digital marketing

New ways to use digital marketing for business

When it comes to finding new ways to use digital marketing or SEO marketing for your business, you need to start by looking in your own backyard.  Having a strategy in place will pave out the way for you and tell you exactly where to look for the best digital marketing ideas for the business (this is for those of you who haven’t hired a digital marketing agency).

Ensure you have asked and answered the following:

Who is your audience?

You need to start with buyer personas. These include the qualities that you would like to see within the ideal customer:

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Motivations
  • Challenges
  • Geographical locations
  • Challenges
  • Personal interests
  • Shopping preferences

What is your main goal?

Identifying the goal prior to creating the digital marketing strategy will ensure that you don’t end up in the wrong spot. Are you wanting to decrease cart abandonment? Increase your purchase amount? Enhance brand awareness or create a better customer loyalty program? Be specific.

It is important to realise that not all the areas are going to be a hit with just the one digital strategy. Evaluate the digital resources that you have already invested in so that you can determine whether they are working. You might have a little tweaking or do or, worst case, re-do the whole campaigns.

Probably at this time you have launched a digital campaign and ended up dropping cash on the tools in order to do it. Be sure that it is not uncommon for people to forget that you are subscribed for email blasts etc. Determine if it is still meeting your needs. With a new digital marketing strategy, you could revamp the previous marketing tools and then you can start getting a return on your investment.

The most common digital marketing channels are as follows:

Email marketing

Email communication is an easy and simple way to remain ahead with your customer base often. By sending out meaningful promotions and company updates, remind people that they have stuff still sitting in their online shopping cart and even ask for reviews from new and old customers. It helps to personalise the email with the recipient’s name and ensure when you send the email is not likely to be when the customers are on the clock.

Social Media

Social media gives you the power to pinpoint your target audience and it gives you the powerful tools in order to boost your digital marketing efforts. The best way to target your customer is to ask yourself: Are they a professional businessperson? If so, you want to focus more on the likes of Linkedln. If they are millennials, Instagram and Twitter would be more suited. You need to be meeting your clients where they are already at. 

Here are a few suggestions when it comes to better ways to use digital marketing:

  • Host a contest
  • Cross-promote a complimentary business
  • Go live on Instagram or Facebook
  • Report user-generated content 
  • Poll the followers

Content Marketing

It is important to be including related and valuable content on all digital marketing platforms as they will increase your chances of bringing in organic traffic. You can use blogs, infographics, videos and even whitepapers to draw customers right to you just on the search engine results.

Mobile Strategy

Having a mobile strategy can go in many directions but it will be determined on the resources that you have available to you. You can perform effective and valuable marketing through the use of social media and by having a mobile-friendly website. You can also create a mobile app which is beneficial to the as there are so many customisation possibilities.

Pay-to-Play Advertising

There are many options here including paid media ads and social media, pay per click ads and Google Adwords. You can create digital billboards where you can even choose the audience that views the advertisement and where you can maximise the ROI.