5 Simple Digital Marketing Strategies 6 Mar 2015, 10:26 am

Digital marketing is essential in today’s world. With both competitors and potential customers constantly online, digital marketing is the only way to stay ahead. When you’re a small business owner the online world can seem intimidating. Here is a list of five simple digital marketing strategies that any business owner can implement to help their business grow.

1. Setting a Goal: You’re looking for ways to help your small business grow. You might want more customers, more recognition or maybe you’re looking to get ahead of the competition. Whatever the case may be, starting with a solid goal in mind greatly increases your chances of success. Digital marketing is a great way for small businesses to prosper, but going into the process blindly can leave you with a jumbled mess. A lot of strategy and precision goes into digital marketing and having a goal helps you know what to focus on.

2. Creating a Marketing Funnel: The most successful businesses have an effective marketing funnel in place. A marketing funnel is when you map out a customer’s journey from when a customer is a complete stranger to when they become a lead, and then put certain strategies in place that will encourage them to move through this funnel. Things like lead magnets, calls to action, opt-ins and offers are all effective pieces of a funnel. You can think of a marketing funnel in four parts: Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.

3. Developing a call-to-action: We talked about using a call-to-action in the second step as a part of your marketing funnel, but what is a call-to-action exactly? A call-to-action (CTA) is an image or text that prompts visitors to take action, such as subscribe to a newsletter, view a webinar or request a product demo. CTAs should direct people to landing pages, where you can collect visitors’ contact information in exchange for a valuable marketing offer. In that sense, an effective CTA results in more leads and conversions for your website. This path, from a click on a CTA to a landing page, illustrates the much desired process of lead generation. In order to increase visitor-to-lead conversion opportunities, you need to create a lot of calls-to-action, distribute them across your web presence and optimize them. A good CTA should be attention grabbing and help lead a potential customer further into your marketing funnel.

4. Creating an Effective Lead Magnet: A lead magnet can be used alone or along with a CTA. This will also be used either within your marketing funnel or as a way to drive potential customers into your funnel. Supply them with something relevant to your product or service that they want. Use your offers as a way to gather more information about a potential buyer while driving them further into your funnel at the same time. This brings them closer to becoming an actual quality lead who will spend money on your product or service. The idea behind a lead magnet is to trade information. You supply something like a free download of a white paper, but in order to complete the download the individual has to fill out a form that will provide you with more information about them. You’ll use the information you gather to interact with them more as they progress through your funnel.

5. Driving Traffic: In order for there to be people to drive into your marketing funnel, there first has to be traffic on your website. There a variety of ways you can drive traffic to your website. Here are a few of the ones we recommend:

• Quality Content: Use content such as blog posts, press releases and articles on authority websites. Insert links to various places on your website within this content to build your brand name through exposure and drive traffic to your website.
• Keyword Strategy: Inserting related keywords into content will help your content and website show up in more search results, this leads to higher volumes of web traffic.
• Website Optimization: Ensuring that your website is optimized and functioning at it’s best is essential. People don’t want to visit a website that doesn’t work properly.
• Social Media: Use engaging social media posts to attract more traffic to your site. Using pictures, video, and other relevant media will help your posts get more engagement.

Try these simple digital marketing strategies out on your website and see for yourself how much of a difference they can make. If you want your business to grow, digital marketing is the place to start.

7 Digital Marketing Trends for 2015 2 Mar 2015, 10:13 am

Digital marketing has over the last few years undergone a substantial transformation, becoming an increasingly important medium for creating an online brand experience.

Just like any field that relies on communication technologies, online marketing is rapidly developing towards some directions and departing from others, rendering some practices obsolete. What’s in store for digital marketers in the upcoming year?

Read on to find out what are the major online marketing trends and predictions for 2015.

1. The Rise of Content Marketing

The popularity of content marketing strategies will continue unabated into the upcoming year, which essentially means that marketers will abandon the traditional digital marketing tactics in favor of creating more relevant and inspiring content. Instead of relying on tested solutions, companies will pay more attention to customer experience and curate content in a more emphatic, client-oriented way.

Along will rise budgets allocated to content marketing and the importance of companies that reach out to their customers in writing – B2B companies with blogs are expected to generate 67% more leads per month than those organizations that don’t have blogs. High-quality and relevant content will be key to digital marketing of the future.

 

2. Augmented Reality & Wearable Technology

Closing the gap between the online and offline experience will be a big step not only for online marketing, but for Internet in general. One of the first possible technological applications meant to combine online and offline are micro-location technologies, in particular Apple’s iBeacon, which has during the last year completely revolutionized the scene and is slowly being introduced into commercial settings.

But that’s not all. Wearable technology will become popular enough for us to see some of the first marketing application of the technology. The Internet of things will create a completely new kind of environment and marketers will have to keep up with its rapid development in order to stay in touch with the changing needs of consumers

 

3. Marketing Analytics Will Bloom

Marketers already use dozens of analytics tools in order to see how customers interact with their company’s products or services. The importance of this section of marketing will rise in 2015, when spending for that purpose are expected to rise by 60%.

Furthermore, we’ll see marketing automation technologies applied more and more often – their use is predicted to grow by 50%. In short, marketing data will become a crucial point in any marketing endeavor and its acquisition will be easier and faster. Consumers will generate a vast amount of detailed information and companies are expected to use specialized software to help them in making sense of the data at hand.

 

4. More Videos Than Ever

During the last few years, the use of videos for marketing purposes has been steadily growing. Videos are perfect to show how a service or product works in such a way that is impossible to achieve with text or images only. This trend s most likely to continue into 2015, when more and more companies will start creating the so-called ‘explainer videos’ and giving them a prominent role in the user experience tactics.

 

5. More Marketing Noise Than Ever

Together with increased interest in content creation goes marketing noise – a kind of low quality content that doesn’t really add any value. Because marketers will focus more on providing interesting and engaging content, we might see marketing noise slowly losing its power.

Over the last few years, marketers increasingly appreciated a long copy over short one and we’ll see this trend blooming in 2015. The length and value of the content will be more essential than ever for effective SEO – Google already labels content of less than 200 words as Thin Content and has two special search algorithms in force, Panda 4.0 and Pay Day 2.0, that are specifically aimed at reducing the ranks of low quality content.

 

6. More Money Allocated in Online Ads

The web is a place, where people spend their time during work and free time, giving marketers a wealth of great opportunities for targeting, segmentation and tracking options that are simply unavailable in traditional offline advertisements.

Internet advertising is predicted to rise by 10% – on a global rate! Furthermore, mobile ads are also expected to grow by a smashing 48% in 2015. Consequently, online ad spending will increase during next year and this trend will continue further on, allowing marketers to precisely target specific user groups.

 

7. Going Mobile All The Way

The importance of mobile will grow in each and every aspect of business, online marketing included. People use mobile devices all day long and in various contexts, allowing marketers to target them in a longer stretch of time and during different phases of the day – at work, during rest or play.

Some believe that the mobile web will become bigger than desktop usage in 2015, but one thing is clear – spending for mobile ads will grow – and grow fast. All agree that the popularity of mobile devices will only grow in 2015, driven by smartphones, tablets and wearable technology.

In order to stay effective, online marketing strategies should immediately respond to the preferences and behaviors of their targeted audiences and follow consumers in their daily use of the web. Considering those ten trends and predictions for 2015, there’s no doubt about one thing – marketers will find next few years inspiring deep changes in the ways in which consumers interact with online environments.