Digital Marketers' Blog

Moving from print ads to radio commercials to adverts on the TV, businesses now have to account for the continuously growing online marketplace. Once you get your digital branding right, you may expect a boost in your business’ online growth.

What is Digital Branding?

In its most basic form, digital branding facilitates online communication between a business and its target audience. This can be by providing a great user experience through your website or by offering quick and efficient customer service. If a brand is not easy to find in today’s online world, it’s safe to say that it probably doesn’t exist in the minds of many contemporary consumers.

Much like branding in the days before the internet,  digital branding involves telling your target audience what your business does, what its values are, what it believes in, why it should choose you, and what it may expect from you. While branding refers to the process of creating memorable brands, a brand refers to how your target audience perceives your business. A brand identity, on the other hand, consists of multiple elements such as the logo, website, and social media accounts that help deliver your message.

Digital branding aims to increase online exposure and build online engagement through other ways as well. These include, but do not limit to, digital advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), guest blogging, online reviews, and webinars. 

Digital Branding Vs. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing typically involves attracting attention toward a particular product or service. Digital branding, on the other hand, focuses more on highlighting the values that a business brings to the table. Digital branding usually follows a more long-term approach than digital marketing and is typically not dependant on whether or not you continue to offer a particular product or a service. 

The brand you end up creating is what stays in the mind of your target audience when it interacts with your brand, and should ideally come with a strong recall value. While digital marketing works well to achieve short-term results, you may expect to build long-lasting relationships with your customers if you get your branding right. Simply put, there is more to branding than relying on digital marketing strategies to increase brand awareness.

The Benefits of Digital Branding

If you follow a good branding strategy, you may expect to see positive results. After all, the reason that businesses of all sizes are turning to branding is not just to expand their existing customer base but also to retain existing customers.  It is now common for businesses to carry out extensive research surrounding the needs of their target audiences so they may fulfill them accordingly, and thereby build trust and confidence. The benefits of digital branding include:

• Multichannel approach. Digital branding gives you the ability to follow a multichannel approach. Typical online tools from which you get to choose include websites, blogs, social networking platforms, emails, online ads, and online forums.  While you get to deliver the same message across multiple channels, you also get the ability to deliver customized messages. 
• Competitive differentiation. Effective digital branding lets you highlight how your brand is different from its competition. This is based on what your target audience values, be it pricing, functionality, customer service, or your overall brand. Once you manage to convince your target audience about what sets your brand apart from its competitors, recognition follows.
• Building connections. When you rely on a good digital marketing strategy, you can get your existing and probable customers to feel that you’re interacting with them directly. This is because you get to engage with them on platforms that they typically use to communicate with their family and friends. Besides, by offering personalized, meaningful, and useful messages, you get to convert customers into brand ambassadors.
• The time factor. With your digital branding efforts in place, you can give your customers the ability to interact with your business in real-time. This enables you to address customer concerns quickly and create positive customer experiences.  If any of your online campaigns manage to go viral, you may expect the kind of rapid exposure that money typically cannot buy.

Elements of Digital Branding

Digital branding is wide-ranging and involves the use of multiple elements.  Irrespective of the digital branding agency you choose to work with, you’ll notice that it relies on different factors to produce desired results. These include:

• Logo. A logo relates to a brand’s identity. In the digital world, this is a pictorial representation of your brand. Among other differences between a logo and a brand, the main aim of a logo is to be recognized easily, and not to convey a message.
• Impact. Creating an impact is an important part of digital branding and relates directly to the image of your brand.  Adding video testimonials and embedding reviews on your website help achieve this aim, as can maintaining goodwill across different social media platforms.
• Online channels. Using different online channels helps with brand positioning. However, this requires identifying your target audience first and then determining what brand image you want to portray.
• Website and social media. Your website and social media accounts help establish your brand’s personality by implementing different digital branding ideas. This practice should remain consistent across all channels.
• Content. From the digital branding standpoint, this refers to how your brand communicates with its target audience and how it differentiates itself from competitors. It requires addressing how you approach your target audience, finding out about its interests, offering solutions for its problems, receiving feedback about your product’s services, and ending conversations effectively.
• Brand extension. If you’ve managed to establish yourself as an expert or a market leader in any niche, you may think about taking advantage of your brand equity and extending your brand by launching new products/services. For example, Coca-Cola has come a long way since it started selling just one beverage.
• Analysis. Analyzing if your digital branding efforts are producing desired results is crucial. For instance, have you optimized your customer’s journey in the best possible manner? While you need to invest in digital branding, you also need to understand what customers feel about their experiences so you may tweak your strategy accordingly.

