Digital marketing is one of the most important channels through which your business can get more engagement and sales. An estimated 76% of customers look at a business’ online presence before buying anything, even if the business is a brick-and-mortar store.
Making the most of your digital presence requires careful planning and smart investment. It’s not enough to just create a website and social media presence, you have to optimize your digital marketing for success.
Here are a few insider tips that can help you make smart decisions when it comes to your digital marketing.
Create a Digital Marketing Strategy
The smartest move you can make for your digital presence is to create a digital marketing strategy.
Having a good strategy will give you faster results because you know what you are doing, instead of experimenting to find what works. Having a strategy also means that you can measure your success and make adjustments if your results are not what you hoped they would be.
SEO experts from Social Market Way have noticed the importance of strategy and planning in their work. After creating the right strategy with Social Market Way, their clients have experienced growth in traffic by the thousands. Their strategies, developed around four pillars of SEO, yield proven results.
Having a strategy in place also means that you will use your resources more efficiently. Most small businesses do not have an unlimited digital marketing budget. Knowing what your goals are and which platforms you will be using can help you decide how to allocate resources.
Engage Your Customers First
If you want to improve your engagement, one of the things you will have to do is engage your customers as well. As more and more people get more comfortable spending time online, they are looking not just for passive content but for engagement. Engagement also improves visibility, because algorithms reward accounts that have more likes and comments.
If you want your customers to engage in your digital marketing content, you need to give them opportunities to do so. Make your social media profiles a place for conversation with question stickers on stories and prompts for people to leave comments. Reshare any social media posts that other people make that mention your company.
When people message you online, you want your business to be responsive. If someone sends you a message that goes unanswered for days, they will think that you don’t care about their business. Make sure that you send people at least an initial response after they contact you through social media or your website.
If your business is having difficulty keeping up with messages online in addition to your other responsibilities, there are ways to get around this. AI automation and chatbots are incorporated easily with most website builders. They respond to messages automatically and address basic customer questions, connecting them with a real person if needed.
Know Who Your Customers Are
When shaping your digital marketing strategy and engaging with your audience, you should keep your target base in mind.
Every business has a target audience. This is the group of people that are more likely to be your customers. Your target audience cannot be “everyone”—that category is too broad to make for a good sales strategy, and it usually isn’t true. Think about who usually buys from you. Do they live locally or far away? What are their interests? Are they usually a certain age or gender?
Many social media and sales specialists recommend creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a profile of an imaginary person that combines some of the most common characteristics of your customer base. For example, a buyer persona for a dog grooming business might be Lindsey, a busy 30-year-old lawyer with a Maltese puppy who loves fashion and style.
Keeping your buyer personas in mind when creating digital marketing content helps you come up with strategies that are more successful. You will have a better idea of what content is interesting for your audience, what they will be more likely to engage with, and what they are more likely to purchase.
Make It Easier for Your Audience to Become Customers
One of the primary mistakes businesses make when creating their digital marketing content is to focus just on engagement, not sales. While growing your audience and potentially going viral is great, your main goal is to get those people to become paying customers.
One of the most important ways that you can turn your audience from digital viewers to paying customers is to make it easy for them to purchase items. Include links wherever you can, such as social media biographies and story posts. Whenever people express interest in a product online, direct them to information about where to purchase.
If you have an online store, make sure that it is organized in a way that makes sense for customers. Have direct links to products that you are promoting, for example, if something is on sale. Make sure that the shop is search-optimized so people can find products easily, categorized in a logical way, and that checkout procedures are simple.
Too many businesses lose potential customers because they make the actual process of purchasing something too difficult to navigate. If you have broken links or worse, absent links, people are not going to take the time to find out how to purchase from you. Instead, they will seek out competitors.
Provide Personalized Suggestions
Personalization is a growing trend in digital marketing and is likely to be even more dominant in the years to come. Thanks to the development of tracking tools and AI support, even small businesses can incorporate personalized content into their digital marketing strategies.
Using these tools, you can provide people with personalized suggestions for products to purchase next when they visit your website. These personalized suggestions are based on browsing data, the contents of a checkout cart, or previous purchase history.
Personalized suggestions are proven to increase the volume of checkout carts and increase the likelihood that someone will become a repeat customer. Suggesting items based on browsing history can also encourage someone to become a first-time customer because you connect them with items they are more likely to want.
Keep It Focused
One of the primary mistakes that businesses make is trying to be successful on all digital marketing channels, all the time. The digital landscape is fragmented, with countless social media platforms, search engines, websites, and other ways that people engage with the Internet.
Some business owners think that to be visible online, they need to be present on all platforms. However, that is not the case. What usually happens is that your digital marketing team gets stretched too thin, your online platforms become inactive, and people don’t find you.
It’s better to focus your efforts on a few platforms that are most likely to drive engagement. You need to have a website because it provides credibility and is important for Google searches. Then, choose one or two social media platforms to manage. Focus on creating good content for those platforms. If you have time and effort to spare, you can expand into new social media.
The best way to decide what platforms to use is to think about your business’s brand image and where your target audience spends the most time on social media. A dental office that mostly serves older people will not find TikTok very useful, while a skincare brand that mostly caters to young women will have the opposite experience.
Use the Power of Community Chats and Channels
Social media platforms have evolved beyond posting, adding stories, and commenting. Many have additional functionalities that allow you to create smaller, highly engaged communities, such as Instagram chats and channels or Facebook groups.
These features were added to improve engagement on social media as people are changing their relationship with these platforms. More and more people report that they only go on Facebook to look at groups. These features provide people with a place to chat with others who share their interests and experience a closer community feeling than on algorithmically dominated main feeds.
More and more businesses are jumping in on this trend and creating their own Facebook groups. Instagram makes it even easier to create closer communities from business profiles using the channel feature. This way, you can increase audience engagement and facilitate a conversation.
Another benefit of these groups is that their higher engagement means higher sales rates later on. You can use your group to promote new products and offer discount codes to the people most likely to use them. Just make sure that your business has the capacity to keep these chats engaged and active before starting one.
Using Digital Marketing to Your Advantage
Digital marketing is one of the most potent tools at your disposal when it comes to driving engagement and sales for your business. Making your digital platforms work for you means creating smart strategies, choosing your strategies with your target audience in mind, and always having an eye on conversions, not just engagement.
Digital marketing techniques are possible to learn on your own, but for optimal strategizing, work with a professional agency that can get you the best results.
