What Is Digital Marketing?
Now that commerce and consumers (along with much of our attention) have migrated online, marketing and advertising have followed suit and now reach target audiences through digital channels such as social media sites like Facebook or search engines or websites offering text message alerts or emails as part of what we refer to as digital or online marketing strategies.
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Types of Digital Marketing
A comprehensive digital marketing strategy is crucial to exploit opportunities and beat out competition in today's digital landscape. That means taking on multiple activities. According to marketers using three or more channels in their campaigns experience increased purchase and engagement rates of 250% greater than marketers using single media. Your digital marketing strategy might include popular inbound marketing tactics like social media, paid ads, email marketing, influencer marketing, content marketing and SEO strategy, and affiliate and conversion rate optimization.
Here Are A Few Tips That Can Boost Your Sales
Utilize Google Shopping Ads To Reach A Larger Audience
Google Shopping Ads comprise over 75% of ad spend in search. Unlike regular ad campaigns, these Shopping Ads allow Google to decide when and where your ad should show based on product data; Google reads titles, descriptions and other feed data to create intent-driven search queries and display ads accordingly. While the initial setup may require manual effort from your side, most of this process will be automated by developing and showing them to targeted people via its algorithm.
Use Instagram Shoppable Post Feature
Instagram Shoppable posts enable businesses and influencers to tag products directly onto their positions, offering users an effortless shopping experience without leaving the app. Furthermore, its Checkout feature allows them to purchase goods without leaving. Incorporating these features into your digital marketing strategy may boost sales by providing discovery capabilities without overselling products.
Instil Trust with Customer Reviews
72% of customers trust a brand more if they see positive reviews and testimonials since consumers tend to place more faith in other consumers than in brands. As such, it's crucial that your website or product listing feature reviews from happy customers; here are a few steps recommended by experienced digital marketing agencies that encourage customers to share their feedback:
Send a friendly note to customers via social media; incorporate a pop-up form after purchase; send out an email following delivery; and finally, share a quick survey to determine who had an enjoyable shopping experience.
Up Your Cross-selling Game with Pop-ups
Cross-selling refers to product recommendations tailored specifically to a customer's interests, intending to upsell more items. For maximum effectiveness, pair suggestions with similar products--for instance, offering watches to those who have just added two t-shirts and pants into their carts.
Also Read: Importance of Digital Marketing
Personalize Website Content
Headlines & Hero Images: Tailor headlines and hero images specifically to your target audience to make an early connection with leads. CTAs: Use calls-to-action as one more point of persuasion to persuade target audiences into becoming customers or upselling existing customers.
Testimonials/ Logos: Testimonials and logos act as social proof, so display those relevant to specific industries when communicating with field visitors.
Product/ Plan Features: Showcase the features or products which resonate more with your customers for maximum impact.
Featured Blog Posts: Make your website relevant for visitors by featuring blog posts relevant to their industry or similar to one they have read before.45% of businesses do not have an effective marketing plan, making success in today's highly-competitive landscape difficult without proper preparation and strategy. Digital Solutions can assist by offering Ecommerce Digital Marketing Services. If you would like us to take over these duties for you, contact us!
11 Top Digital Marketing Tips
CIS helps e-commerce businesses leverage texting as an effective digital marketing strategy, but we understand there's much more involved. So here are our best digital marketing tips - so send your emails today to experience its power!
Understand Your Customer
Understanding your target audience is essential in e-commerce marketing. Who are they, what interests, needs, and desires do they possess, where do they spend their time, etc? To identify and understand customers better, conducting market research may be helpful; even something as simple as surveying current customers will give valuable data that will allow you to create various buyer personas.
Map customer journeys that detail how a prospective shopper travels from an anonymous shopper to a loyal purchaser. You should also identify customer segments based on age, gender, occupation, income, location etc. By having a clear image of your target customer, you can develop marketing campaigns tailored to their interests. Also, remember the power of customer feedback: using it as an invaluable resource can help your brand enhance the customer experience even further.
