Technology is becoming a more important part of our lives every day—we carry small computers in our pockets, we wear them on our wrists, and we have a variety of them lying around at home. Learning how to use this technology in your marketing campaigns will boost their performance and will ensure you receive more business. It isn’t as easy as it sounds, however.
There are many different types of digital marketing that you can employ, and in this article, we’ll explain a few of them to help you and your marketing team decide what strategies you want to use and who you want to reach. This will help your partner marketing agency in Broomfield, Colorado, or your marketing department create the best campaigns for your business.
Search Engine Optimization
When you speak to any marketing agency or look into digital marketing, a common term you’ll see and hear about is search engine optimization, also known as SEO for short. SEO is improving your website so it ranks higher in the search results.
For example, let’s say you want to improve the SEO of your site that sells heating pads. You may first search up the term “heating pad” to see what the results are and why they are ranked so highly. The first results you see may say “ad” in bold next to their headline. This means they paid for an ad spot and had enough SEO to be the first ad shown on the page.
Other results will not be ads but may be retailers who already have a reputation, such as Walmart or Target. Your marketing team will then go to each website and see what may make them rank highly in the search and change your site accordingly. They’ll then keep an eye on how many clicks your website receives and how high they appear in the search.
In general, the better the SEO, the higher the site will appear and the more clicks it will get. The more clicks your site gets, the more likely you are to have an increase in sales.
Email Marketing
Everyone has at least one email, with many people having three or more, and this makes emails a popular marketing tool. Thus, email marketing or using emails to connect to a customer base was born. If you have ever signed up for a weekly newsletter to appear in your email or have received discount codes from an online marketplace you use, then you have come into contact with email marketing.
Some emails may not seem like email marketing, such as password reset or welcome ones, but these keep the brand fresh in your mind. Surveys, feedback, and promotional emails are more obvious examples of email marketing as the company asks either for your time, opinion, or attention for some reason.
Feedback and survey emails also double as information-gathering ones as you collect the thoughts and suggestions from your loyal customer base and may be able to use them to improve your products and services.
Social Media Marketing
Social media has been a vital tool in creating online communities, exchanging information and news, and for many other things, no matter what your opinion on the specific platforms may be.
Social media is a crucial part of the experience online, so it makes sense that marketing teams view it as a gold mine. SMM or social media marketing is when a brand uses it to build, draw attention to their services, and increase sales overall. This may entail creating a Facebook account to promote new products, share memes, answer customer questions, and more.
You can also create ads for your products that play on the sides or at the top of the site. Some even allow you to pay for sponsored posts that appear in more people’s feeds. You may even be able to categorize paying a popular creator to post a message that promotes your products as social media marketing. This is a common and effective way that many brands promote themselves.
Mobile Marketing
As mentioned earlier, we all carry small computers that we call smartphones in our pockets. They have become a vital part of our lives, with many people spending more time on their phones than on a traditional desktop or laptop computer. Mobile marketing, or marketing your business to mobile users, has risen in popularity.
It’s a process you must actively pursue as the smaller screens and potential for both vertical and horizontal viewing will not work unless someone has tailored their ad to work in these circumstances. It has become such a popular marketing strategy that many ads are designed to work on mobile phones before any other placement is considered.
While many do this by creating specific social media ads, others use the massive mobile game market as their way to reach potential customers.
Content Marketing
The final type of digital marketing we’ll discuss here is content marketing. Content marketing is creating material to try and attract or convince people to become customers. Some examples of content marketing include videos, podcasts, ebooks, and blog posts.
Resources such as explanatory articles and definition pages are also examples of content marketing. The best part about content marketing is that other pieces of the strategy can link back to the content literally. A promotional email may link to your most recent or relevant blog post, or you may boost the SEO of a product comparison piece you posted.
Content marketing allows customers to understand what services and products you provide, and your free resources may improve your brand’s value for the people who use them. For example, a plumbing company with a blog post explaining how to unclog a toilet will not only help people solve their problem and endear that company in the reader’s eyes but may also be the resource they reach out to should their problem be too big for them to fix.
Creating Robust Marketing Efforts
Digital marketing is only growing and will likely only continue to do so as we spend more time on our devices. There are many ways you can take advantage of this, but some may work better for your company than others.
The best way to figure out what might and might not work and to implement winning strategies is to work with a marketing agency that specializes in the digital landscape. They’ll know about trends and technology you may not have heard of and can use them to create hugely successful campaigns for you.