Formulating a Digital Branding Strategy

Businesses need to look at their offline and online branding efforts in a unified manner. However, they still need to find two completely different ways to tell their stories and communicate with their target audiences. Businesses that have under-utilized or neglected what digital branding has to offer so far now need to step up their digital branding efforts if they hope to make inroads in the online world. A good digital branding strategy involves paying attention to multiple aspects.

• Identifying business goals. Coming up with a digital branding strategy requires direction, and this comes from identifying your business goals. These could come in the form of increasing awareness, attracting new customers, or differentiating your brand from its competitors. For instance, if your aim is to attract new customers, your strategy should include monitoring how many leads convert into paying customers.
• Target audience research. Your digital branding efforts will not produce desired results if you don’t define your target audience first. If required, segment it into groups. Create user personas, explore their lifestyles, and identify their needs vis-à-vis your business. Draw from these when you need to make decisions about your digital branding strategy. Identify buyer behavior and determine which online platforms they favor using the most.
• Competitor analysis. It’s important to look at what the top players in your field are doing, as this helps you narrow down on what your brand does differently, and perhaps, better. While your brand might not be the only one that provides the products or services in question, it has its own unique team members, skill sets, and processes. What you need to do is identify what distinguishes your brand from its competitors.
• Brand voice. You need to use a consistent voice in communicating your message across different channels, so your target audience perceives it in the same way, no matter which platforms they use. Since your brand’s voice plays an important role in how your business is perceived, you have to ensure that you’re creating the desired impression by paying close attention to how it’s developed.
• Brand positioning and brand identity. Effective brand positioning requires synchronicity between your digital and offline branding efforts because mixed messaging is prone to lead to confusion. Your brand’s identity needs to remain consistent across platforms too.  For instance, does your brand’s online presence invoke the same feelings that its offline presence does? Remember that brand identity extends beyond the use of visual elements. It also relies on how effective your content strategy is as well as the overall style and voice of your brand.
• Identifying assets. Good digital branding strategies take into account what brands already possess. These include, but do not limit to, team members, technology, services, products, features, and media. Once you identify what you have, determine what you no longer need and narrow down on just what will work after accounting for the needs of your target audience.  
• Brand building. Digital brand building brings with its efficacy and scalability. The online world makes it simpler and more cost-effective to increase a brand’s visibility as compared to traditional offline mediums. For instance, consider the cost and effectiveness of networking by attending live events or via social media, or of hosting an in-person seminar versus a webinar.  Determining who your target audience is gives you the ability to identify which digital channels to use.
• Mapping. An important aspect of any good strategy is mapping every piece of content, service, or feature back or a particular segment or customer. This helps provide the right solution at the required time during a customer’s journey. While brands have the capability to choreograph such journeys, from a customer’s perspective, it might seem like a matter of chance. Just where in the journey your target audience gets to interact with your brand the most can have an effect on your marketing strategy. For instance, if you find out that your target audience spends considerable time on Instagram, you might benefit by directing your social media marketing efforts toward this platform.
• Analytics. Monitoring the effect of your digital branding efforts is easier than monitoring the impact of traditional methods. A number of online tools simplify this aspect considerably by providing in-built analytics. For instance, tracking the behavior of visitors to your website is fairly straightforward, provided you know how to go about the process – and this is also the case with social media engagement. Tracking, analyzing, and making required adjustments are bound to improve effectiveness. Besides, since it’s easier to monitor and control digital branding, making improvements follows suit.

Conclusion

Effective digital branding can definitely help boost a brand’s online growth. However, achieving desired results requires research as well as an understanding of how to go about the process.  No matter which digital branding strategy you employ, you need to start by knowing more about your target audience, identifying the value your brand provides, and recognizing any possible brand barriers, while laying due emphasis on creating your brand’s identity.

Bear in mind that consumers now look beyond the products and services they use, and their outlook toward brands involves feelings, memories, expectations, and more. When done right, digital branding has the potential to deliver great results, which is why it’s typically best left to the experts. If you wish to know more about how your business might benefit by taking this path, consider discussing it with someone from a reputable digital branding agency.

