While many businesses get tied up with trying to crack social media as their current tool of choice, there are plenty of old school digital marketing tactics that are still relevant today. These are based on the very foundations of marketing as a whole, the tenets of having a great product and a good idea about who your customers are and knowing what they want to hear or how they want to engage.
1. Written Content Marketing
Content is still king if you want to market your product successfully. In fact, it’s now more important than ever. Carefully crafted, engaging, written content that helps you stand out from the crowd and sets you up as a respected source of information is key to ensuring potential and existing customers flock to your site and buy or hire your products.
2. Videos That Make a Difference
We are visual animals and it’s not just written content that floats our boat. With the rise of the smartphone we are more likely to click on a link to a short video than ever before and we’re doing it on the move. Platforms like YouTube have a billion users just waiting to see what quirky and innovative offerings your business can come up with helping you to reach a global audience. Get the right video in place and it could go viral and make you a global star.
3. Email Marketing
Still at the top of the list when running a marketing campaign, emailing potential customers has a pretty high success rate if done properly. That means developing the right mailing list and creating the kind of copy that makes people want to click on links and find out more. The problem most businesses find is that they either have bad, cheaply bought lists and compound this by developing poor copy or not sending out enough emails. It’s a marketing art that requires a good deal of thought and planning but it still works.
4. SEO is Highly Relevant
You’ll come across various articles suggesting that SEO is dead and that we shouldn’t bother with it anymore. The issue often is that businesses expect quick results and that often leads them to break the rules or become dispirited easily. Search engine optimization is a long term strategy and covers everything from keywords and inbound links to how you tag your videos and images or put in a site map. They are the building blocks of your business online and without them you stand less chance of being seen.
5. You Still Need a USP
Whether you are engaging in traditional marketing or digital, you still need a unique selling point, something that sets you apart from all the rest. It’s one of the most difficult things to come up with, especially in today’s markets that are often saturated with similar products. USPs can be a single factor or a combination of things that make up your offering to potential customers, but if you want your digital marketing to succeed it needs to be well thought out and easily perceived.
6. Social Proof AKA Are Your Customers Happy?
Customer reviews have come in for a lot of stick in recent years. Do shoppers really trust them? With many businesses opting to put fake ones on their sites you can be forgiven for thinking they are all but irrelevant. Social proof matters, however, particularly when it comes to ecommerce. Whether that’s through your testimonials, online reviews, or on social media comments from customers are highly important. This also, of course, works in the opposite direction. One bad mention on social media can cost you money so the value of management of social proof and making sure you keep track of things cannot be underestimated.
7. Landing Pages that Convert
If you are running a sales campaign and want to get potential customers into your site, sending them to the right landing page is imperative. With the plethora of other marketing opportunities out there it’s something that many businesses have managed to forget about. A well-crafted landing page that is geared to the strategy at hand and contains a strong call to action is worth its weight in gold.
8. Word of Mouth
One of the best ways to promote your brand is word of mouth. When people start talking about your products in positive ways, it can transform the perception of your business. There are numerous ways this can be encouraged now online. You can join social media groups, develop brand ambassadors, run competitions, post humorous articles, or make a video go viral, to name just a few opportunities to get people talking about your business.
9. Measurement Helps Develop Digital Strategies
No digital marketing strategy should be without some metrics to help measure and assess a campaign. Whether it’s the number of visitors that are coming to your site through your blog or how social media is influencing your customer conversion, the key to success is to test, adjust, test and then test, adjust, test some more. Metrics help you to refine your online marketing and shouldn’t be ignored.
10. CRMs Keep it All Together
Making sure you have an integrated digital marketing strategy is the key to success. A customer relations management system enables you to track different campaigns, segment your audience and develop long term strategies that work. Without a CRM you are likely to lose track of your advertising, social media interaction, email marketing and customer conversion which means you are essentially trusting to chance. Marketing integration is vital if you want to make sure you have everything in the mix that needs to be there.
There’s no doubt that digital marketing is one of the most important aspects of business development and is set to be around for a long time to come. The companies that succeed with it are the ones that make the right choices and don’t simply jump on the band wagon of the latest technology. The traditional drivers are still relevant; they just need to be integrated with what’s new to make a more powerful marketing strategy.
