Top 6 Techniques You Need in Your Digital Marketing Arsenal

Digital marketing is about incorporating technological tactics into your overall marketing strategy. Choosing the right techniques and fitting them into your business are vital to your company’s success in digital and offline spaces. If you want to drive traffic to your website, increase conversions and build brand awareness, here are six practices to add to your online marketing plan:

1. Content Marketing

I can hear you saying already, “Isn’t this article about digital marketing?” There is an adage that people who work in digital here over and over: Content is king. Content is anything that has a message, from images and videos to blog posts and infographics. Google – and your visitors – reward good content. If you’re coming from a business with a physical location (e.g. retail) think of content as your products and the way they are laid out in your store. Without good products and an aesthetically pleasing store layout, people may come in but it’s unlikely they will buy or return.

Content marketing has become a buzzword, but simply put, this is storytelling for your brand. Social Media B2B claims that businesses that blog get 67% more leads a month than those that don’t. Use content marketing to become an authority in your field, earn customer trust and loyalty, and build a community. By creating original, engaging and shareable content you are content marketing.

2. Retargeting

This is a common way to convert web traffic. Since only 2% of visitors convert their first time on a website, retargeting is a potent way to keep your brand and its products in the forefront of a potential customer’s mind.

The way this technique works is that, using cookies, the visitor is tracked while on your website. When the visitor leaves the site, they are shown ads of the product or services they viewed while on other websites. It reminds them of items they didn’t purchase and can bring them back into the conversion funnel.

3. More video

People love videos. They allow for an interaction that words and images simply can’t get across due to their lack of dynamism. Many companies are now incorporating videos into their websites in order to engage viewers and facilitate communication. The advantage of video is that it can be shared – and more importantly, viewed – on different social media platforms. A user does not have to leave Facebook to watch an embedded video but they are interrupted in they want to read a blog post.

Videos that are easy to understand and engage with will help potential customers understand your business and product, making them easier and more likely to convert. Don’t just use YouTube. Try to incorporate Vine, Snapchat and Instagram videos as well.

4. Go mobile

Fewer people are looking for information from their desktops, so optimizing your website for mobile formats is the way forward. Not only will this improve the user’s experience – bounce rates can be very high on mobile – but it will make Google happy as well. Mobile access and loading speed are an important factor in determining website quality.

Don’t just stop at responsive sites or mobile versions – think about how you can use data from mobile check-in applications like Foursquare or Facebook to target marketing campaigns. To take it a step further, gather this data to understand more about your customer and his or her behaviour to maximize your product or services.

5. Build community

SEO and social signals are overlapping even more than before. Search engines like Google use an algorithm to determine which results are the most relevant and of best quality for the searcher. It makes sense that having a high number of shares would thus be indicative of quality content. There is a chance that in the future, social shares will be just as important as traditional incoming links as a signal of trust.

So what can you do to get more shares? Build a community by creating discussion worthy content and giving your customers an experience. Last year, when Coca-Cola in Venezuela partnered with Guinness World Records they got hundreds of Coca-Cola lovers together to create an awesome marketing campaign. Coca-Cola set a record for performing the longest drinks pouring relay, and as a result the record was the top trending topic in the country on Twitter. They created community by facilitating teamwork and received the social media impressions to prove it.

6. Conversion optimization

This is another buzzword in the online marketing world, but what is it exactly? Conversion is when a visitor takes an action that you wanted them to – whether that is a sale, signing up for a newsletter or downloading an e-book or app. Conversion optimisation, or CRO, uses analytics and data collected from users to optimise for that particular action. CROs find out why a user isn’t converting and then fixes the problem.

The advantage of conversion optimisation is that it has a very clear and scalable ROI. It also doesn’t require the kind of financial investment that something like retargeting does but it takes time. It simply improves your site to help its visitors through the proper channel to get you the result you want.

There you have it: 6 techniques that will take your digital marketing to the next level. When it comes down to it, marketing is all about the consumer. Getting them to feel invested in your brand and to feel like you are speaking to them is exactly what is going to influence your bottom line.

What did you think, folks? Will you incorporate these techniques into your digital business plan?

Lead photo courtesy of mkhmarketing.