Originally posted in: https://www.topnotchdezigns.com/digital-branding-and-how-it-can-boost-online-growth/

The Opportunity

A study conducted across five countries highlights that daily consumption of online content has increased from an average of around 3 hours and 20 minutes before the COVID-19 pandemic set into just under 7 hours.  It suggests that 44% consumers give new brands a go after watching relevant ads. It also points out that younger consumers show a preference toward social media ads.

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Given the vast population of internet users across age groups, socio-economic classes, and geographies, businesses now have means to reach out to their target audiences in a quick and efficient manner.  It comes as no surprise, then, that 84% businesses had digital marketing strategies in 2020. Unfortunately, only 11% felt their efforts delivered excellent results.

One common problem that most digital marketing managers face is that of oversaturation. In this highly digitalized world, the internet is awash with blogs, videos, podcasts, and other types of content that do not have any takers. To get it right, businesses need to deliver their well-planned content through the right channels by relying on structured digital marketing strategies. Then, they may expect a boost in traffic to their websites as well as increased sales.

What is Digital Marketing?

According to Lexito’s digital marketing definition, digital marketing is “a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.” Simply put, it refers to a strategy through which a business creates relevant and valuable content with the aim of engaging with its target audience organically. 

The long-term aim of digital marketing is to attract new customers and boost sales. In the short-term, the goal is to deliver valuable content regularly and to get your audiences interested in more.  Any successful digital marketing manager will tell you that it’s important to acknowledge the audience’s presence and make it feel heard.  Your audience needs to know that you understand its pain points, and you need to work on building trust in the products/services you provide. 

Types of Digital Marketing

Irrespective of the type of digital marketing you use, your aim should be to build your brand’s reputation and trust. For instance, if you’re relying on email marketing as one subset of your overall digital marketing strategy, it should offer value to readers that other similar emails do not. While digital marketing is far-reaching in scope and can make use of different tools, types of digital marketing boil down to five basic categories.

• Written content. This can come in the form of blog posts, landing pages, case studies, press releases, white papers, answers to frequently asked questions, instructional guides, and emails.
• Graphics. These include logos, infographics, charts, call to action (CTA) buttons, and suitable use of color schemes.
• Videos. Videos may include vlogs, behind-the-scene brand stories, customer testimonials, instructional guides, webinars, live feed to events, and virtual reality (VR) tours.
• Audio. Audio-related digital marketing examples include podcasts, interviews, and ads on online audio streaming services such as Spotify and Amazon Music.
• Social media. Social media presents a great opportunity for digital marketing through user-generated content, sponsored content, customer reviews, celebrity endorsements, contests, and hashtags. Popular social media platforms that businesses turn to for digital marketing include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

Digital Marketing Channels You May Use

You may consider any avenue that you use to share your content as a channel. Determining which channels will be the most effective in delivering your message is crucial for running a successful digital marketing strategy. The different channels you may employ include:

• Organic searches. Organic traffic refers to the web traffic you generate through search engines such as Google and Bing without the use of paid advertisements. By providing relevant and useful content that is created keeping search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, you increase the possibility of ranking high when users conduct searches related to the subject matter at hand.
• Paid searches. Traffic that comes through this channel is the result of showcasing your content through carefully crafted paid ads on prominent websites and/or search engines.
• Social media platforms. These include popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
• Emails. Well-crafted, relevant, and useful emails have a long history of working as an effective digital marketing tool. By delivering your message via emails, you get the ability to capture an audience that has already demonstrated some interest in your brand (by signing up for them in the first place). 
• Link building. Link building involves an online platform that links to your website/content and sends web traffic your way. This aspect plays an important role in SEO and can work as a rather effective way to boost traffic to your website.

How Your Brand May Benefit By Digital Marketing

Irrespective of which industry your brand belongs to, digital marketing gives it a cost-effective way to boost the results of its overall marketing efforts. Benefits of digital marketing include:

Building Trust

Creating relevant and useful content gives your brand easy means to build long-term relationships with your target audience. When you build trust, it has a direct effect on improving your brand’s reputation. Engaging with your audience remains an ongoing exercise, through which you keep it interested in your existing and upcoming offerings. The content you provide helps foster positive customer experiences, which is always good for your brand’s bottom line.

Generating Leads and Increasing Conversions

Digital marketing gives you the ability to share information with your target audience in a streamlined, engaging, and compelling manner. Digital marketing managers often look at this as a highly cost-effective way to generate new leads. They do this by providing content with engaging CTAs that capture your audience’s attention.