Create Compelling Content
An essential aspect of digital marketing is creating compelling and relevant content that draws visitors to your website. Clickbait might capture shoppers' attention, but they need to provide value to your target audience to avoid abandoning it before purchasing. Valuable content comes in various forms - blog posts, videos, infographics, or social media posts are just some of the formats. Here are some marketing tips to ensure successful content production:
Optimize Your Website Frequently for Conversions and SEO
Your website is your gateway to revenue, and as such, it should be optimized for conversions. This involves making sure it's easy to navigate, with clear calls-to-action that load quickly and offer frictionless checkout. These factors alone could yield significant increases in online sales.
Your website can help collect important customer data, including top purchases, browsing history and click pathways. By analyzing this data and recognizing patterns, you'll discover opportunities for further optimizations and ways to more efficiently target and segment customers.
Your website and published content should also incorporate critical search keywords: the words and phrases customers type into search engines when looking for products, services and websites like yours. Google provides several free tools that can assist with researching keywords and optimizing content accordingly.
Build a Presence on Social Media Platforms
Most of your current and prospective customers spend much of their day scrolling social media or engaging with online communities like Reddit and Discord. Here are some social media marketing tips to take full advantage of these ubiquitous platforms.
Locate and monitor the platforms and communities where your customers gather. Keep an eye out for what types of sentiment analysis they share about your business or industry - how they feel about it, etc.Be sure to create content that engages, educates and informs your target audience: not just about your brand and products but also their needs and wants. Engage regularly with your followers by listening and replying on the platform or online community where they frequent.Utilize high-quality images and videos, as they are among the most-wanted forms of content.
Create Mobile-friendly Content
Did you know North American-based online retailers receive 66% of their traffic through mobile devices? If your website is optimized for mobile, you could retain new and loyal customers. To ensure customers stay on your site for long, optimize it to work seamlessly across devices like phones, tablets and laptops and measure page speed. This is key in drawing visitors in; slow load times could result in customers abandoning it altogether. When creating mobile-friendly content: Create a presence on social media, as most mobile users spend most of their screen time browsing these platforms.
Integrate Marketing Across Multiple Platforms
Digital marketing relies on seamlessly integrating messaging, branding and campaigns across many different platforms at once. While managing content across digital channels may seem challenging at times, doing it effectively is crucial for success online. Here are some digital marketing tips for successfully integrating across platforms:
Get on Google your Business
Google ecommerce business is a free platform that enables businesses to list themselves on Google. It's an effective way of reaching potential customers nearby if yours is a local business; make sure your listing has all of its information filled in correctly! Other advantages of Google your Business:
Add or update essential information about your business, such as contact details, website URL, images, videos, events and hours of operation.Customers can rate and review your business, giving you valuable customer feedback that allows you to tailor products or services according to what resonates best with the masses. This way, you can better address audience desires.
Registering your store on Google, yourBusiness can provide your shop with an additional boost in search engine optimization and search rankings.Your business listing will receive regular reports with data on its page views, notifications of user reviews, and more.
Use Email and SMS/Text Marketing Efficiently
Email remains at the heart of digital marketing strategies for a good reason: it provides a high-volume, low-cost way of staying in touch with customers, reminding them about your products or sales offerings, promoting news or products and informing your target market of upcoming promotions or deals.
Numerous software products make creating email templates, tracking open rates and clicks, and compliant email lists, as well as growing potential customer bases easily accessible through forms, banners or pop ups on websites aimed at collecting email addresses for further growth of customer lists - adding forms, banners or pop ups can help capture email addresses quickly from prospective customer and expand potential customer bases rapidly - a great way of growing possible customer bases further! Email is ideal for communicating important news and timely information. At the same time, SMS may provide immediate alerts - when urgent messages need to be conveyed immediately!
