The digital marketplace is increasingly crowded for retailers. THOMAS YOUNG explores methods to help your business stand out.
Unless you have been stranded on a deserted island, you know the past two years have seen tremendous rise in internet usage and digital marketing.
Businesses have embraced content marketing, SEO, Google Ads, social media and basic email marketing. Others have worked to improve their websites and proactively drive more online traffic to their brand. As a result, the digital landscape is now more cluttered and noisy than ever.
What can your business do to get ahead of the curve and rise above the noise?
Influencer marketing
This year has been defined by influencer marketing and companies of all sizes have embraced the practice.
What’s an influencer? An influencer is anyone who can raise consumer awareness of your products and services or directly refer qualified prospects to your business. Influencers can take many forms including popular websites, social media content writers, industry experts, writers, and more.
One of the more defining traits of an influencer is the possession of a large database of followers on social media. Influencers can leverage these followers on behalf of a business by highlighting the use of a product on their social media.
Influencer marketing rose to prominence during the pandemic and can be especially effective in B2B markets and in highly specialized areas where the voice of an influencer may carry significant weight. The bottom line is this – influencers are a ready-made shortcut to put your brand or product in front of an audience.
Email marketing and CRM integration
Email marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) are two concepts that pair exceptionally well together.
Businesses must find ways to integrate and align their sales staff with their marketing programs in order to gain a competitive advantage and provoke improved sales results.
Unfortunately, sales and marketing often have an adversarial relationship within many businesses, usually competing for resources. Aligning sales staff and marketing programs around a common set of goals is critical to preventing this conflict.
There are excellent tools that handle this integration well. HubSpot is one of the best tools to track and report on movement through a sales and marketing funnel. It’s one of many excellent resources for sales and marketing teams to coordinate their efforts in managing funnel movement.
Conversion analysis
The time has come to go deep into digital conversions and the factors that move people through your sales funnel to a closed sale. There are three key tactics to focus on in this pursuit of maximizing conversion rates – content, customized landing pages, and call-to-actions.
• Content: In 2022, take your content beyond blogs and social media posts and dive into the story of your target market.
Who is the hero at the center of the content you write and put online? In many cases, the hero of your content is your own business and this must change! The hero must be your prospective customer. The core of this content should be the key benefits of buying from your company and the problems you solve.
• Customized landing pages: The key to conversions is still excellent landing pages. Those pages must relate to the intent of the person visiting the page.
You will see stronger conversion rates when you use customized landing pages for the targeted visitors coming to your website. People are researching your products and services and the pages they land on must meet those research needs or they don’t move through the buying process.
• Call-To-Actions (CTAs): Make 2023 the year of excellent mid-funnel CTAs.
Go deeper into website user engagement with Google Analytics and set up heat mapping to see how people interact with your web pages. Review the traffic on your website and the key landings to determine if user intent is being met or if the current landings are too generic to engage visitors.
Develop more effective and engaging CTAs to help people research and decide if they want to buy from your business.
Good luck!
A highly competitive digital marketing landscape has its upsides and downsides for all businesses. The downside is the competitive and crowded marketplace and the improved chances of your business getting lost in the excitement.
The upside is the chance your business is discovered in the flood of people looking for the solutions you provide.
In order to boost your chances of being discovered, it’s crucial your business stays on top of the latest and greatest developments in digital marketing.
