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The Crucial Connection Between Digital Marketing and Your Online Excellence
To grow your business, you must pay close attention to how you market yourself digitally on the Internet.
Perhaps your products or services are entirely online, or maybe you supplement your brick-and-mortar operation with some online sales. Either way, digital marketing techniques trump traditional methods in keeping business going.
And if your business isn’t currently online, make it your business to get it there fast! Consumers increasingly turn to the Internet to make their purchases. Shopping online allows potential customers to easily:
- Compare prices
- Read reviews
- Purchase from wherever, whenever
- Save on driving time and costs
With their smartphones in hand, consumers engage with online content like never before. It’s satisfying to hand-pick who you want to see and hear from in your digital world. Help your customers hand-pick your business with a solid online marketing campaign.
How Digital Marketing Benefits Your Business
Digital marketing benefits you in various ways. In addition to building your brand recognition in the online spaces your potential customers frequent most, you’ll see improvements in the following areas.
Reach
Gain more advertising potential and mass appeal. Tap into niche markets that might have been off-limits to you with traditional methods.
Relationships
Build stronger bonds and engage in more meaningful conversations with potential customers.
Data
Receive better feedback through digital marketing than with traditional options. Effortlessly track your performance with digital metrics and analytic methods. Gain valuable insights and make adjustments quicker.
Expenses
Digital marketing is more cost-effective than traditional advertising. With so many ways of digitally advertising to potential customers, you can find an effective method at your desired price point.
Speed
Start and revise marketing content more quickly and easily than with traditional methods.
What Counts as Digital Marketing
Digital marketing includes all forms of online business promotion, like:
- Social media management
- Email campaigns
- Content creation
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Pay-per-click advertising
You might be wondering where to start with so many different ways of reaching your target audience.
Let’s discuss our top three business growth strategies from a digital marketing standpoint. Whether new to the game or well-seasoned, these tips will help you improve your business.
1. Pen Down Your Dream Customer
Optimize your efforts by identifying the right people for your product or service–your target audience.
We didn’t misspell the first word of the heading. It’s essential to write down or type out what your dream customer is like. You’ll refer back to it repeatedly and watch it evolve.
Create a dream customer avatar (persona) to narrow your focus and generate creative marketing strategies for them.
To build your dream customer avatar, answer the following types of questions:
- Who do I want to reach?
- What is/are their demographic(s)?
- What problems do they experience?
- How can I help them get what they need?
- What do they fear or stress about?
These questions are just a start. The more you pin down and write down, the better you can produce the type of individual representing your target customer (also known as a customer avatar or persona).
Make Yourself Noticeable
Creating a website with your contact information is just the beginning. Optimizing your site and content for search engines (SEO) and staying active on social media are the top two ways to bring your business’s name to the forefront when your dream customer goes online to research solutions for whatever they seek.
SEO
Most online activity begins with a search engine query. If you aren’t in the top 10 of the results page, you are almost invisible to your dream customers (who rarely click to the second page of search engine results).
Content is the name of the game. It’s the most organic way to move to the front of the line.
To start with the basics, research popular keywords for your industry. Use those keywords in your content–titles, descriptions, and blogs. (Yes, you need to produce blogs regularly if you aren’t already.)
Then, check your site’s mobile friendliness. Google is prioritizing mobile-friendly sites. And if it’s important to Google, it needs to be important to you.
Next, optimize your videos and images for a smooth user experience. If they cause your site to be glitchy or slow, if they are unreadable or very pixelated, customers will quickly leave your site. The search engine they use will assume you weren’t a legitimate producer, and your ranking on the results pages will slip.
Use schema markup to help search engines better understand what content you provide.
Begin building links and backlinks with other companies. Ask to guest post on other blogs or if they’ll link you to one of theirs. Build business-to-business (B2B) relationships that mutually benefit your company and theirs.
Social Media
Social media is more than individuals exchanging photos and ideas. It’s a powerful marketing tool.
Social media can become your advertising space to reach wider audiences. More importantly, it transforms you from a faceless business to an actual human, connecting and building relationships with your target audience. Those relationships are what will make your business go the distance.
The best social media platform depends on your business and where your dream customers hang out most. Research and choose the platform(s) that best suit your business. Start an account and interact with others by replying to comments and posting helpful information.
Focus on Helping People
You, no doubt, created your business to help people. Keep that as your primary focus, and you’ll see success as you put digital marketing to work for you.
Want more insider tips on digital marketing for your business? We have even more actionable insights for you here.
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