Every day, most Americans are exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 advertisements. Every industry, from retail to B2B, appears to have gone digital, from little mom and pop stores to large international enterprises. Email, digital advertising on social platforms ranging from Facebook to Snapchat, as well as commercials on radio, television, and other media, bombard us with messages.
Technology is in a continual state of flux. So, we’re going to help you and reveal the digital marketing best practices you should be concentrating on right now to help you stay competitive in an ever-changing marketplace.
How Digital Marketing Practices Have Changed
Social Media
Ten years ago, social media was mostly used to communicate with friends and family. It was simple to use and provided a great method for individuals to remain in touch. When Facebook was first launched, the term “influencer” had no significance in the social media world.
A decade later, it has evolved from a site where you may interact with your friends and family to a full-fledged media platform where multi-million dollar corporations promote themselves. With over 3 billion active monthly social media users across the world, the possibility for companies to reach their target audiences and more will only expand.
Mobile First
In 2018, Google began using mobile-first indexing, which implies that Google now considers a website’s mobile version to be its primary version. Businesses have to adapt to these developments in order to stay competitive.
In particular, Generation Z is a mobile-first generation. Personalization and engagement with data-dependent smart gadgets become extremely important as a result. Gen Z is the next generation of customers, and they play an important part in any digital marketing plan for a business since they are the individuals you want to target and attract.
The change in how social media is used and now making sure that everything your company posts online is mobile friendly are the 2 most significant changes we’ve seen in digital marketing over the past decade. Let’s now focus on the current year and the best practices you need to be performing to be successful with digital marketing.
10 Best Practices for 2021
Identify Your Target Audience
The first step in creating a successful digital marketing campaign for your product is determining who your target audience is. Determine the campaign’s aim. Is the goal to get new consumers, win back old ones, or keep present clients?
Those that try to sell to everyone end up selling to nobody. So, take a deep dive into your Google Analytics to see just who is visiting your website and where they are coming from. The better you have this understanding, the better your approach can be in providing a messaging gameplan that specifically resonates with this type of person.
Create a Content Marketing Funnel
More prospects might be attracted to your material if it is properly promoted. It may also direct customers through a marketing funnel, increasing sales and profits. That is why content production has become so important in digital marketing.
Focus on various methods such as video production, blog writing, photojournalism, and influencer marketing. There are so many content strategies to implement, but it is up to you to decide which works best for your company. Content marketing is a full-funnel strategy that demands you to provide high-quality content to customers at every stage of their relationship with you.
Optimize Your SEO/SEM Plan
Many websites rely on search engine rankings as their primary source of visitors. Indeed, search outperforms social media by more than 300 percent. And you thought Instagram was a force to be reckoned with!
Search engine optimization (SEO) has become one of the most profitable areas of digital marketing as more consumers rely on Google and Bing to answer all of their inquiries. However, boosting your site’s search engine ranks isn’t always simple.
Using the services of professional SEO specialists to create an SEO/SEM action plan might be required as SEO takes a good amount of time. However, if you’re able to properly train your staff on how to perform SEO, then this can be a huge lift to your online presence.
Consider Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel digital marketing essentially refers to promoting on various channels. It establishes a number of points of contact between you and your prospective clients. The goal of omnichannel marketing is to spread your company’s message across many channels.
According to research, omnichannel marketing results in:
- Higher engagement: In an automated process, utilizing only one channel resulted in a 5.4 percent engagement rate, but using three or more channels resulted in an engagement rate of 18.96 percent.
- Increased purchase frequency: Customers who connected with three or more channels were found to purchase 250% more frequently.
Utilize ChatBots
New leads will find chatbots to be the most convenient method to communicate with your company. They’re the link between the customer’s problem and the answer your company can offer.
Chatbots provide a wide range of configurable capabilities as well as simple automation tasks. As a result, chatbots may mimic a face-to-face discussion between your prospects and salespeople. Chatbots, on the other hand, will fail to offer smooth, consistent, and efficient user experiences if they are not used appropriately, that is, if they are not programmed rationally.
Ultimately, chatbots can help you automate your business and reduce your workload assuming you’re setting them up properly. Depending on how good your tech skills are, at the very least, you’ll want to make sure that you have a chatbot on your sales page so that those that are at the point of purchase can easily get in contact with your company to assist in any last minute questions before deciding to leave the page.
