If you’re here, chances are you probably are well aware of what digital marketing is. However, if you are not, it is the act of promoting and selling products and services via online marketing and advertising tactics. Essentially, because everything about our world today is online, digital marketing is really the only type of marketing nowadays. For a guide to finding some success in digital marketing, keep reading.
1. Where, When, and How
This refers to knowing where, when, and how your audience consumes their media. But before you can know that, you must make sure you know your audience. This means more than simply knowing their demographics or psychographics. Knowing your target audience involves intensive research and strategy to determine their current state of life–their wants, their needs, their habits, their perceptions and so much more.
To do so, you are going to need patience. Doing the research to truly understand these factors takes a great deal of time. The best place to start is by conducting interviews with your prospective audience that cover their general focus areas in life. You could be an agency focused on influencers, a life science marketing agency, or an agency that covers what comes to them. Then, once you have those answers you can sift through the answers to find commonalities and recurring themes in order to find what is most important to them. With that information, your next step, conducting focus groups, becomes much easier to facilitate. Focus groups are valuable because they give you, as the marketer, a chance to get outside perspectives that provide new ideas and inspiration for potential content.
2. Insight
The second piece of our guide to digital marketing is insights. Ultimately, the goal of all of this research is to find your insights. Insights are more than just current trends, behaviors, or perceptions among your audience. The basis of what a real insight is is that it tells you what is true for the consumer. An insight that’s of value is one that tells you exactly where the consumer is in his/her current point in life and what they need or what is lacking. Then, you can easily take what you know about your product/service and find what is true about it. Find the truth about your product and what it offers. The insight lies in the overlap of these two truths–that is where the value is to the consumer.
Now that you have gathered insights based on your research, you can start the real work. The key to successful digital marketing campaigns is staying organized and cohesive in your approach to content creation across all platforms. Obviously, you want to spread and post your content as far and wide as possible to get as much exposure as possible. If you are posting on various social media platforms, for example, you’ll want to make certain that your posts have a similar look and aesthetic across all websites. This is crucial in order to establish a brand identity that consumers can recognize anywhere.
3. User-Created Content
This refers to content such as, “Post us on your story for a chance to win our gift card!”. Contests and consumer engagement efforts like this are extremely effective, and they take some of the work off of your back. Plus, people are much more likely to believe posts and promotions from their friends than they are from bigger companies.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Finally, no matter what you are pushing out, whether it is a social media post or an email newsletter, or a blog post, your SEO matters. However, SEO is complicated, especially if you’re not a tech expert. Luckily, there are myriad tools available to help you optimize your search engine results without having to get too into the weeds of the technology side. Some examples are Semrush, Yoast, and Google Search Console. These tools make it easy to plug in your text or photos or captions and they tell you how strong your SEO score is and give you tips on how to increase it. The importance of paying attention to your SEO cannot be stressed enough when it comes to digital marketing.
All of this can be overwhelming, especially if you’re just starting out. Or, maybe you’re a larger company, and it’s time to outsource your digital marketing efforts to an agency that specializes in just that. If this is the case for you, you’ve come to the right place with this guide to digital marketing. Now that you know our top tips, it’s time to step your marketing game up.
