How to make the most of digital when marketing your business
Marketing is a big deal for pretty much every company on Earth. Other than those that trade on secrecy, marketing is one of the most important ways to get messages out there: whether you run a financial services firm that is looking for new investment clients or you are in charge of the advertising budget at a major manufacturing organization that is on the hunt for new buyers, marketing is pretty much essential.
But how can the new-fangled world of digital help your business’s marketing efforts? How can digital marketing experts help propel your firm and its potential to the next level? This article will provide some answers to those questions, and help you to understand just what digital can do for you.
Using search engines
When it comes to digital marketing, social media retains the top spot at the first option for many leading marketers in the space. Why is this? The main reason is that it responds to customer demand to do so: users of the internet see Google and other search engines as their first port of call when they want to work out something or discover some piece of information, so it makes sense that businesses with a digital marketing budget will prioritize resources in that regard.
For some firms, search engine optimization (SEO) is the way to go. This involves ensuring that web pages are responsive to Google’s needs, such as by expressing clear keywords in the ‘meta description’ of a page, which shows up as the small excerpt in Google search results. Other firms choose to pay to boost their web pages using pay-per-click, the ad model run by search engines themselves, responsible for the websites at the top of your search results marked ‘ad’. This can help to bypass the long-term time investment required with an SEO project. If you are unsure, then it is wise to speak to a digital marketing expert about these two options. They will be able to tell you which one is likely to work best for your business.
Harnessing social media
In the age of Facebook and Twitter, digital marketers would be crazy to avoid using these important channels to reach people who are looking to be connected to the businesses they value. To be fair, it is easy to see why marketers – and those in businesses that pay them – might be skeptical. Scandals involving organizations such as Cambridge Analytica have left many suspicious of the use of social media to achieve corporate, organizational ends. However, the reality is that campaigns that are both ethical and effective can be put in place on social media channels.
Facebook and other social media platforms collect all sorts of data on their users – and while that can be misused, it can also be used to connect people to the sorts of products and services that they want to see. If your firm produces clear, upfront and direct advertising that uses demographic data to meet willing customers where they are, then social media platforms can be a great way of achieving advertising goals.
Making the most of email
Anyone who was online in the early iteration of the digital age – the era in the first decade of this century – will remember exactly what the birth of email marketing felt like. It was very different from the over-stuffed inboxes of the modern age: instead, it was home to clever email adverts that were noticeable for their uniqueness, rather than for being one in a crowd of hundreds or thousands of spam emails.
Now, of course, a large number of digital marketers have cottoned on to the trick – and a look down any modern spam or junk email folder is likely to reveal a deluge of marketing emails that most users are likely to simply ignore. However, this doesn’t mean that a savvy marketer can’t still make the most of email. Combining it with other methods, including direct mail, as Wolverine Solutions Group is known to do, can increase the chances of success. By using intriguing subject lines and by avoiding the use of ‘spammy’ techniques in the bodies of emails (such as overusing dollar signs, or constantly encouraging users to click), it’s possible to reduce the risk that your business emails will get redirected to spam folders – and instead build an authentic rapport with your customers and potential customers.
In the modern era, there is nothing quite like digital to help transform an organization’s marketing prospects. Internet-based tools are all-powerful these days, and they are everywhere you look: not using them can leave you at a significant disadvantage, and can put you at a real risk of failing to reach customers who are thinking in digital terms.
From social media to search engines and much more in between, then, there are plenty of ways to integrate digital into your marketing strategies.
