The beauty of digital marketing is that it’s an effective solution for businesses of any size in any industry. Small businesses, startups, B2B companies, brick-and-mortar stores, freelance gigs, and just about anyone can benefit from digital marketing to help establish themselves in their field.
So which digital marketing strategies are worthwhile investing in? And how can you effectively grow your business with digital marketing? Here are some of our favorite magic digital marketing techniques:
1. Expand Your Company’s Blog
First off, you may be wondering: how can digital marketing help me grow my business?
Well, a key strategy for using digital marketing to grow your business is to invest time, effort, and budget in your company’s blog.
Why? Because growing your blog shows that you’re knowledgeable in the field and can successfully address customer pain points and concerns with strategies and tips. Useful blog articles make you searchable and easy to find in search engines, ultimately driving more traffic to your site.
Wondering which kinds of blog articles are most effective? In short, topics that focus on issues that readers genuinely will find helpful are the way to go. Remember, focusing your articles on how great your product or service is won't do much besides present your brand as spammy and self-centered.
Think about common questions your ideal customers might ask, such as: What are the benefits of X? What are some strategies for Y? or How do I do Z? Writing blog content that answers a range of such questions related to your industry will cement your company’s credibility in the field while drawing your target audience to your website and, ultimately, your product.
2. Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader
Just as blog posts help you build credibility in the field by addressing the questions of your target audience, published articles help you build credibility by establishing your position as a thought leader in the industry.
While your blog posts should focus on helpful strategies, useful explanations, and actionable tips, articles published on sites other than your own can either provide similar information or offer your own opinions and insights about your field.
Whether you write the articles or outsource the task to an agency, you can publish them under your name and link to your company in your author bio. Alternatively, you can have the article published under the name of an unaffiliated author and add a link to your company in the article.
Either way, you’ll be establishing your company as a leader in the field, attracting the attention of people in the industry, and raising brand awareness to encourage people to navigate to your site and buy your product.
3. Drive Traffic Organically
Everything I’ve mentioned so far about driving traffic touches back to one big marketing strategy: SEO.
SEO encompasses a few different tactics. First, it’s about optimizing your website for search engines and including targeted keywords in your content and blog posts to make your site more searchable and appealing to users.
It’s also about establishing yourself as a voice of authority in your industry. This is where SEO is deeply intertwined with content: the better your content, the more value you can bring your readers - and the more visitors you’ll bring to your site.
You shouldn’t stop SEO as soon as you start seeing results. Instead, SEO should be implemented as a long-term digital marketing strategy since it establishes your company as a voice in the industry over time. Studies have shown that compared with visitors who click on paid ads, obtaining visitors organically through SEO provides the most qualified leads.
4. Don’t Post Just to Post
Keeping an active social media feed across as many channels as possible is essential to accessing modern users. Since lots of users will hear about you through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other channels, social media provides a great opportunity for drawing qualified leads.
Still, don’t post content just for the sake of having content. If you want users to take you seriously, you need to post quality content that brings them genuine value.
While reposting content from relevant, high-authority sites across the web is a useful strategy, it is most effective to post content that you create yourself. This way, users won’t just hear about your brand - they’ll also click on articles that’ll drive them directly to your site!
5. Don’t Skimp on Paid Campaigns
What’s the difference between organic and paid traffic? And what is the importance of each for your digital marketing strategy?
Organic traffic is the traffic you get to your site through unpaid SEO, social media, and content efforts. The idea is that by creating awesome social media posts and optimizing your website and blog for SEO, you can draw visitors to your site.
It’s true that building up organic traffic over time tends to result in more qualified leads. Still, in order to move up your search results fast, you should consider using paid campaigns.
PPC, which stands for Pay Per Click, involves paying for advertising space in search engines for certain targeted keywords. Have you ever noticed top search results marked “Ad” in Google Search? That’s PPC. Paying for your company’s presence on search engines is a powerful accompaniment to efforts that drive organic traffic.
6. Make Your Efforts Long-Term
To truly secure your place in the industry, you mustn’t stop your digital marketing efforts once you reach your initial goals. You don’t want all your available content and social media posts to be outdated, as this would only lower the SEO status you worked so hard to achieve.
Remember that your competition is also doing digital marketing, and once you stop your efforts, they could very well pass you up.
7. Use the Inbound Methodology
It’s important to note that while each of these methods can certainly be implemented independently, they’re most powerful when used together. Together, they comprise the practice of inbound marketing.
Originally developed by Hubspot, inbound marketing is the latest form of online marketing, and it’s proven to be widely successful. While traditional forms of marketing involve pitching your product or service to potential customers and fighting for customer attention, inbound marketing is about letting your customers find your brand.
This is exactly why it’s so critical to provide content that offers users value - whether in the form of blog entries, articles, social media posts, or an informative website. When you let your customers find you, rather than aggressively seeking out your customers, you end up with more qualified leads and earn the credibility and trust you need to establish yourself as the leader in your industry.
Want to learn more digital marketing tricks? Reach out to us today to hop on a 15-minute free consultation call where we'll discuss building your tailored inbound marketing strategy.