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When done right, online digital marketing has a positive effect on conversion rates as well. This is because it lets you connect and share information with your audience directly – be it new leads or existing customers. If you can manage to provide valuable content consistently, you get to influence your audience so it may make well-informed decisions surrounding the value your brand provides. Once your audience gets a good indication of what your business is and what it stands for, there’s an increased possibility of it investing in your brand.

Improving SEO Effectiveness

People who ask “What is digital marketing in SEO?” should know that the former can help improve the effectiveness of the latter. SEO has an important role to play in the online visibility and accessibility of your brand, which is why it is important to use content that highlights your brand’s value. By creating and publishing SEO-based content regularly, you get to increase your brand’s online presence. This is why most prominent websites have blogs through which they offer content that their audiences might find useful. More often than not, content provided through blog posts is optimized for search engines.  

Increasing Authority

Creating a variety of online content helps your brand build its reputation. By offering high-quality content regularly, you get to build respect. While the content you provide can help differentiate your brand from its competitors, it can also help you in showcasing your expertise. Over time, this helps you establish yourself as an industry expert and your audience will look at you as a form of credible authority. With consumers becoming increasingly conscious about where their money is going, establishing a sense of authority can go a long way in boosting your business.

Coming Up With a Good Digital Marketing Strategy

Any digital marketing strategy is only as good as the results it produces.  Formulating an effective strategy requires paying attention to different aspects. While there is no set strategy to follow, some factors remain the same across all good digital marketing strategies.

Setting Uniformity Across the Brand

If multiple people speak on behalf of your brand, it’s important that they maintain the same voice, tone, language, and personality. Businesses that have no set protocols in place may benefit by taking a look at what industry leaders are doing right. While your digital marketing strategy should account for your audience and employees, it should also factor in other stakeholders such as suppliers and vendors.

Assessing Resources and Capabilities

The lack of a standard digital marketing definition results in several businesses being unsure about what marketing strategy to employ, and they end up spending valuable resources in the process. Determining the right digital marketing fit and identifying what’s in and out of scope gives marketers the ability to focus on the right combination of resources for formulating and executing their strategies. 

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After you establish which type of content you wish to do extremely well in, you need to address aspects such as what your digital marketing budget is and how you wish to break it down, who will create the content, the types of creative specialties you are looking look for, and the technologies and processes that might come into play when implementing your strategy. At this stage, it’s important that you take complete stock of the resources and capabilities you already have access to, so you may then look for external help accordingly. 

Setting Clear Objectives

Your brand’s digital marketing requirements help determine its key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals. Different types of content with relevant metrics may come in the form of content that caters to building brand awareness and consumer perception; content that focuses on performance marketing through a variety of promotional content; content that caters specifically to local markets; as well as content that relates to specific business objectives surrounding products, pricing, promotions, and placement.

Creating Customer Personas

A number of successful businesses now create customer personas (semi-fictional representations of their ideal customers) based on data and research. This gives you the ability to focus your marketing efforts on qualified prospects and to develop products that align with the needs of your target audience. Factors that go into creating customer personas include age, gender, income, location, marital status, employment status, personal values, likes, dislikes, needs, and media preferences.

Using Data

When it comes to getting customer insight, data and research play vital roles. This can come in the form of data from your own research, historical data, and data acquired from third parties. 

Mapping Customer Journey

A journey map comes from your customers’ perspective and gives you an indication of how they progress when interacting with your brand. In this fast-paced world, a customer may switch from one stage to another depending on a range of factors, and might even skip a touchpoint or more completely.

Following a Streamlined Process

Effective digital marketing requires following an iterative process from the creative stage to putting forth your content. Grouping your content into separate sections is a good idea, as is creating and following a best practices approach to deal with different types of content.

Conclusion

When handled in the right manner, digital marketing can help boost your business’s online presence as well as overall sales. However, creating and implementing a digital marketing strategy requires considerable research and planning, which is why several small and mid-sized businesses steer clear of taking this path. Fortunately, expert help is available more easily than you might imagine. Besides, when you get a digital marketing agency to work on boosting your business online, you get to focus on the internal working of your business. 

Originally posted in: https://www.topnotchdezigns.com/a-guide-to-how-content-marketing-can-boost-your-business/

Planning and implementing a digital marketing campaign comes with various challenges. While you might think you have it all figured out at one moment, the next might come with a reality check. Even though not everything in the digital marketing world might be in your control, identifying the most common digital marketing strategy mistakes that others make gives you a good head start. What follows is learning how to avoid them.

