It may look like traditional advertising is becoming obsolete, but the truth is that it is the exact opposite. Instead of dissolving into the ether, traditional advertising and marketing strategies are simply evolving at a rapid pace.
While television commercials still garner a premium price for their ads, the tiny ads in various social media platforms and websites are slowly growing in value and have collectively peaked at $15.9 billion. This obviously means that something is working and it’s your job to take advantage of this trend, while it is still relatively new and growing.
Developing Your Own Digital Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve established the basic requirements to start a business, the next thing you should be looking at is how you can market your products and services in the digital arena. Much like in the real world, your digital marketing strategy has to reach a lot of people.
Before it reaches your audience, you need to prepare a stellar campaign that will resonate with consumers, motivate them to buy your product/service, and be tastefully disseminated in a way that will not turn off or offend the rest of the world once they see your campaign.
In order to do this, you need efficient tools and data to support your marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at some of them, shall we?
Analytics Tools
The most popular tool marketers use these days is Google analytics. Using this platform, users can assess the number of organic visitors, page clicks, duration of visits, conversion path, etc. Analytics tools can show you how well or how bad your site is doing. They can also allow you to analyze this information to determine the steps you need to take to improve your website’s following.
SEO know-how
A few years back, SEO got a bad rap because of the proliferation of fake backlinks and scams offering top rankings on Google. Remember, only Google’s algorithm decides whether or not you should be on top.
Today, they’re laying everything out on the table and telling users what exactly it is they need to do to be recognized by Google’s spider search. Just provide useful, original content and make sure that people are talking about you. This can easily be done using the rest of the tools on this list. If you don’t have the time, find a credible SEO specialist that can give you proper counseling for a fair price.
Email marketing tools
Using email marketing tools, you can send out newsletters to people, who are interested in what you have to say. At the same time, you can check to see how they received the newsletter – whether it went to the spam folder, how long they read it, which parts they lingered on, or if they deleted it as soon as they saw it in their mailboxes. That way, you can edit your newsletters in a way that makes them more enticing and useful to your subscribers.
Growth hacks
Growth hacks are the non-traditional route to advertising. If your company has sufficient manpower, your marketing team can spare a few people who can spread the word about your company on sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, and other mainstream forums. These platforms are visited by millions of people on a daily basis and can serve as a free. Just remember to follow the rules and avoid hard-selling your product to a niche group that does not welcome it.
Visual marketing
One of the most profitable platforms for advertising these days is visual apps and sites like Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Most businesses have subscribed to these apps in order to reach a wider market. Facebook covers a general audience, but these other apps connect their users according to their interests.
Marketers can take advantage of Instagram and Pinterest to share high-quality images, while they can use Snapchat to share unfiltered, live takes of their daily activities in the company. If you can afford it, you can place a bid on any of Snapchat’s partners to get your product featured. They have over a dozen partners covering different niches like video games, food, entertainment, and much more.
Social media platform ad offers
Sponsored ads on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are significantly more affordable than direct advertising options with large websites, influencers and celebrities. Small business owners can start with a small advertising campaign while continuing to build their capital to reach a wider audience.
The downside is that you are competing with thousands of other ads, which means that you need to choose your audience carefully. Facebook pages are programmed to use friends’ lists and expanded connections to distribute the ads across the platform.
Social media management tools
Marketing automation tools are used to save time on posting content online. Whether it’s for your company website, social media accounts, or email list, marketing automation allows you to organize the time of posting in order to maximize the views it can get based on the general schedule that your audiences follow. Popular tools that businesses use include AgoraPulse, Likeable Local, Hootsuite and Sproutsocial.
Retargeting tools
The concept of retargeting allows your ads to be seen in various parts of the internet instead of just through one paid space in a specific website. Retargeting tools use the data from its users to help your ad gain more exposure. The basic premise is that the tool lets users see an ad of your product on the different websites they browse. Before this can happen, the user has to look up a keyword related to your product. Most social media platforms have partnerships with tools like AdRoll and ReTargeter, which connects them to over five hundred brands who have a chance to get more screen-time on sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Content creation tools
Like every successful digital marketer says these days, “Content is king.” No matter what kind of content it is, whether it’s data, pictures, articles, music, you name it – everyone want the highest quality content in order to apply an effective marketing strategy.
Ideally, you will want to focus on your niche product in your website or social media enterprise; however, you need to focus on images and word content. Good SEO revolves around quality images with proper tags, but more importantly, spider searches need to comb through quality text in the websites in its search engine. For that very reason, you will need a copywriter and quality images from independent or private firms.
Marketing principles
You can argue that the new way to do things is to disrupt the marketing initiative or stick to the traditional methods, but the thing about these two routes is that they are both effective.
Unfortunately, only one of them is easily within your grasp. Disruptive marketing techniques are very risky. For example, you have iHop’s ill-conceived pancake promotion which fell flat on Twitter, as well as many other campaigns from huge companies. Gimmicks like these seem memorable, in theory, but the effects usually reflect on the sales of the company. That is why you need to follow traditional marketing principles, but still be open-minded enough to use the evolving trend of digital marketing.
About the Author: Diana Beyer is experienced and self-driven media expert who is passionate about writing. Her purpose is to share values amid those interested. She is always seeking to discover new ways for personal and professional growth. Connect with Diana though Twitter.