Improve Digital Marketing with These Techniques and Tips
Uncover the Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies and Activities to Consider
Business-to-busines (B2B) marketing teams leverage well-rounded and unique digital marketing ideas to stand out in their competitive environments. A recent study showed that 53% of senior marketers are investing significantly more in digital marketing campaigns for their business. These executives are forward thinking and on missions to drive business growth in ways their competition isn't yet.
So, in this increasingly online world, what is digital marketing and what should a digital strategy include?
What is Digital Marketing and Why is it Important?
A digital marketing strategy outlines how to grow your business using the latest in online marketing elements. This should outline how to expand your online presence, target your audiences and convert engaging parties into sales. Essentially, it's the road map to reaching your marketing goals through the Internet.
To succeed in competitive business-to-business (B2B) industries, marketers must develop comprehensive digital marketing plans to differentiate themselves. Growing your business with digital marketing starts with a solid understanding of your target audience, products and services, and goals.
In this article, we are building on your existing strategy foundation that followed the six steps outlined in a previous article. Once you set the foundation of your digital strategy, you can continue by adding some of the below digital strategy components.
Types of Digital Marketing and Tips for Success
When building digital strategies for business, remember it's important to customize each component based on what you want to achieve. Consider your customer base, marketing budget, the marketing tools available to your team. Below is a list of digital marketing elements and tips you can implement to be effective and increase sales.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimizing your website for search engines is one of the most important marketing tips. Given the current environment, your competition is likely ensuring they stand out and attract attention of your audiences.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): This marketing activity is specific to paid advertising on search engines. SEO focuses on enhancing content for search results. SEM focuses on paid efforts and consists of search/display ads on Google, YouTube or in-app mobile ads.
Content Marketing: The key to developing relevant content is making it valuable and consistent for the people consuming it. Examples of activities to include in your content marketing strategy include podcasts, blogs, social media posts and industry association articles. Create content for the specific outlet channel and what readers are wanting from your content. If you’re stuck on what to write about and need inspiration, consider learning more about ChatGPT.
Remarketing: This can be a critical aspect of digital marketing that most manufacturers don’t often consider. This activity engages traffic after they saw your digital marketing materials previously. It works by tracking visitors and send them new ads, reminders or emails to keep your company top of mind. The goals are to get audiences to engage more, build brand awareness and increase conversions.
Geofencing: This is a newer marketing activity for many B2B businesses, especially manufacturers. Geofencing offers unique opportunities to broaden the reach of marketing to specific location. By using different data points (i.e.,coordinates, addresses or regions), geofencing serves up advertising to people in that area. It has a lot of beneficial purposes, including trade shows, supporting sales teams, building brand awareness and more.
Email Marketing: By now, most B2B companies attempted email marketing at some point. When used correctly, email marketing is a great tool for generating and converting leads than most other marketing strategies. You can personalize and cross promote emails on different marketing channels. They can also offer referral or promotions to help shorten a sales cycle.
Marketing Automation: When staffing and budgets are limited, marketing automation becomes a top priority for businesses. This activity is an important part of marketing for nearly every business—including manufacturers. This is proven when 96% of marketers implemented a marketing automation platform. The sooner you can learn and embrace this technology, the more likely you will stay ahead of competitors and save your marketing team time.
Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing, or affiliate marketing, isn’t always about hiring celebrities that will promote your company. It can be about finding an influential industry professional that you can partner with. Consider how they can assist you. Keep in mind that the most effective approach to finding a partner is to ensure mutual benefits for both parties.
Video: More companies are realizing that videos are a great way to repurpose written content and engage audiences that prefer visual learning to reading. Recent studies show 75% of digital marketers use video content as a strategy in their business. Video marketing ideas can include tours of your facilities, testimonials from employees or customers, informational videos or storytelling case studies.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI tools are now commonly used in digital marketing strategies, whether it's for customer service, advertising, or content creation. We recommend you find ways to embrace the technology now and use it to enhance the work of your marketing team.
Social Media Marketing: Many business know about or dabbled in social media marketing. Social media is great for curating content, establishing thought leadership and sharing experiences. Here are some popular social media platforms for B2B companies and ideas on how to use them:
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is one of the most effective platforms for B2B businesses and manufacturers. This is where your audience is most active. Forty percent of the 260 million active monthly users use LinkedIn daily. And, LinkedIn is the most used social media platform for Fortune 500 companies.
Twitter (X): Twitter works best when companies find ways to stand out among the vast amount of time-sensitive information.
Facebook and Instagram: Facebook and Instagram are excellent for hiring, employee engagement, increasing brand awareness and supporting your company culture.
YouTube: As we highlighted in the video section above, sometimes video is one of the most successful marketing strategies. YouTube is a popular platform for information and it helps with SEO and SEM efforts. This platform works best for companies that can be more open about operations, products and services.
By incorporating these elements of digital marketing strategies, you will optimize your website and see exponential growth in Google Analytic reports.