Use Email Campaigns
Yes, Email is still alive and thriving, and it should be a key component of any digital marketing plan. All you have to do is put it to good use, and it will pay off handsomely for your company.
Email has a $42 to $1 return on investment and is often times regarded as the most powerful form of digital marketing as it’s the only type of marketing where you completely control when your message gets sent directly to your potential customer. To ensure your email marketing performs well, you must first master the fundamentals, which include:
- Ensure that your emails reach your prospect’s inbox and do not end up in the spam bin. Stay away from “trigger” words that make your email feel spammy and stay away from attachments just to name a few of the best practices.
- To have your email opened, write a compelling and customized subject line. Invoke curiosity or provide a special deal to increase open rates. Stay away from clickbait though as that’s a surefire way to upset your subscribers and get them to unsubscribe.
- Prioritize automation and ease of use for the consumer. Sending emails manually on a schedule would be the doom of you. It takes far too much time. Instead, consider using Email Automation software such as Mail Chimp, Sendinblue or Mailer Lite
Create Relevant Content
The content you create should always have a solution in mind for your customers. You don’t want to just throw out random content as it takes a lot of time to create and you want to make sure that it’s actually benefiting your audience to hopefully gain you and your company more trust in their eyes.
Pay close attention to what content is performing well and you’ll want to make more content around this as your customers are already telling you they like it. Furthermore, look at your Google Analytics and see what pages are being visited the most. See what pages are leading to the most sales. This is all giving you insight into the right content that you should be creating and providing your customers as the numbers don’t lie. If you’re truly lost, use software such as Ahrefs and take a look at what blogs your competitors are getting a lot of traffic from. If they have a similar target audience, this is a good indication that your audience will like this material as well.
Ensure Your Data is Accurate
The accuracy of the data is critical to the success of a data-driven campaign. Cleansing data entails eliminating inaccuracies, typographical mistakes, syntax problems, and other issues. It’s also crucial to supplement your existing data with pertinent information. Your data-cleansing procedures are critical to the success of your digital marketing initiatives as inaccurate data will lead to incorrect assumptions which will lead to incorrect strategies.
User information like phone numbers and social media handles may help your data be more precisely targeted and responsive. There are a number of specialist firms that can do email hygiene and append on a regular basis to maintain the correctness and integrity of your data. Make sure that you don’t miss this step in your digital marketing strategy as this can significantly throw off building a fine-tuned strategy due to the fact that you’re building it based on incorrect information.
Measure Performance Analytics
Companies should use data analysis to identify which platforms were effective in getting their targeted message out to customers, allowing them to concentrate their efforts on tactics that have been proved to succeed.
There are several analytics tools available to assist businesses in analyzing the success of their campaigns on their own. Successful data-driven digital marketing initiatives that combine appealing content with a precisely focused audience (due to clean, fresh, and properly targeted data) may provide the ideal trifecta: improved sales, ROI, and brand recognition.
Beware of Ad-Blockers
Many businesses have risen to prominence as a result of social media advertising. Advertisements that are well-targeted and tailored may help you boost brand recognition while also enhancing your bottom line. There’s only one problem: many individuals don’t enjoy seeing advertising in their feed, so they use ad blockers.
For some people, advertisements may be overpowering. After all, not everyone wants their phone to be inundated with fresh advertisements every time they use it. Pay attention to which demographics use ad-blockers the most and try to determine if this is the demographic you’re going after. Usually, it’s the 25 and under (especially those with tech skills) crowd that are using ad-blockers more extensively. Keep this in mind if you’re running ads as you might need to figure out other ways to get in front of your target audience if this is a problem.
Final Thoughts
It can be extremely difficult to keep up with an industry that seems to be changing constantly. Though, it is blogs like these that will help you and other emerging digital marketers feel ready for any new obstacles thrown at them. So, the best advice for anyone trying to get started in marketing is to constantly be educating yourself! Read, Read, Read, and you will be fine.
If you need any free help launching your marketing career, consider taking JobPrepped’s Digital Marketing Training + Immediate Work Experience program as 94.3% of JobPrepped students get marketing interviews or job offers within 3 weeks.
Good luck out there!
By Guest Writer,
Aditya A.
