed as a website refresh. So even if using SEO-focused keywords isn’t your strongpoint – just write regular blog posts to rank higher on Google.”
You also need to be certain that your website is mobile friendly, with astronomic rates of mobile viewing these days has eclipsed desktop views.
Check yourself out online and make sure your websites, landing pages and social content all display properly on a mobile device.
*Further Reading: Check out our interview with resident Digital Marketing Manager, Val Valentina for her personal tips and advice on how to better leverage digital marketing in your business.