1. No Realistic Goals or Goal Tracking

Not having realistic goals makes it to just about every list of top 10 marketing mistakes. If you don’t set goals, there is no way to telling how well your campaign is performing. Similarly, an unfocused online marketing campaign gives you no way of knowing whether you are achieving your goals in the desired time period. This also applies to tracking your goals, because you will have no way to telling which aspects are working and which need improvement.

What You Can Do

An easy way to avoid this mistake is to set SMART goals.

• Your goals need to drive specific actions, be it clicking on a link, subscribing to your emails, or making a purchase.
• Goals that you can measure through different metrics and data points give you the means to identify what’s working for you and what’s not.
• It is important that you set achievable goals, failing which you are simply setting yourself up for disappointment.
• Realistic goals are ones that allow you to make the best of your resources and budget, without having to stretch beyond your means.
• Time-sensitive. Make sure your goals come with deadlines. This helps keep you and your team motivated and on track.

Keep your goals in mind when determining which key performance indicators (KPIs) will work best for you. Using Google Analytics to keep track of your KPIs comes next. This step helps measure your campaign’s return on investment (ROI).

2. Absence of a Documented Strategy

No matter whether you look at statistics surrounding content marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, or email marketing, you will notice that a significant percentage of marketers give due importance to having a well-documented strategy in place. While it is important to establish your goals, it is equally important to map out a path you need to follow.

What You Can Do

If you have a small team or plan to handle your business’ online marketing on your own, it is best to focus on no more than two to three strategies at a time. Alternatively, you can think about leveraging the expertise that a good digital marketing agency can bring to the table.

3. Not Paying Attention to Your Website

One of the top digital marketing mistakes that businesses make is not paying due attention to their websites. If you wish to make the most of the booming online marketplace, having a user-friendly website that provides a great user experience (UX) is crucial. Businesses that do not focus on their websites often tend to lag behind their competitors in the online world.

What You Can Do

You can work on delivering a great UX through your website by:

• Making sure it uses responsive web design
• Making it easy to navigate
• Ensuring that it is quick to load

4. Overlooking Keyword Research

Sure, we no longer live in a time when simply adding keywords to your content worked in attracting web traffic. However, keywords continue to play a very important role in any business’ search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. This is because more than 65% of all clicks on search results pages go to the first five results. Besides, over 85% of consumers begin searches for products online.

Making use of the right keywords comes with benefits that include an increase in organic traffic and more qualified leads, as well as getting the ability to gain insight into consumer behavior. Ignoring this aspect, though, is easily among the top content marketing mistakes you can make.

What You Can Do

Getting your keywords right requires following a few simple measures.

• Determine which keywords you rank well for already.
• Check keywords that your competitors are using.
• Make use of search suggestions that Google provides when you carry out online searches.
• Think from your customers’ point of view to determine terms they might use when looking for your products or services.
• Consider using online SEO tools that provide insights and analytics.
• Make keyword research an ongoing process.

Provide useful and relevant information that your target audience can use once it reaches the desired page, failing which all your keyword research efforts might go in vain.

5. Focusing on the Wrong Target Audience

No matter whether you look at big, mid-sized, or small business marketing mistakes, targeting the wrong audience continues to be a problem. This is mainly because several businesses try to reach out to as wide an audience as possible. The problem with this approach is that while you might manage to reach out to scores of people, not many might be interested in becoming your customers.

Instances of businesses simply targeting the wrong audience are common as well. This results in a waste of time, money, and effort. Besides, when businesses try to target very broad audiences, they often fail in providing relevant content to people who might otherwise be interested.

What You Can Do

Narrowing down on your target audience requires research and testing. This gives you the means to identify which segment might be interested in what your business has to offer.

Creating marketing personas based on your existing customer base can also help identify your target audience. These personas are typically based on aspects such as demographics, shopping habits, interests, and hobbies. Using personas can help you get an insight into your customers’ varied experiences, behaviors, and needs.

If your business caters to a diverse audience, you may create multiple personas. Then, you may target people with similar traits, and test whether you might get better returns by targeting a narrower or wider audience.

6. Not Using a Blog to Grow Brand Identity

Several businesses do not have blogs, and many others have abandoned their blogging efforts because they feel they have not delivered the right results. However, it is in your best interest to avoid this common digital marketing mistake, because blogs give you an easy and cost-effective way to build brand identity and authority.

