Now is a good time for companies to take a look at their digital strategies. We’ve been talking a lot about the importance of building a solid strategy and are even running an event in a couple of weeks in Partnership with Make it York to help get the year off right. We believe a good strategy articulates your business goals, the audience you’re trying to reach, and the most cost-effective methods for managing your time and resources.
Let us share our top tips to take your company’s digital strategy to the next level.
1. Connect Your Business Objectives with your Digital Marketing Strategy
Reviewing your current strategies are an important first step in making improvements to ensure that your business objectives and digital marketing practices are on the same page.
In many companies, there’s still a divide between traditional and digital departments. Take a look around at what you already have and ask yourself how you can integrate these for best results.
2. Integrate Video into the Customer Journey
Making it personal is the key here. Trends show an increased demand for video personalization as well integrating video marketing into the customer journey.
By inserting a well-placed video to illustrate your company’s product, service, or cause, you can create a personalised journey for your customers. It’s a creative way to leave an impact.
3. Integrate Content Marketing into the Customer Journey
Did you know that 70% of people said they’d rather learn about a business through an article than an ad?
Good storytelling can humanise your company so consider blog posts to videos and infographics in your strategy.
4. Keep Your Eye on SEO
SEO is not going out of fashion, the majority of people searching for your company online will still head to a search engine as their first port of call.
If you have a presence in the top positions for keywords the user is searching, then you have a much better chance of attracting more attention and trust for your company.
5. Use Live Video
Live video is nothing new, but it’s growing exponentially. Lately, everyone wants a piece of Facebook Live – in fact, 80% of users said they’d rather watch a live video than read a blog post, while according to Facebook, live video gets 3 times more views than regular video content.
Here are 3 quick tips for getting started with live video:
- Use at events to give followers a behind-the-scenes look at the event.
- Use to introduce your followers to your employees.
- Advertise an exclusive sale or promotion exclusively to anyone who watches.
6. Incorporate Social Messaging into Communications
Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of incorporating social media into their digital strategies. As an addition, you might also want to consider using direct messaging apps along with other social media marketing techniques you already have in place.
According to the latest Ofcom Communications Market research, more than half of the total mobile audience uses Facebook Messenger (61%) while exactly half uses WhatsApp (50%). These significantly large audiences should not be ignored when considering the integration of messaging apps as part of your strategy.
7. Don’t Forget to Test
The more you test, the more likely you are to see patterns emerge which can help guide your subject line creation. Proper testing can save you precious time and resources down the line.
8. Customer Experience Marketing
Customer experience marketing is exactly what it sounds like – making sure the customer has a positive experience from start to finish.
Why is customer experience essential? Customers see your company or brand as the sum of the experiences they’ve had with you. This could be anything from in-store customer service to finding your local listing online or seeing one of your company’s ads on Facebook.
So, make sure you’re putting your best foot forward – from start to finish.
9. Don’t Shy Away from Transparency
In a world where everyone has access to reviews, transparency and trust are big factors when consumers are checking out a business. There’s a lot out there that people can learn about you from the web. They search for your social media profiles. They “Internet stalk” you. In short, they want to know everything they can possibly know about you before they come to your business.
We’re most likely to see this transparency increase in 2018. So, focus on your review marketing strategy. Feel free to give consumers a behind-the-scenes look at your company.
10. Think About What Influencer Marketing Can do for You
Want to quickly build your brand online and raise awareness among your target audience?
The beauty of influencer marketing (if done right) is that the audience is already there. All you have to do is figure out a win-win partnership where your influencer will benefit – all the while generating new leads for your company.
11. Utilize Instagram Stories
Instagram is growing at an impressive clip. In 2017, Instagram announced that approximately 800 million people now use the platform each month. Their latest tool, Instagram Stories, became more popular than Snapchat just one year after going live.
12. Revisit Twitter – Do You Need it?
Twitter has only shown moderate growth in 2017. This may be due to the fact that the platform has focused on user acquisition rather than on making improvements to their ad platform – as a result, marketers are already using other social media platforms to connect with prospects. It may be worth considering whether Twitter is still producing the results you want as part of your 2018 planning.
13. Remember, Strategy Over Tactics
Your strategy is the process that defines your approach to reach your business goals. Without a strategy, the time and resources you’re putting into your tactics may turn out to be a waste.
A solid strategy will help you determine your budget, while it’ll also assist with the evaluation process, so that you can efficiently cut out what’s not working and push forward with what does.
Once you’ve determined your goals, make sure your strategy is fully committed to achieving those goals. In other words – don’t be reactive; be proactive.
If you would like help to create or develop your strategy, please get in touch on 01904 863511.