Saturday, 5 November 2016

5 Digital Marketing Strategies That Can Help Drive Online Sales


Marketing technology changes rapidly—and if you keep up, it can spell opportunity for you and your brand to move ahead of the competition.

With so many digital marketing tactics all aimed at driving online sales, how do you know which are the most cost-effective and efficient? When it comes to driving qualified traffic to help your site produce sales, the following five tactics can be incredibly effective at helping to generate conversions at a low cost.

1. Social Media Marketing

Going beyond organic posts and using the advantages of social media marketing can hold many opportunities for your brand online. Today, a company's social media presence is critical to growth, and with the advertising options that are now available, it's incredibly easy to reach a targeted audience.

Across social platforms like Instagram and Facebook, you can completely tailor your ad content for the platform in an easy manner. Such channels allow you to select different targeting options based on refined demographics, locations, interests, professions and beyond, allowing you to only spend money toward the users that are going to be most interested in your ad content. Best of all, the platforms are cost-per-click, which definitely helps to keep your budget down. And they offer various ad formats, so you can really customize the style you want to serve your audience with.

"Without a thorough understanding of who your customers are and what they want to know and receive from your brand, it's nearly impossible to foster engagement"

2. Retargeting Ads

A second-time visitor has a far higher likelihood of converting than a first-time visitor, so it's essential that you reengage users and bring them back to your website. Retargeting ads through programs offered by Google or AdRoll can help you to stay top-of-mind with your users while they consume content elsewhere on the internet.
This digital advertising can be incredibly cost-effective too, as you can select an option where you only pay when the user actually clicks through to your site from the ad. By serving users that are already familiar with your brand, you're more likely to reengage them and eventually convert them. Tapping that initial interest is key.

3. Email Marketing

While people receive a ton of promotional emails each day, it's likely that the average user doesn't receive that many that are truly interesting and relevant to their needs. With the right email marketing approach, you can easily communicate with users, reengaging them with a valuable message and helping to bring them back to your site.
Programs like MailChimp or Constant Contact make it easy to disseminate emails to lists of users. That being said, in order to send emails that garner results, you need to send to the right audience, and creating email lists of users that are interested in your brand can be tricky. The most effective way to capture user interest and increase sign-ups for your e-newsletters may be to really provide an incentive. If you're an e-commerce brand, try offering exclusive deals or special promotions when they sign up for your newsletters. If there is no real value in your email campaigns, then they aren't likely to resonate well with users and produce the type of results most brands seek.

4. Content Marketing

Users don't want content that fails to serve their needs or that holds no real value. As a brand, if you can produce content that is incredibly relevant to your audience, whether it is a video tutorial or a “how-to" post, you can help engage and capture customer attention.
That being said, to effectively create content that resonates with your audience, it's critical that you listen to their needs and understand them as users. Without a thorough understanding of who your customers are and what they want to know and receive from your brand, it's nearly impossible to foster engagement. Listen to your audience on social media, examine analytics to see which blog posts tend to perform the best and look for opportunities in the marketplace where you can fill a gap with what customers are looking for.
Once you have that understanding, leverage your internal experts to create content that showcases your expertise and skills. Create posts that experts at your company can use to highlight their knowledge within your industry, or use design resources to aggregate data to create infographics.

5. Responsive Design

Last, but certainly not least, a responsive design is one of the most important digital strategies you can use to help your brand online. It's surprising to see how many brands still don't have a website that is optimized for mobile.

A responsive design ensures that regardless of the device users are accessing your site from (mobile, tablet or desktop) they are provided with a website that is optimized for their screen. This type of design renders to fit the screen size, ensuring that users aren't faced with any issues in terms of functionality and usability. Whether it's buttons that are too big for the screen, or images that require excessive zooming in and out or form fields that are too difficult to type into on mobile, any of these blunders with your design can interfere with visitors converting on your site.
To grow your brand online it's essential that you focus on a strategic approach to digital marketing—and tailor these tactics to help meet the unique needs of your users.

Photo: iStock


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