Using your blog in the right manner can work wonders in driving traffic to your website, it can improve your website’s SEO and ranking, and it also lets you establish yourself as an industry expert.

What You Can Do

Getting your blog to work for you might be simpler than you think.

• Post content regularly.
• Provide quality content that is relevant, up-to-date, and useful.
• Encourage your audience to interact with you through the comments section with the aim of keeping them engaged.

7. Ignoring Social Media

Close to half the world’s population uses social media, so ignoring it comes at your own peril. Social media gives you an opportunity to build relationships with your customers, increase brand awareness, and reach out to new audiences. Data suggests that social media platforms can help build brand loyalty, increase conversions, and improve customer experience. Besides, using social media platforms comes at a fraction of the cost of employing traditional marketing techniques.

What You Can Do

You should start by identifying social media platforms that your target audience favors the most. While you need to foster relationships with your consumers, you also need to do the same with your employees and brand influencers. This ensures that your consumers get similar messages from different stakeholders. In addition:

• Make sure your posts seem real, and not very business-like.
• Use a professional approach.
• Take a stand on issues you feel strongly about because several consumers now wish to buy from socially-conscious businesses.
• Carry out polls and ask for opinions to boost conversations.
• Think about using paid advertising.

8. Using Erroneous Practices

Indulging in shady practices to boost traffic to your website might come with short-term benefits, but long-drawn effects can be rather damaging. One of the top SEO mistakes in digital content production is that of using clickbait – where you try to lure customers by making content seem very appealing to them while providing no real value. While this practice might help increase web traffic, it can have an adverse effect on your brand’s credibility and reputation.

You also need to steer clear of using black hat SEO methods that might help increase your website’s ranking by tricking search engines. This is because search engines such as Google continue taking measures to combat the use of unfair practices, and they take stringent action against those found violating guidelines. For instance, indulging in black hat SEO can get Google to ban your website from showing in its results.

What You Can Do

Make sure you provide content that offers value to your target audience. Use descriptions to tell your customers just what they might expect to find in your content, and do not mislead them in any manner. Use only white hat SEO methods as these lead to long-term benefits.

9. Spending Excessively on Paid Advertisements

Data suggests that just about a quarter of all spending on digital ads reaches the desired target audience. While using paid ads on platforms such as Google and Facebook might work well in increasing web traffic and conversions, it can be a rather expensive and ineffective proposition if you do not have a suitable strategy in place.

What You Can Do

If you plan to use paid ads to boost your business’s online presence, keep these points in mind.

• Study your target audience and divide it into sub-segments based on aspects such as locations, age groups, interests, and income levels.
• Carry out A/B testing by using multiple ads with different formats and different target audience sub-segments to determine which ones produce the best results.
• Have a defined budget and prepare to adjust the price per click on ads based on their performance.

When you are only beginning your online marketing endeavor, it is best that you devote your time to getting to know your target audience and testing other strategies. Once you have a well-defined target audience, you get the ability to refine your efforts and increase your online ads’ ROI.

Other Common Mistakes

Here are some of the other common digital marketing mistakes you need to avoid.

1. Not using a customer-centric approach. The solution is to deliver customized experiences through personalization, journey mapping, data analysis, and effective targeting.

2. Not using email marketing. More than 90% of Americans appreciate getting emails from businesses they support. You can use emails to provide insights that you gain from customer data across different channels, as well as to achieve high levels of personalization.

3. Not using case studies. Case studies help increase credibility, build trust, boost organic traffic, improve conversion rates, and enhance user experience. Implementing case studies in your marketing plan gives people the means to see how your business has helped others, and what it can do for them. Start by building relationships with your clients and letting them know you would like to spotlight their companies and their customer success stories online. Once you have your case studies, share them via email and different social media platforms.

4. Not using the right tools. Digital marketing has come a long way in the last two decades, and changes continue to take place regularly even now. For instance, your overall efforts in 2021 should take into account content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and even paid to advertise. Content marketing in itself is wide-ranging and can involve textual content, infographics, and videos. As a result, succeeding in your efforts requires that you use as many suitable tools as possible. If you feel you do not have the required know-how, seeking professional assistance might be your best bet.

