Category Digital Marketing News

The digital arena is always changing and marketing efforts have to keep up with the constant flux. Every business, no matter the size, should have a well organized and robust marketing plan. As the digital landscape changes, businesses and their marketers can more easily adapt and adjust with clever solutions that can strengthen and help future-proof the business.

Digital marketing can help to generate more clients and bring value to the businesses you cater to. It’s important to know what strategies are most effective. Here are some of the best strategies to get businesses remarkable results.

Paid Media

You can market your services without having to shell out a budget, but not all the time. By using paid media, you can target your desired audience directly through advanced tools, making it one of the best ways to land a client.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC advertising is when you pay to have a search engine display your ad when a user searches for related keywords. Through an auction-based system, PPC works when you bid on keywords that you want your ads to show up for. When a user types in the keyword, it triggers your ad to appear above organic listings. Once a user clicks, you pay for that click.

Paid Social

With paid social media, it is easier to market any content as soon as it goes live on the platform. Social media channels also let you determine and control your message frequency. Low pricing for social media ads allows campaign sustainability even when it runs for a while, unlike other digital advertising strategies that may need more significant funding.

Earned and Owned Media

Earned media is also called word-of-mouth marketing. This includes testimonials from customers, influencers and fans who turn into brand advocates for your product or services. On the other hand, owned media is the content you can publish for free. You have full ownership of this content and can edit it whenever you desire.

SEO

SEO revolves around making your website and web pages rank higher in search engine results pages organically. It starts with creating valuable content with the right keywords. SEO also requires making your website fast-loading and user-friendly for a better navigation experience.

Email Marketing

When creating email campaigns, always keep in mind your audience. Know their behavior and adjust your strategies from the insights you get. Find out if they value simple and plain emails more than those with moving illustrations or interactive features. From here, you can make campaigns that yield better engagement.

When it comes to content, start with a subject line that is short and catchy. Try descriptive lines with a touch of creativity. For the main message, always present them with benefits rather than irrelevant information they may not need in their businesses. Avoid using highly technical terms that you, may only understand. Keep your emails short, easy to digest and brief.

Remember that your clients are busy with their own business and only have a short time to check their emails. Grab this opportunity to capture their attention, or you may lose their interest.

The digital marketing landscape is kicking into high gear for the fall and the holiday selling season. Now is a key time to get informed on the latest in digital marketing trends. Many people believe that digital marketing is still the best adaption for businesses to use. This has been proven by the fact that there are still new digital marketing trends being developed and put into place each month. The following are the most Top 5 most important changes we believe will impact the marketing space.

Instagram Adds New Tools to Improve Content Recommendation

With Instagram’s new Explore feature, you can mark multiple posts as ‘Not Interested’ to streamline your algorithmic Instagram experience. It should enable you to delete a bunch of trash instantly, demonstrating to Instagram that you’re not interested in the topics you selected.
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Also, Instagram is testing the ability for users to opt-out of seeing suggested posts with certain words, phrases, or emojis in the caption.

‘Group Invite Links’ Added to Messenger to Streamline Group Chats

The new feature will allow administrators to share group chat links, which will be beneficial to parents and study groups as we enter the new school year. As Messenger explains: “This highly desired feature will allow users to connect with family, friends, and communities more easily, eliminating the need to search for and add group members individually. With group chat invite links, only the admin can turn the link on or off, and they can ‘approve’ new members.”

A Live Test of the Tweet Editing Option is Now Enabled in the App

All users will be able to see tweet edit histories by clicking on the pencil icon in edited tweets, which will include a notice at the bottom stating that the tweet has been edited. Because of potential misuse, many people are already sounding the alarm about the potential damage that could be caused by edited tweets, edit history will be available for all to view. “For this experiment, Tweets may be edited a few times in the 30 minutes following publication. An icon, timestamp, and label will appear on the edited Tweet to inform readers that it has been altered. Tapping the label will take visitors to the Tweet’s Edit History, which includes previous editions of the original message.”

