by Samantha Arigapudi

Digital marketing has become the norm, replacing the term marketing altogether. As an evolved form of traditional marketing, digital marketing uses the web and digital channels to connect consumers with brands and brands with partners to help each other grow in this dynamic digital age. Digital touch points such as tablets, smartphones and wearable devices are becoming more ubiquitous around the world.

As the digital world changes with every new invention, app and upgrade, it can become a challenge to keep up with today’s digital marketing needs and outlets. Digital marketing however is a practice essential to modern marketing and here are some easy ways to help you improve your digital marketing.

#1 Focus on Customer Acquisition

“Content is king,” is a saying that’s foundational to digital marketing. Use content creatively to define your company and what you offer to acquire your target audience so they too can spread your creative word.

Before you start, set up acquisition goals for your digital marketing and create a timeline with goals working backwards from your end-goal. What steps do you need to take? Where can you improve your content? Have you identified your keywords and attractive links?

A must of digital marketing is to have web traffic and to gain traffic to your website, blog and e-commerce store. To do so, it’s important to share your content in a smart way. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Vine are all effective ways to draw a new crowd to your website, and other methods such as search and display may also help you optimize your media plan.

#2 Examine Your SEO

In 2014 until now, SEO’s impact has grown 29% for B2C brands. It is now just as important as email for a more positive ROI. Hiring an outside company to evaluate your SEO is a great way to see where you fall on the map in your industry and get a step-by-step list of how to improve your digital presence. Get a report that allows you to understand the quality of each of your website’s pages and how they compare with the quality of your competitors’ pages.

A good starting point for any SEO strategy is to first determine who you have to beat! Look at your competitors and do a thorough competitor analysis—what niches and keywords do they seem to be targeting? Do what your competitors are doing right to get in front of them on the search results page.

#3 Focus on Retention Rates

Customer retention has unique challenges of its own and to keep up, you need to react to your messaging. Where have your customers gone? Are competitors stealing your base?  Is your customer turned off by bland communications that are no longer personalized and engaging? Concentrate on the customers that are more likely to convert based on their positions in the buying cycle, which will improve your company’s digital-marketing efficiency.

Deliver the excellent experience customers expect by interacting with them through multiple digital outlets with engaging and more importantly, genuine content. Constantly reevaluating your overall digital marketing strategy is one of the best ways to stay ahead of your competition, acquire new customers, retain your brand ambassadors and produce more personalized experiences.

What is your digital marketing tip?

by Samantha Arigapudi

A cheap way to spice up your digital marketing efforts is by pushing your way into people’s phones. Push notifications get you front and center of a valuable space — the mobile phone in the hands of your target audience.

Push notifications are the perfect addition to your digital marketing campaign. They literally get your message on a phone’s home screen in basically real-time. Having a sale tonight? Let your customers know about it by sending them a push notification through your app. Push notifications, not to be confused with texts, can do so much for your digital marketing efforts.

How Push Notifications Work

Push notifications help you communicate and constantly re-engage users. They can be sent based on a consumer’s location or even time zone through your app—they are a great way to prompt a mobile user at the right place, at the right time. For example, the Target Cartwheel app will show up on a phone’s home screen reminding them to use their Cartwheel App because the app picks up your location and realizes you are near a Target.

Simply put: Push notifications are simple messages from apps installed on a device that wake up the handset and alert the user with a message displayed on the home or lock screen.

Why Use Them

The best push notifications tend to be personalized, contextual, timely and relevant. And in fact, your app doesn’t even need to be open for a notification to be sent. Also, notifications have similar guidelines as Twitter — they are limited to 140 or less characters. Some guidelines to keep in mind:

• Keep Consumers in the Know. Push notifications are a great way to reach consumers on the go at any time of day — which makes it all the more important to have a mobile-friendly site.
• Be courteous. Don’t be a spammer. When planning your communications, organize your messaging so that you are only sending when it’s really worth it. Start with two pushes per week and work your way from there based on user feedback and analytics.
• Keep it short, stupid (KISS). No offense, but users have an attention span shorter than goldfish. Make a big impact with few words because all you need is a swipe. As soon as they react to your notification, your app or site will launch anyway.
• Always have a CTA. With that short notification, always include a call-to-action (CTA) that is as straight-forward and as obvious as possible.
• Bring something to the table. Add value with your messaging, just as you would with all other channels. Use their purchase history, previous interactions through other channels and CRM information to create a personal journey for each customer.

With the Great Power of Push Notifications…

…comes great responsibility. Don’t abuse the system … this only leads the consumer into disregarding your notifications. Don’t replace them for email — don’t send company or weekly updates via push notifications.

Push notifications are easy to implement and when best practices are followed, can be a great way to interact with users. Don’t overstep your boundaries and cross the line into harassment. Back up your action plan and only enable push notifications when they are worthy.

The key to digital marketing success is to deliver a rewarding customer experience that equates to brand and profit growth for your company. Fuel your digital marketing with these 5 tips:

1. Track Everything

The goal of digital marketing is to attract your target audience and this means telling them, nicely of course, what to do. You can accomplish this with a call-to-action. Help them help you by using a click-to-call extension that uses something like a tracking number so you can identify and measure which click-through’s measure best. Your focus should be on content with conversion.

2. For Social Media…

Be content ready. Identify your audience and three types of buyer categories and their stages in the buying cycle. Use social media to reach your buyers and build a relationship that leads them to your site, to share your content and eventually build a following of brand ambassadors willing to do the same. They take care of the “attract and convert,” cycle for you, but first you need to appeal to who they are as people instead of buyers.

3. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

There’s a reason “O” in SEO means Optimization, and that’s because as a component of digital marketing, search engine optimization means identifying and following the rules of major search engines like Yahoo! and Google. Find the target keyword in your headlines and copy that closely matches keywords in your bid to boost your chances of standing apart from your competitors.

4. Bam! Take Mobile Marketing Up a Notch

No digital marketing plan is complete without a mobile approach. First things first, see how your site and click-through’s look on your phone. “Googling” your business is important to do on your desktop but be sure to run the mobile test on your phone as well. Review your business information in search results. With organic search results, you should find the following:

• Your website
• Your social media pages
• Google Maps results
• Sites and online directories on which your business is listed
• Links to verifiable third-party content about your business

When checking on desktop and mobile, check:

• That your business name appears in organic search results
• That your information is up-to-date
• The sentiment behind your reviews
• Whether your site is as it should be when viewed via mobile

5. Automate to Increase Engagement

Emails may seem like an out-of-date outreach approach but automation still helps increase engagement. When was the last time you were enticed by an email from your favorite department store only to click and click and click until you purchased a pair of shoes you don’t really need. According to SilverPop, automated emails have an average 23.6% unique open rate and 5.0 click-through rate, which is higher than manual sends.

There is a positive impact from automated emails, especially transactional emails, if you provide additional value: where can they go for help? How can they check their status? For you as the marketer, are there cross sell/upsell opportunities you can provide in the email to take advantage of an email’s shelf life?

Examine your email engagement to see your highest-performing communications and, conversely, where you are performing most poorly. During your examination, look at ways you can incorporate more personalization into your emails (back to the social media tip) to nudge your marketing into that of a top performer’s.

Still need help sailing into the marketing wind? Let us help you kick up your marketing strategy. Contact us today!

5 Myths of B2B Marketing

B2C marketing is trendy. There’s a glut of information available about how a business can reach out to individual customers. There is relatively little information available regarding B2B marketing. Because of this lack of information, it’s important to take a discerning look at B2B on its own instead of lumping it in with B2C. Let’s take a look at 5 common myths of B2B marketing to elucidate some key differences and challenges of B2B marketing.

1. B2B Marketing is Essentially the Same as B2C Marketing

Although there are many aspects of B2B marketing that overlap with B2C, B2B marketing is still a completely different beast than B2C. Your target audience in B2B marketing is going to be a business and employees within said business. B2B customers usually have a pretty good idea of what they want. They may desire to be educated to some degree, but they have honed in on their goal much more completely, in general, than your average B2C customer. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that all of your standard B2C techniques will transfer over to B2B marketing.

2. Social Media is Always Beneficial for B2B

Social media is an incredibly powerful tool in this digital age in which we live. It allows a company or individual to reach out to millions of people in a moment through numerous compelling media channels. Despite this value, it is not always ideal for B2B marketing. The customers you attempt to target often won’t be interested in finding product or service information on Facebook. They may feel that Pinterest is not professional enough to yield valuable results. LinkedIn can be among the social media networks that are effective for B2B, but before you start to launch a concerted social media campaign, make sure that you first verify that your audience is interested in using social media for business.

3. Outbound Marketing is Ideal for B2B

Let’s start by clarifying that outbound marketing most certainly has its place in an effective marketing strategy as a whole. However, it may be more effective in B2C than in B2B, and here’s why: As previously mentioned, B2B customers usually have a better idea of what they are looking for than B2C customers. This means that reaching out to them with outbound marketing can be ineffective or even counterproductive. B2B customers are used to parsing through the fluff to get what they want, and pestering them with constant outbound marketing can drive them away. Instead of outbound marketing, take a look at inbound marketing for an effective B2B strategy. Inbound marketing is basically marketing that focuses on helping customers to find you, instead of reaching out to them. Therein lies its B2B marketing power.

4. B2B Marketing Should Only be Done Through Networking

This is actually a rather common, and surprising, viewpoint. Many marketers, both agency and in-house, have become jaded after watching various marketing efforts not show results in the B2B sphere. This is largely due to our first myth. After various marketing techniques fail, very traditional methods such as networking are reverted to. There is definitely a place for networking in B2B marketing and business development. However, it most certainly is not the only effective method. There are numerous marketing techniques available today that, when slated for B2B effectiveness, can produce sustained positive results.

5. B2B Marketing Starts At the Contact Form

There’s a rather pervasive belief in many B2B businesses that the sales and marketing process only begins when a potential customer submits a request for quote. This belief hampers marketing efforts to a very significant degree. Although you may not hear directly from a customer until they submit an RFQ, make no mistake, they have been researching and vetting your product or service long before they get to this point.

It is for this reason that SEO is such a valuable tool for B2B marketing. SEO allows a B2B company to get involved in the pipeline earlier and more effectively. If you actually believe that you have no control over the process until an RFQ is submitted, then you have already missed an opportunity. Making sure that not only what you present is the message your customer wants, but also that they can find said message is absolutely crucial to marketing in a B2B world.

SEO allows a B2B company to have some control in the initial search stage over what the customer finds and how quickly they find it. This is critical to not only bringing satisfactory volume to your product or service, but also to closing the sale. The less a potential customer needs to search to find what they want the more likely they are to convert into a paying customer. SEO for B2B marketing is about enabling potential customers to find and be delighted by what you have to offer.

Sometimes we forget that for anyone desiring to perform effective marketing for any business, one must first understand their market. B2B is a unique market and there are many tactics that simply don’t transfer from B2C. If you make sure that you are marketing within the proper context you will have much more success in the long term.

Andrew Dean is an account manager at Globe Runner.

Photo credit: Zachary Korb