Conclusion

Surviving and succeeding in the ever-changing digital marketing landscape requires that you remain up-to-date about the latest trends and technologies. When trying to ensure the success of your business in the online space, it is normal to make a few mistakes. However, identifying common online marketing strategy mistakes and steering clear of them gives you the ability to save on time and money, and it also helps minimize stress. If you are still not sure about how to boost your business online, consider taking help from a reputable agency.

Originally posted in: https://www.topnotchdezigns.com/13-common-digital-marketing-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/

The near disappearance of face-to-face interactions in the form of meetings and live events pose a significant challenge for most businesses. What might work, in such a scenario, is building and maintaining a strong online presence.

The Impact of COVID-19

According to data released by the Pew Research Center, around 70% of Americans feel that the coronavirus outbreak poses a major threat to the country’s economy. Around 35% feel that the outbreak will affect their personal financial situation.

PredictHQ, a data intelligence company, published rather alarming figures – pointing to the fact that concerns about the coronavirus outbreak resulted in a 500% increase in the cancellation and postponement of major events only in February. Over 225 events that ranked as high impact stood cancelled. The cost of these cancellations is estimated to be in the billions. In addition, the company expects an even higher number of cancelations in March.

Making the Case for Online Marketing

According to data release by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research in the 2018 Marketing Spend Decision Report, B2B marketers who partake in industry events allocate around 40% of their budgets to shows and exhibitions. Less than 10% goes toward their online marketing efforts. If they end up directing even a small percentage of their budgets for events to digital marketing, they may look forward to considerable growth in the online marketplace.

Non-digital native businesses might have a more difficult time in addressing digital growth as well as customer relations. When it comes to small businesses that have so far relied on their offline reputation and word-of-mouth referrals will also need to take stock of how they approach digital marketing in the near future.

Mid-sized to large businesses that have lost out on profits because of cancelled events may benefit by allocating the money they get through flexible cancellation policies or insurance claims to their digital marketing budgets.

Several businesses that have avoided the online world will have no other option than to go digital because of existing and impending shutdowns. For instance, if you business relies on face-to-face meetings with probable clients, you might consider making the most of apps that support multi-person video calling. There is no telling how long people will continue to remain wary of physical interactions, so taking a look at what online marketing can do for businesses is the obvious way to go.

Digital Marketing Ideas for Getting Through the COVID-19 Outbreak

As a marketing specialist with time on your hands, you need to look at your company’s online presence and come up with ways to make it better. A good place to start is to look at the results achieved through previous efforts. Then, a resetting of goals for your upcoming online marketing campaigns might be in order.

As things stand because of the coronavirus pandemic, you may forget about attending conferences or in-person events in the near future. This requires that you use different online strategies and tools to further your marketing efforts. For instance, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram let you stream live videos, and this gives you an easy way to engage with your audience. Webinars also give you the ability to get people to connect with each other from the comfort of their own homes.

Here are some other aspects that require your attention if you want your business to make the most of the online space during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Get Your Branding Right

For people to turn to your business in the online world, you need to work on developing your brand. By building a suitable branding strategy, you give your target audience an easy way to identify and distinguish your business. It also leads to increased credibility and customer loyalty.

Optimize Your Digital Content

Take a good look at your website and look for ways in which it can offer a better user experience. Your website should contain the right marketing message and have a suitable call to action. No matter whether it’s your website, blog, or a listing on a third-party site, you need to ensure that all the content is completely optimized. You need to have an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place, so your content becomes as visible as possible. This helps increase your organic search rankings while improving the quality and quantity of online traffic coming your way.

It helps to narrow down on what’s working for you and what’s not, as this gives you the ability to tweak your online marketing strategies accordingly.

Focus on Content Marketing

This is a good time to come up with ways in which you may connect with your target audience through the use of content in different forms. This can range from blog posts, to videos, to newsletters, to case studies, to webinars. What you need to keep in mind is that while your content should relate to your brand, it also needs to provide value and address the needs of your target audience.

Social media plays an important role in content marketing. If your business has kept away from platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram until now, it’s time to embrace what these platforms have to offer. While your content marketing efforts should not explicitly promote your offerings, you need to capture and hold the interest of your target audience.

Pause Non-Essential Launches and Press Releases

Launches and press releases play important roles in public relation (PR) strategies. However, it is not a good time to proceed with a new business announcement – unless it cannot wait or it’s related to the coronavirus pandemic. After all, people in most parts of the world are experiencing a sense of panic, and hardly anybody is going to be interested in news about your business. Thinking about piggybacking company-related news with the outbreak is not a good idea, as it will appear to be in poor taste. Most new launches can and should wait until a sense of calm prevails again.