Twitter Expands Access to the Private Sharing feature ‘Circles’ to All Users

According to Twitter, the overwhelmingly positive response to its new enclosed group tweeting feature, which was first made available to some users in May, has prompted them to provide it to all Android, iOS, and web users. Before you post to Twitter, you will see an option to share your post with either your full followers’ list or your Circle group. You can add or remove members of your Circle at any time, and it can include up to 150 people. You may make any changes you like to your Circle without notifying anyone. A green indicator will alert Circle members that their tweets are only visible to those inside the group.

Google Tests the ‘Browse Place’ Search Feature With Swipeable Cards

To provide users with a more engaging search experience, Google is experimenting with showing place cards that you can swipe through and then click on. In other words, it’s kind of like a new local pack grid view for restaurants.

Keep these upcoming changes in mind when mapping out your marketing plan. Being the first to accommodate these trends could create new opportunities for your business and give you a distinct advantage.

Digital marketing has made tailoring marketing campaigns to specific demographics and interests easier and more lucrative than ever. Presently, device targeting is a key consideration for marketing efforts. Not only should marketers design campaigns that are mobile-friendly, they should design those campaigns as mobile-first. Smartphones dominate the device landscape in the present digital age and to overlooking that usage reality could be a disaster for any digital marketing strategy.

Over the past decade, the relationship between consumers and brands has moved from the physical to the digital at an expeditious pace. Consumers interact with an average of six digital touchpoints when engaging with a brand, whether that be content on social media, payment through wallet, news from SMS, or offers via email, to name but a few. A brand cannot rely on a single source to connect with consumers. Critically, however, all these touchpoints can be directly accessed through a smartphone, making mobile the obvious nucleus of any digital communication strategy.

Andy Gladwin of Cheetah Digital provided some insights to the digital community, to stating how a comprehensive mobile strategy can furnish enterprises with the tools to build more meaningful digital relationships with consumers. This mobile strategy can empower them to gather vast amounts of consumer opt-ins, preference insights, and behavioral data, and unify and harmonize that data in a single, accessible source.

The problem of harmonizing data from multiple sources

“Always Be Collecting Data.” It’s the ABCD of marketing. However, in the data economy, it’s not uncommon to hear marketers lament that they have too much data to analyze, or that the data they have is siloed or in inaccessible formats.

Fifty-three per cent of organizations report that they have only a few of their marketing channels connected. Conflate that with the fact that, on average, marketing departments have a tech stack boasting 12 systems — the vast majority of enterprise brands are using many more. A single, accessible view of the customer seems like a pie-in-the-sky utopia.

As mammoth a task as it appears, centralization is imperative. Andy Gladwin explains:

“Modern enterprises are awash with data, but it’s fragmented from all manner of sources and siloed in disparate systems which are not integrated, nor were designed to be. Having a centralized, single source of truth of the customer serves as a complete, up-to-date record and empowers marketers to build lasting and more meaningful relationships with customers through accurate, timely, and trustworthy data. The closer marketers can get to the utopia of a golden record, the more likely they are to interact with customers through preferred channels with preferred messages.”

To cut the marketing buzzwords, the single source of truth is quite simply a unified customer profile, which includes identifying information about the customer, the channels they use to interact with the organization, their most recent interaction with the organization, and which recent offer they reacted to positively. The single source of truth also encompasses how a customer engages with the organization, including their most recent activity and lifetime value, complemented by a raft of preference and behavioral data.

This is where mobile comes to the fore; connecting brands, consumers, and touchpoints, it is an ecosystem that offers many channels and backed up with the right technology — harmonizing and actioning data.

“Devices have gone from being convenient to connected and, through this period, content has evolved from being relatively basic to incredibly rich. The evolution of the channel ecosystem where engagement has moved from transactional to conversational gives brands more of an opportunity to engage, listen, and influence customer behavior. For too long marketing has been a decidedly one-way affair, with brands seeking to push their message louder and further into more intimate contacts. However, it’s not better marketing, just better targeting. Using mobile to engage in true two-way communications with consumers through legacy and emerging channels will be the next significant paradigm shift.”