5 Tips for Digital Marketing Beginners
Online marketing has become vital in practically every industry, but especially those that cater directly to consumers. Retail businesses, service providers, and even the food and beverage industry have found marketing on social media and the web essential to success in today’s market. That means there are constantly new people learning how to navigate marketing in these spaces, so you are not alone in your efforts. Here are a few starting points to get you oriented to digital advertising and marketing best practices.
1. Update Often, Update Strategically, and Update Consistently
Engagement is the name of the game online. From social media posts to blogging, website updates to improve your SEO, and email messaging to build a relationship with your customer base, you need to be creating content that is timely and doing it often. Not every platform or campaign needs a daily update, but it is good to stagger your overall digital marketing strategy to have at least one update on most days and to avoid having too much on your plate when one update creates engagement and has you answering messages or having conversations with your customers.
2. Bring Together Web SEO, Social Media, and Email Efforts
Use your online marketing campaigns to advertise for one another and to tie in to one another. Build a blog post for your site and you update the site, post it to social media to create engagement and send readers to your site, then make sure your email newsletter features the blog post. That’s just one way to do it, but it demonstrates the idea. Make sure all your digital efforts promote one another and that they funnel potential customers to a specific goal like following you or engaging with your brand’s store.
3. Build a Brand Voice and Provide Guidelines To Content Creators
If you intend to engage across a variety of platforms and online strategies, you will wind up needing some help creating content. Even if you do it entirely for yourself, guidelines that specifically outline your brand voice, its unique features, and your core do’s and don’ts will be vital if you want consistent messaging across all your spaces. That guideline makes sure that the posts written for social media sound like your blog and website content, so your brand has a recognizable character to it. This is very important for recognizability across platforms and also for consistent appeal to your core customer base and its values.
4. Invest in Graphic Design and Photography
This goes hand in hand with developing your brand voice. You need graphic design for your digital spaces and traditional media that builds itself around a clear and image-defining logo, just to start. From there, graphics for your digital campaigns and posts will be important. Whether you invest in stock photography to accompany blog posts or make a point of cultivating photos of your business and products online, you will want to invest in engaging photography alongside original graphic art.
5. Evaluate Your Campaign Results To Find Your Best Strategies Online
The last step is vital to success in the digital sphere, and that’s evaluation. Any successful marketing strategy has to involve a self-check at the end to determine the returns you are getting from the investment. This helps you tweak your approach from one campaign wave to the next. It also lets you determine which digital strategies and platforms provide you with the biggest bang for your time and money, which lets you see where to expand your efforts and where to cut things loose so you can try out a new option. Whether that return is in customer engagement, sales volume, or bottom-line profit, you need a goal to measure your success by while you fine tune your approach.