Revisit Pending Projects

Most businesses have projects that they put on hold. This is a good time to take a look at all the projects that have been put on the back burner, because you can give them your complete attention. This could involve looking at new web design alternatives, revising your branding strategy, creating a YouTube channel, preparing presentations, or even encouraging employee participation through digital channels.

Update Local Business Listings

This is particularly important for small businesses that do not have their own websites yet, and rely on local directory listings instead. Small business owners need to remember that this is the information their customers get to view online, which is why it needs to remain up to date at all times.

Google makes use of Duplex, its AI assistant, to confirm business hours in order to maintain accuracy in its Search and Maps. However, there is no reason why you cannot update your business hours manually, without waiting for Google to contact you first. If your business hours have been affected during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, make sure you update your Google My Business listing accordingly. Google also gives you the option to list it as “temporarily closed”. Review your business listings across other platforms such as Bing Places, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram too.

You may also consider creating Google Posts, through which you get to provide information about how the outbreak is affecting your business. These posts stay in place for seven days, and show up in Maps as well as Search.

Remain Relevant

Your aim should be to post at regular intervals, as this gives your customers a sense of confidence in your business. However, it is important that your posts remain relevant to your target audience. Since several people are in panic mode right now, it’s not a good idea to focus on your needs. What you need to do, instead, is address the needs and concerns of your customers. For instance, a local gym can give its customers tips and ideas about how to work out from home.

Create a Dedicated Coronavirus Page

If the coronavirus outbreak has had a significant impact on your business, think about explaining how your business is coping, either right on the homepage, or through a dedicated page. Several large businesses have already asked their media sections to address this aspect. The information you provide should tell your customers how the situation might affect them, and you need to update this information as often as required.

Several businesses need to address questions their customers have about the coronavirus outbreak. These could include questions about business hours, changes in safety protocol, as well as the specific measures your business is taking to adapt to existing restrictions. In such a scenario, your customers would benefit if you provide answers to most commonly asked questions in a single place.

Provide Structured Data and Product Feeds

Online retailers need to ensure that the status of item availability is updated in near real-time, because different online businesses are seeing a surge in demand. For instance, item availability should clearly highlight whether a product is available, out of stock, in limited stock, or discontinued. This would require addressing the product schema on product pages and in product feeds.

Event organizers can use the Event Status schema type on their websites to list their events as Postponed or Cancelled. According to Google, organizers should stick to the original Start Date until they can confirm a new date. Once you have a new date, you may update the Event Status as Rescheduled, and update the Start Date and End Date.

If you’ve moved a physical event to the online world because of the coronavirus outbreak, you can set the Event Attendance Mode to Online Event Attendance, and the Location Type you’ll need to select is Virtual. The Special Announcement option makes way for date-stamped textual updates as well as contextualized web links to link announcements with particular situations.

Determine How You Can Help

This is not so much a marketing idea, but simply a way to do the best that you can for your employees, customers, and the community at large. The help you may provide can come in the form of monetary aid, technology, or a particular skill set that’s in demand. As long as you keep doing the right thing during the coronavirus pandemic, there’s a good chance that your efforts will be noticed.

Don’t Forget to Work From Home

No one really knows just how long the coronavirus outbreak will last or how many people it might affect. What’s known, though, is that it spreads easily and quickly. As a result, work from home whenever possible, and ask your employees to do the same. This not only protects you, but also prevents any possible spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Conclusion

Most businesses will experience different challenges in the coming weeks or even months because of the coronavirus outbreak. Business leaders and managers need to come up with ideas surrounding what they need to do in order to make up for lost opportunities. Part of the process should involve shifting the focus to digital marketing in a strategic manner. After all, online marketing does not have to be a stopgap measure, since it can provide long-term benefits even as the world limps back to normal.

While digital marketing requires little to no face-to-face interaction, you also get the ability to measure results. A good marketing company can get a fair indication of your return on investment (ROI). It can also determine which activities result in the most number of quality leads and then suggest suitable changes in your overall marketing strategy.

In case you have some free time, especially if you have to remain in isolation because of the coronavirus outbreak, it is crucial that you make the most of it and review your online marketing strategy.

Originally posted in: https://www.topnotchdezigns.com/whats-the-right-approach-digital-marketing-in-the-time-of-covid-19/