A digital marketing campaign is a scary but powerful animal that can break a business in the blink of an eye, but will take its own sweet time to build one. It’s scary because it needs to be honed through many variables. It needs to be brought to heel.
The following paragraphs have some opinions I had the chance to gather on how marketing in the digital era is no picnic but is the only way to go if you want to build a successful business today.
Bear with me.
What the experts have to say
The impact of changes
“One of the biggest digital marketing challenges I have faced is keeping up with the constantly changing landscape of social media platforms and algorithms.
Every few months, a new update or feature is rolled out that can significantly impact the reach and effectiveness of my marketing campaigns.” —James Parker, Digital Marketer, and Entrepreneur.
Deb Wallace CEO of Tulumi, says:
“Digital marketing is incredibly dynamic – Facebook may reign today, but there is no guarantee that it will be the same tomorrow.
Yahoo, Friendster, and StumbleUpon used to be things on the internet. They’re now relics of the past.”
The digital marketing landscape grows more competitive with every day that goes by and businesses need to find ways to stand out:
- Create unique and engaging content
- Innovate your strategies
- Build strong relationships with your customers.
But,
“With changes to algorithms, new social media platforms, and advancements in technology, it can be difficult to stay ahead of the curve and know what strategies will be most effective.” —Anisur Rahman SEO Expert/Digital Marketing entrepreneur.
According to Deb Wallace, as a marketer, you shouldn’t panic and invest time and money in every new trend on the internet. A common error that may not give you any ROI is jumping on the bandwagon immediately.
“Instagram TV, or IGTV, was quite a hype in 2018, but users still favored the classic landscape videos of YouTube. Countless brands spent millions of dollars creating vertical videos for IGTV, and no one cared to watch them.”
When you see something new on the internet, give it some time and think about its users. Are they your buyer persona?
Is the site growing after three months? How about after a year?”
Turn on the machine: Finding new customers
One of the biggest hurdles is generating leads and conversions in a saturated market.
With so much competition, standing out and getting people’s attention can be hard. Marketers need to focus on creating high-quality, targeted content.
Aena Tariq Khan has a BA in Computer Science & Psychology, lives in Canada, and is a digital marketing and tech specialist:
“Getting quality leads is hard. Validating them takes time and effort.”
Deb Wallace jumps in:
“Especially if you don’t know who they are.
There’s little to no success selling a nail gun to an accountant – if you introduce him to a calculator, the story changes.
It’s all about delivering the most suitable product to the right person; that’s how efficient advertising is done.”
“If you don’t know what your ideal customer looks like, what a quality lead is to you, how can you tell the difference between a quality lead and a bad lead? Your target audience may not be a single demographic. Rather, it can accommodate multiple persons, demographics, and customer types.” —Aena Tariq Khan
Andrew Constable from Visualise Solutions, is an Innovation & OKR consultant for mid-sized businesses.
“For me, it’s being very disciplined in approach.
Loads of shiny new objects are promoted all the time, promising improved CTRs and much higher conversions, etc. The challenge is sticking to a disciplined process of using evidence to learn and iterate.
Everyone looks for a silver bullet to marketing when I haven’t seen one yet.”
Go get’em, tiger
You must find your best customers once you define who they are. Decide where and how to do it. An that means doing a lot of planning before you can get your generating-leads machine up and running.
Creating a plan for marketing on social media is one way. It is also a great place to build relationships.
Last year, the average user spent two hours and twenty-four minutes a day on internet communities. —Mike drop.
Once you know your buyer persona, you must ensure he can find you. This is when SEO, or optimization for search engines stomps in. In other words, if your SEO is set up right, potential customers will flock to your website.
You must have a well designed site with captivating landing pages, opt-ins, direct email campaigns. Many approaches can get you out of the dry season.
If you create a good content distribution system, nobody will stop you.
Now what?
You’ve got new clients, and now you have to start creating for them as well.
Most businesses don’t know where to begin. But here you are to save the day.
In the same way you created your online persona as a marketer, now you need to lather, rinse and repeat for your client.
Now, it’s the client’s target audience. What is the content that will help? Which channels does the client have in mind?
For example, if your client’s audience is young, don’t share content intended for middle-aged or older audiences. It happens.
Next, you need to figure out what content you already have and if any of it could be useful to that target. But you now know how to go about this. Piece of cake.
Aha!
Content marketing’s biggest secret is content reuse. Excuse me?
When I began this journey I was freaking out about all the work that building an online presence implies.
What follows sounded like Chris Martin singing “Viva La Vida” in my living room:
- A blog post can be split into multiple social media posts (and vice versa) and shared again.
- Groups of related blog posts can be combined into one digital resource that you can use to gather leads.
- A video course can be broken up into a series of nurturing emails for those interested but not participating.
- Posts already published can get new life by being reshared with a little tweak here and there.
- Creating a schedule in a content planner is the last step in a content strategy. Canva has an excellent one. You create your post, schedule it, and forget about it.
What’s next
Is the beast “tamable”? Can it be controlled?
Yes. If you,
- Keep up with the latest trends, without falling victim to the shiny object syndrome.
- Set realistic expectations. and this is very important. Immediate success is just pure luck.
- Measure your progress and celebrate every small victory.
- Stay focused. Your goals must be clear. Stick to them.
- Leverage the power of social media.
The good news is: that digital marketing is cost-effective and measurable, and it has become an opportunity to gain a competitive edge.
For start ups with a limited budget it’s the only way to get traction in the commercial world. As their marketer being open-minded and patient are just other traits you need to build on to help them succeed.
A 2021 article on the America’s Small Business Network page, said that Gen Z and millennials will become the target audience for most businesses and require a highly responsive and modified approach. This is already the case in 2023.
Businesses will adopt a shared and global perspective before using new digital marketing tools or executing ad campaigns.
SEO, data analytics, and AI will increase their participation in the digital marketing landscape, and businesses will automate more digital processes and make informed business decisions based on data analytics insights.
Personalized targeting has become a secret ingredient in rolling out effective ad campaigns and communicating with the target audience.
Entrepreneurs and small businesses will need to be more critical and reflect on previous efforts. The more precise language of an ad shows the intent and confidence of the brand.
Augmented reality (AR) tools are becoming more and more popular for businesses to communicate with their audience.
Buyers can test the product with AR or VR and get a feel of its features and benefits helping them make a decision. (Golf stores offer a virtual client try out a swing with the golf club the client would like to buy.)
Voice optimization is also a trend, as more users want the freedom to speak to a dedicated digital assistant directly rather than type manually.
As the voice recognition capabilities of digital assistants improve, marketers will focus on a different SEO approach to optimize business sites based on voice search.
Google concurs that the voice recognition of digital assistants is close to 95.3 percent accurate, —Human transcriptionists have a word recognition result of 96 percent.
More precise voice recognition search results mean digital marketers will use more natural long-tail keywords than generic text-oriented ones.
Tools like Hootsuite are allowing businesses to maintain a unified customer-centric approach and integrate their core message and value proposition for the specific target audience on various channels.
With this approach the customer has a consistent experience..
Businesses don’t need to understand every facet of new technology, but those that plan to broaden their digital marketing approach will see the most positive results.
Finally
Digital marketing has made it possible for businesses and entrepreneurs to increase their ROI and roll out effective campaigns.
In time its power will reach new heights and allow companies to make the most of AI, SEO, AR, and VR tactics.
Many trends may or may not pan out in the coming years, but digital marketing will always boil down to customer behavior and new strategic digital marketing efforts will allow businesses to set a new precedent.
Long live the beast. Its growl is fearsome.
Embrace it.
The Analytical Wordsmith 