Digital marketing gets better every day. Because marketers are always looking for better means to convince and convert customers. They are looking for new strategies and refining the old ones so that they can have a competitive advantage in business.
You know that this “advantage” would mean more customers, which results in more profits and a better business. Isn’t that what you want?
As exciting as this may sound, a study by SmartInsights found that 49% of organizations have no clear digital marketing strategy. Furthermore, HubSpot reveals 39% of marketers think their organization’s marketing strategy isn’t effective.
This is why you need to improve upon your strategies in 2018 to get your business ahead of the tough competition.
That being said, I want to show you some of the proven digital marketing strategies that will bring real results this year.
1. Integrate On Demand video into the customer journey
It’s seemingly hard to gain people’s attention today with the traditional written content. No matter the social media platform you use to reach your target audience, you need videos to connect with them emotionally and keep their attention.
Coupled with that, the human brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than text and draws 94% more views. Furthermore, having videos on your landing page could raise average page conversion rates by 86%.
According to video marketing statistics from wyzowl, 76% of businesses said videos helped them increase sales. How can you increase conversion on your website and your social media pages with video content?
Well, it starts with understanding your customers’ pain points. What problems do you know your customers have that your product can solve? How will your product solve it?
Vidyard improved their conversion rate by 100% when they incorporated a video on their homepage.
Essentially, you have to personalize your video. Each viewer needs to feel you’re connecting with them on a personal level. When you have a buyer persona, this helps you to connect better with your potential customers.
Your videos need to be short and using an attractive thumbnail would lead to more views.
2. Prioritizing customer needs above everything else
When Harry Selfridge said “customers are always right,” this statement shows the importance of adapting your business to the customer’s needs. If you fail at this, you lose business and your competitors gain.
What are your business goals? What are your customers’ goals for using your service or product? You must align these two goals to satisfy your customers.
You can use personalization to attract and convert more customers. When a customer believes your product is tailored to them, they’re more open to doing business with you. For your current customers, recommend products to them according to their buying patterns. Companies like Amazon and eBay do this to get more sales and satisfy their customers.
Marketo conducted an experiment and found that 78% of consumers will check offers that are personalized to their previous experiences with the brand.
Often times, people want to minimize risks as much as possible. This is why you must convince them with user reviews and testimonials.
Potential buyers want to see what past and present users of your product/service think about it. Reviews of your product could be on your website or another site. Either way, it’s important.
The key to reviews is honesty. Always receive negative reviews with open minds because they’re equally important. Having only positive reviews for your product can be suspicious. Hammacher Schlemmer recorded a 380% increase in conversion of items that had reviews.
Testimonials show potential users that you have satisfied many customers in the past. Case studies highlight the problems your customers had before using your product, and how your product solved these problems for them.
Make it easy for your customers to reach out to you via live chat on your website, contact form, interactive social media pages, etc.
3. Hosting live events and webinars
A webinar is a seminar that’s hosted online. The seminar is delivered to an audience and there is an interactive section which makes it possible for the presenter/host and attendees to communicate through Live Chat.
If you’re hosting a webinar, you’re asking for 45 minutes to 2 hours of your customers’ time. You must decide on a topic that your customers are struggling with and solve this problem in an interesting manner.
You must educate and engage your viewers so that they can have a feel of a two-way communication. That’s the essence of a webinar anyways.
Hosting a webinar can help you acquire more leads and close the deal. For example, BuzzSumo converts 20% of its webinar attendees to paid customers. This is 1 in 5!
Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom says customers should leave a webinar knowing how to kick ass at their job, not how just knowing how to use an interface.
When you host a webinar, you must also make the recording available so that attendees can rewatch whenever they want.
4. Pay attention to Millennials
The Millennials market has grown to a $200 billion market. This is a big market you can’t afford to ignore.
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How do you get the best out of the millennials market?
Make your website mobile responsive. This is because most millennials use their mobile to do most things online, including shopping.
This audience dislikes research papers and your content must be a light conversation with the usual terms they use in their conversations.
Your website must be easy to navigate. Because they’re least likely to go through the stress of looking for your sales page. You have to make your most important pages easy to access.
Let your content be shareable as most millennials spend a lot of time on social media. SocialTimes estimates that 71% of millennials check social media daily.
Allow users to generate content for your business. The study by SocialTimes found that user-generated content (UGC) is 35% more memorable and 50% more trusted than other media.
Urban Outfitters has a board on Pinterest which has pins of people who wear their clothes. It found that 20% of users who view this board click the ‘shop it’ button.
Attract millennials with discount and other offers. Statistics from Yahoo! show that 63% of millennials on social media don’t mind checking in to businesses on their social media channels if they’ll get a discount for it.
5. Get a clear mobile marketing strategy
According to Shopify, mobile now accounts for more e-commerce traffic than the desktop with a share of 50.3%.
If your website is not optimized for mobile with a responsive design, you’re actually wasting half of the visits to your website. Below is an example of a responsive design.
Another option is to launch a mobile app to deliver experiences that are unique to mobile users.
You can use data like Location, Device type, and other user demographics to serve mobile users. You can offer discounts to users on mobile to encourage more users to purchase your product.
There are many users you can reach through channels like Instagram and Snapchat that are mainly mobile. You can also advertise your service through these channels.
Airline company, KLM, launched a mobile-only campaign to convince customers that mobile booking is simple, fast, and reliable. Through this campaign, they generated 34% more bookings and 38% more mobile revenue.
6. Integrate Chatbots in your strategy
If you aim to improve your customer service in 2018, then you must use chatbots.
There are many reasons to use chatbots.
It delivers a quick response to both site users and customers. When you consider that 75% of customers believe that live agents are too slow to reply their messages, then a chatbot will provide a satisfactory experience to most of your customers who value their time.
Chatbots train as they gain access to more data to upsell and cross-sell to customers. This improves customer experience dramatically. This is so crucial in your business — after all, a Walker study predicts customer experience will be the key brand differentiator by 2020.
This is an example of eBay using its ShopBots to provide product listings for customers.
Winnie, a Chatbot on Facebook Messenger which helps people choose a hosting provider for their website achieved a 72% CTR from users clicking through to affiliate hosting providers.
7. Using data-driven content marketing
Many times, marketers follow their guts in providing content to their potential customers. They ‘feel’ they know what their potential customers want. Most times, they are wrong.
It is important to gather data about what users really want because this is the best way you can satisfy them. For instance, when you want to advertise your business, do you use the ad template that has performed over the years? Or the one you like?
You can carry out A/B tests to determine your content that performs best. HuffingtonPost tested two headlines and chose the one that had the highest performance.
When Curata decided to use a data-driven approach to their content, they generated 67 times more revenue compared to when they just used ‘guts’.
Conclusion
To excel in your digital marketing operations this year, you have to approach it with the aim of providing a robust experience for potential customers and be determined to meet their specific needs in real-time.
When your strategies are centered around your customers, and how you can satisfy them, you’re bound to achieve your business goals this year. After all, when your customers are happy, it snowballs on your business.
