Digital marketing is a way to attract visitors to your website, keep them engaged and persuade them to become customers. Today, this requires using a range of digital channels, including search engines, email and social media.
In this post, we’ll look at some of the tips that leading digital marketers put at the top of their priorities.
- Keep your website in tip-top condition
Wherever you do your marketing, the aim will be to drive visitors to your website. All that effort and investment can go to waste, however, if your website causes those visitors to leave rather than stay. High bounce rates and short visits result in fewer sales and can even impact how well your website ranks in search results.
To prevent this, it is important that your website is well maintained.This covers a number of aspects. It needs to load quickly, be mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, have up-to-date content, be secure and look attractive. For this, you’ll need to make sure your hosting is fast, that you have a responsive theme, that your site is well organised and regularly updated, and that there’s an SSL certificate. From time to time, you should also consider changing the theme to keep the design fresh and contemporary.
- Understand the sales journey
A lot of digital marketing doesn’t work because it focuses too heavily on the ‘here’s our product, buy it now’ approach. This presumes that all potential customers are at the stage where they are ready to buy – but that’s just the latter end of the purchasing process.
A good marketing strategy will address all three main parts of the buyers’ journey – awareness, consideration, and decision. ‘Awareness’ is when people recognise the need to solve a problem, e.g., the TV’s broken or they need a new outfit for a wedding. ‘Consideration’ is where they research how to resolve their problem and ‘decision’ is when they decide it’s time to buy what they need.
Marketing can be more successful when it targets customers across all three stages.For example, you can write blog posts that help people at the awareness and consideration stages to solve their problems and find solutions, for example, ‘Should I fix my TV or buy a new one?’ or ‘Best wedding outfits this year’. If your content can help a potential customer earlier on in the journey, you stand a better chance of them making a purchase from you at the end.
- Optimise your content marketing
While content, like the blog posts mentioned above, has the potential to engage customers earlier on the buyers’ journey, it can have a much wider reach if it ranks well in search engine results. For this reason, your great content needs SEO.To do this, make sure you are using the most important keywords and putting them in the right places (titles, subtitles, main content, meta descriptions, etc.) with the right density. You should also make sure your content is original, well written and of a reasonable length. SEO tools, like marketgoo, can provide lots of help with this if you are not an expert.
- Make use of social media
Social media is excellent both for advertising and posting engaging content. When it comes to PPC advertising, most platforms now allow you to target specific audiences and give you control over how you spend your budget. They’ll also provide helpful engagement analytics so you can monitor how well your ad campaigns are progressing.
Of course, you can also use social media for posting a wide range of other, less sales-driven content to millions of users to promote your brand.To do this successfully, you need to know which platforms your target audience like to use and what kinds of content they engage with so that you can put the right strategy together.
- Don’t give up on your email list
Email marketing still brings in the highest ROI of any marketing technique and this makes an email list a highly valuable asset. So, even if your ads and content are bringing in a good number of new visitors, you should still try to get as many of these as possible to subscribe for emails.
Quite simply, with an email list, you have a group of users that have chosen to receive marketing communications from you. These are people that like your brand and who want to know more about your products and services. With email, you can do that as often as you like and tempt them with special offers and discounts to keep them returning to your website.
- Remember to remarket
Lots of customers look at a product, think they want to buy it, but decide that they’ll do it later. They may not have the time, they might need to give it some more consideration, or they may just have seen so many products that they need a break. There are lots of reasons why they don’t go ahead. When they eventually get around to making the purchasing decision, finding the same product is not always simple.
The customer might have forgotten about the product altogether or the website they found it on. Remarketing is a solution that enables you to target those people who have visited a web page or even added a product to their basket, but who have not made a purchase.It enables you to remind the forgetters about your product and where it is, and it also gives you the opportunity to do a bit more convincing. You can even send retargeted visitors to customised landing pages or provide them with special offers.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is vital to attract the right customers to your website and to provide them with content that matches whatever stage of the buyers’ journey they are on. Hopefully, the tips provided here will help your marketing strategies to be more effective.
If you are looking to boost website speed, check out our high-performance web hosting solutions.
