Businesses thrive on sales and sales happen with prospective buyers stumbling upon a product or service and finding it appealing enough to purchase. How that happens usually comes from advertising. Here is how you can boost your sales with digital marketing with loads of other info.
There are many different ad platforms and channels you can choose from to advertise your business online. Picking the right one and maximizing the opportunities is a different ball game.
Investing in advertising is important for modern businesses today as seen with the COVID-19 lockdown period. The pandemic forced many businesses to rely on online marketing to keep revenue coming in.
Why invest in digital marketing?
Most business owners and entrepreneurs who aren’t familiar with digital advertising may not be keen on it as it may cost more for online ads. Instead, they may choose to only pursue organic marketing strategies in which they can closely monitor the cost-effectiveness.
However, digital marketing is becoming increasingly more popular and important to modern marketers and business owners.
Digital advertising and online ads work alongside all your other marketing efforts and can benefit your organic strategies in the following ways:
1. Gain a better understanding of your audience(s) through ad platform analytics.
2 Create higher-performing organic content based on successful ad strategies.
3 Increase traffic to your website and organic content.
4. Increase brand awareness and reach.
Types of digital marketing:
There are four main types of digital ads include paid search, social media, native and display advertising.
PAID SEARCH ADVERTISING
One of the oldest forms of online advertising, paid search ads gives you the opportunity to get your target audiences’ attention when they search for something specific online. The primary benefit of search ads is you can anticipate a user’s wants and needs, allowing you to deliver highly specific results to entice them to your page.
Paid search ads start with target keywords, which is a word or phrase that someone types in a search field.
Over time, advertisers discovered they could interpret a user’s intent through specific keywords. For example, an advertiser could create search ads for a moving company by targeting people who use the keywords “best moving company” and “moving company near me.”
The three main search ad platforms are Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google is by far the largest search engine with over 3.5 billion searches every day, and it generates about six times the amount of searches than both Bing and Yahoo combined.
This ad platform can significantly grow your business, but the competition and costs are generally thought to be steeper than others.
SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING
Social media has become a very popular advertising platform because there are millions, if not billions, of active users on each platform. For instance, Facebook and Twitter have 2.5 billion and 330 million active users each month, respectively.
Because of the sheer number of users, business owners and advertisers are flocking to these platforms and are expected to spend over $84 billion on social media advertising.
Advertising on social media has many benefits, such as reaching very specific audiences, learning user behavior through platform-specific analytics, utilizing multiple ad formats, and focusing on strategies and platforms that drive results for your business.
The most common and popular social media platforms to run online ads are:
1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. LinkedIn
4. Twitter
5. Pinterest
6. YouTube
7. Snapchat
8. TikTok
NATIVE ADVERTISING
For this type of online ad, an advertiser works with a publisher or media platform to create a paid ad that matches the look, feel and form factor of the format they appear on. The main differentiating factor of native ads from other digital ads is that they often don’t look like ads at all.
Native ads are very common in social media feeds and are identified as an ad when they have a “promoted” or “sponsored” sticker next to them.
Another popular native ad form factor is recommended content sections on a web page that look like they are part of the editorial content. The key here is to create nondisruptive ads.
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
Finally, display ads are some of the oldest forms of online advertising and have a checkered past. In the late ’90s, display ads were often aggressive and misleading.
Display ad technology has advanced to the point in which advertisers can deliver relevant ads to specific users through big data analysis and machine learning.
The two most popular display ad networks are Google Display Network and Facebook’s Audience Network.
Display ads can take the following form factors:
1. Banner ads
2. Interstitial ads
3. Rich media
4. Video ads
Regardless of the form factor, display ads are intended to attract a user’s attention and take a specific action, such as visiting a website or making a purchase.
Know where your audience is
Once you have more information about your audience, it’s possible to know in what channels they concentrate on.
The importance of this is precisely to communicate through these platforms. The main ones are usually Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and also email.
In surveys, it’s possible to identify which of these channels your audience uses the most to get information, follow brands, and communicate with them.
You’ll know how to direct your Digital Marketing campaigns, with excellent results in conversions.
Your digital marketing goals should be to improve your overall social media presence and brand awareness.
Increasing brand awareness. This means getting your name out there. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and values first.
Generate leads and sales. Whether online, in-store or directly through your social profiles, followers don’t make purchases by accident. For example, are you about alerting customers about new products and promos? Are you integrating your product catalog into your social profiles? Are you running exclusive deals for followers?
Growing your brand’s audience. Bringing new followers into the fold means finding ways to introduce your brand to folks who haven’t heard of you before.
Growing your audience also means discovering conversations around your business and industry that matter the most. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening for specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Having a pulse on these conversations helps you expand your core audience (and reach adjacent audiences) much faster.
Another area alot of digital marketers fail to take advantage of is responding to enquiries.
Respond to your customer questions and shout-outs as soon as you see them.
Your customers want speedy responses. In fact, 47% believe that strong customer service defines a best-in-class brand on social.
On social media, you gain respect as a brand by being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness—word travels fast about great service.
Brand Authority
Customer satisfaction and brand loyalty both play a part in making your business more authoritative, but it all comes down to communication.
When consumers see your company posting on social media, especially replying to customers and posting original content, it makes you appear more credible.
Regularly interacting with customers demonstrates that your business cares about customer satisfaction, and is available to answer any questions that they might have.
Satisfied customers are eager to spread the word about a great product or service and they usually turn to social media to express their opinion. Having customers mention your business on social media will advertise your business, and show new visitors your value and brand authority.
Once you obtain a few satisfied customers who are vocal about their positive purchase experience, you can let the advertising be done for you by actual customers who enjoyed your product or service.
If you decide to use paid advertising on social media, always start small to see what you should expect. As you become more comfortable, fine tune your strategy and try increasing your budget. Just by spending a small amount of time and money you can significantly increase your conversion rates and eventually get return on investment on the money you initially invested.
Contact us if you want to start an online marketing campaign today.
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