SMS marketing, especially two-way and conversational SMS helps build relationships, establish an urgency sense, and meet shoppers where they spend most of their time: their phones. While email remains the go-to marketing channel, research firm Gartner found that text message campaigns had 7x higher response and click-through rates than email campaigns(4). Texts provide the perfect medium for high-conversion marketing messages such as abandoned cart reminders, Black Friday sales alerts or promotional content updates, and personalized messages tailored based on user data.
Invest in Digital Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC ads) can be one of the most effective digital marketing strategies to reach your target audience and drive traffic to your site. Although spending money on digital ads might feel risky, they have proven highly cost-effective in today's highly competitive e-commerce environment.
PPC ads can be an invaluable way to test different messages and brands, with the ultimate goal being that you find out which attracts the highest click-through rate and can find ways to optimize ROI. Examples of PPC advertising include Google Ads and YouTube Ads on search engines and Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook platforms.
Personalize Content
Every day we share information online that could benefit an e-commerce business by understanding shoppers and providing products they need and want. By harnessing this data ethically and legally, e-commerce businesses can better connect with shoppers by gathering critical pieces of data about themselves online - information which allows for improved targeting strategies. Personalizing customer experiences, be it by greeting email recipients by their first name or notifying customers when an item they viewed online is back in stock is a critical element of digital marketing.
Demand Metric has conducted studies demonstrating that 82% of customers feel more positively towards brands after engaging with personalized content. (5) By tailoring it specifically to shoppers' needs and interests, you'll increase conversions while simultaneously realizing a greater return on investment for your efforts.
Make Use of Modern Digital Tools Just as online stores evolved from physical locations, digital marketing tools enable marketers to be more efficient, data-driven and effective online. They can help make customer journeys smoother, from lead to referral. Here are a few examples for you to consider if you aren't already doing it.
Chatbots use artificial intelligence to engage visitors. They can be used to answer queries, provide customer service support, promote products or serve as customer advisors - making chatbots an affordable way of providing one-on-one connections when there aren't enough humans around to respond immediately to customer inquiries.
Make sure that you take full advantage of all the integrations offered on your e-commerce platform. Integrations can make your business more efficient, freeing you up to focus on other areas by connecting data across platforms and giving an accurate snapshot of your business.
Powerful Digital Marketing Hacks to Increase Sales
Know What Matters To Your Customer
Personalizing customer experiences begins by understanding who your target customers are and their individual needs and expectations. Since most customer interactions with brands (including your own!) happening online, using data like behavioral patterns, engagement metrics, order history, and affinity categories to identify customer personas will allow you to build comprehensive profiles that would enable a hyper-focused strategy aimed at inspiring those that check in with your brand to progress further down their sales funnel and become paying clients.
Create Engaging Content With A Clear Cta
Enticing, tailor-made content explicitly tailored to customer preferences will generate the highest levels of engagement from readers. Clickbait can drive online traffic temporarily, but for awareness, leads, and sales, it must provide value to readers. Thus, it must either be educational or engaging (or both), easy to read, appealing to the eye, and easily understandable, with clear calls-to-action (CTAs) like redirecting customers back to your website or filling out forms to nudge them towards taking the next step; reaching customers on platforms most comfortable to them.
One of the most significant errors businesses can make when creating content is creating it in hopes it will immediately attract attention. Your content strategy should focus on both short-term and long-term goals for success.
Automate Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing automation robs marketers of valuable opportunities for growth and engagement with target audiences if it still needs to be implemented. In addition to automating tedious tasks, email automation enables your marketing team to categorize audiences more efficiently and target them with relevant materials - keeping your brand at the forefront of customers' minds while increasing conversion rates and realizing a higher marketing return on investment (ROI).
Email marketing automation solutions also allow you to track recipient behavior. Did they open and read your email, click through to the link, click it more than once etc? By monitoring feedback metrics such as open rate, clickthrough rate and bounce rate, you can analyze your strategy to convert more leads into sales leads.
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Perform A/B testing
With A/B testing, you can fine-tune your messaging and create content that resonates best with a particular audience. In an A/B test, two versions of similar content (for instance, banner ads or emails) are created and tested against one another for 7-14 days before analyzing conversion rates and other metrics to identify which version performed better in terms of conversions or other measures of success. Once this evaluation period has concluded, results can be evaluated and refined further for future digital marketing strategies by repeating A/B tests in future iteration cycles. Many people mistakenly assume that A/B testing is only helpful for email marketing; you can also utilize it with blogs, gated content, landing pages and online ads.
Measure Your Actions
Personalisation is an ongoing improvement process; to succeed, you must constantly adapt your strategy and communication for each customer until they find their perfect spot. Feedback can be collected by monitoring customer response to marketing actions. In addition, periodically assess the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy as compared with competitors and stated goals; measuring also allows you to discover innovative ways to tailor it according to specific target audiences' requirements.
After some months, you might realize that Instagram audiences are consistently engaged while Twitter posts don't perform as expected - this could indicate that it may be time to revisit your approach or that specific channels provide better access to brand content than others. By measuring and monitoring strategies, you can get answers to questions such as these while developing new ideas for converting leads into sales opportunities.
These five digital marketing hacks will help your brand develop more personalized interactions with its customers, connecting on an individual level with each one and increasing engagement with you and sales. However, to do this successfully, you need the appropriate tools, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, to leverage existing data or collect additional insights for tremendous sales success.
Also Read: 7 Digital Marketing Secrets to Attract Top Clients
How To Build A Digital Marketing Strategy
Now is the time to create your digital marketing strategy; all elements must come together seamlessly. No matter which of our 11 digital marketing strategies you select, setting goals, identifying audiences and understanding what needs to be created is critical to developing an effective plan.
Set Goals And Objectives
Before choosing a digital marketing strategy, set and document your short- and long-term goals and specific objectives to gauge its effectiveness. Ensure these goals and objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely).
Goal. Increase awareness of our widgets with our target audience-strategy (how you'll reach this goal). Utilize content marketing to convince potential buyers that our widgets are superior offerings by producing at least two user persona-targeted pieces for every step in the sales funnel. Objective (to evaluate whether the strategy is working): Reach a 25% increase in downloads of our widget white papers and eBooks each quarter and increase email subscribers by 50% within six months.
Consider Buyer Personas
Creating an effective digital marketing strategy is only possible if you understand the people you're trying to target. That's where buyer personas come in. Buyer personas are fictional people representing the traits of those you'd like to buy your products or services.
Audit Your Assets
Gain in-depth knowledge of what assets your business already owns by documenting current digital assets and ranking each from most effective to least effective. Once complete, this exercise will show which ones need improving and which need rebuilding from scratch.
Plan Your Content Creation Resource.
Once you've identified what needs to be created for a content marketing campaign, the next step should be deciding how the work will be executed and delivered. Usually, this involves factors like:Once you've considered all these elements alongside your objectives, personas, and audit findings, you can create your content plan and any necessary resources.
Decide How To Distribute Your Content
After developing personas and creating content, and with resources in place to distribute it, it's time to decide how you will distribute it. One key consideration should be whether the content falls under either of two categories:Channels under your control, such as website, blog, email and social, are acknowledged. Earned. Content shared or discussed by others counts as made content.
The content you pay to promote, such as pay-per-click ads (PPC) and influencer marketing (Improvisers). Most digital marketing strategies employ all three approaches in tandem - using SEO-oriented blog content on owned channels like their website, for instance, earning social shares with PR-focused PR pieces and budgeting for paid influencer marketing posts.
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Conclusion
Marketing on the Internet has become an essential aspect of company life, becoming a necessary focus to reach customers online and grow sales.Text marketing should be an integral component of your digital strategy; research has proven its efficacy over email and paid ads in increasing conversion rates.
