Digital marketing is still the way to go if you want to grow your business in 2019. The internet continues to offer a massive amount of opportunity for growth for all types of businesses. As the world becomes more digital every day, your customers are now closer to you than you think. Search Engines and Social Media has played a significant role here. Your immediate network is your direct customer base. People who like your product or want your services will search for you on Google. If you come up with an ingenious solution to a pesky problem people face, you become a trending topic.
However, not many businesses want to take over the world by storm. Some want steady growth. You may be looking to grow your business, your customer base, or you may only be starting. If you are looking for a way to scale fast, what should you do? We are here to help. Here are some of the most effective marketing methods for you to use this year.
You have probably heard this term thrown around in the media, on mega marketing exhibitions or conferences. Maybe you don’t even know what SEO means. So, what is SEO? SEO is the most effective method of increasing the quality and quantity of the traffic coming to your website through organic search engine results. Let’s break that down a little. Quality traffic is traffic that comes to your website and performs specific actions that you desire. Actions may include giving their contact details, downloading something or directly, making a purchase. If you have quality traffic, you want them to come in droves because that means it increases your revenues. You can achieve this by paying for traffic, but not everyone can afford it. Therefore, you want organic search results to favor you. This way, you have many website visitors, doing what you want them to do after they found you naturally.
SEO began with the dawn of Search Engines and has developed in complexity and accuracy ever since. That is why it remains one of the topmost effective ways to market in 2019. The critical thing is always to stay updated on the constant changes that happen to the search engine algorithms. There are many strategies you can use to build your SEO, including creating a mix of inbound and outbound links and optimizing your posts to niche keywords.
Link Building
Link building is an important part of SEO and should be used in all effective marketing strategies in 2019. Link building helps you build authority. When other highly-ranked inbound pages link to your content, this increases the authority of your website. Very rarely, however, does this mean that writing great content means that other people will link to it. Link building is an active process.
Link building will require you to request websites with a similar or higher ranking than yours to link to your content. Before you do this, make sure that the site you are asking is compatible with the content for which you are seeking a link. Another way is by using the skyscraper method. Here, you identify keywords that are most relevant to you. You determine the best content using these keywords. After writing or rewriting better, updated content, you persuade higher sites linking to these old articles to instead link to yours. Link building is an effective method of increasing your page authority and ranking on search engines.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM is a close cousin of SEO, except while SEO can be done for a marginal cost, SEM has to be purchased. What Search Engine Marketing does is increase traffic to your website and digital business by advertisements. When you pay a search engine for an advert, they display your website, products or store on the paid section of the results page. Paid adverts appear above organic search results when specific keywords are searched. The most prominent paid search service providers are Google Ads and Bing Ads. Search Engine Marketing has continued to grow ever since its advent. They are very useful because you can direct them at a particular target. You do this by targeting your audience by demography, gender, location, and target keywords.
E-mail Marketing
E-mail Marketing remains one of the most potent marketing methods in the digital age. As a marketer or a business, e-mail marketing provides an avenue for you to interact directly and more personally with a client or customer. Here you have the opportunity of understanding specific customer needs and upselling them products in which they have shown interest. E-mail users tend to show increased customer loyalty to brands and businesses that reach out to them through e-mail. Studies have shown that Email Marketing is so effective that, at it’s optimum, you can make $44 for every single dollar you spend. These metrics speak for themselves.
You and your business need to embrace e-mail marketing as one of your strategies in 2019. You can create newsletter campaigns for your clients. You can also send them confirmation e-mails, thank-you e-mails, and e-mails about news and updates concerning your business.
Influencer Marketing
Remember how your Marketing Professor sad that word-of-mouth marketing was the most potent form of marketing? Well, he was right. Influencer marketing is word-of-mouth marketing. Influencer marketing is done by using social leaders to push your brand message to a broader market. Many influencers are celebrities on social media like Instagram and YouTube. Influencers have large followings and high engagement levels. You can partner with them to promote your brand and products through their social media channels. People trust influencers. Studies show that 92% of people believe other people’s recommendations over corporate marketing because these are more authentic. Influencer marketing is expected to grow through 2019 into the future.
Content Marketing
Content marketing remains an integral part of effective digital marketing for businesses today. The Google search algorithm continues to favor comprehensive, complete, and well-researched content. Nine out of ten B2B Content Marketers agree that creating engaging content for your digital marketing makes your customers perceive you as a reliable and trustworthy source of information. As a business, we encourage you to keep producing well-researched and updated content for your digital marketing strategy. It remains a reliable way of getting customers to your platform and converting them. Good engaging content helps you build valuable and long-lasting relationships with your clients and customers.
Social Media Marketing
Nothing beats Social Media Marketing. Social Media is the largest platform on which you can engage with your customers and clients. Many users of social media expect their favorite businesses and brands to have some form of social media presence. This way, they can directly interact with your business, your products, and your employees. Social Media is responsible for the growth and death of many companies, and ignoring this channel is quite foolish. There are several Social Media Sites including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
As a business, it is essential to create a page for your business on all relevant social media platforms. This one of the best ways to position your brand in the market, create new business opportunities, sell products, engage viewers and provide customer care services. Your clients on social media will also provide reviews and insights into your business, which will help you streamline your processes. Social media also offer paid ads and campaigns. These campaigns allow your business to extend your reach to untapped markets and keep your brand visible to existing customers.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an effective way of marketing that lets you outsource your marketing workload to independent service providers. Affiliate marketing is an excellent way to market because you only have to pay the service provider if the product or service was purchased. You also pay when clients perform a desired action, which may include voting, filling out a survey or registering to a paid service. Affiliate marketers, in return, do all the heavy lifting. They may market on Google or Bing, use social media, their website or use banner placements and landing pages.
As a business, using Affiliate Marketing can grow your business, especially if you are starting. The most important thing about affiliate marketing is training your marketers on the product effectively. Training ensures that they market your business correctly and ethically.
Remarketing or Retargeting
Many times, your initial market fails to respond to your marketing correctly. They may have visited your website briefly then left or may have abandoned carts. You are usually able to track these prospective customers across the web using cookies. Retargeting these clients using adverts that appear on their social media or search engines often leads them to convert.
As a business, you will lose many customers to incomplete actions. Remarketing often helps you reacquire and retain customers who had otherwise forgotten to follow up on their activities. Remarketing keeps your new clients engaged to you as you create brand awareness and increase your sales. You can also acquire your competitor’s customers by taking advantage of the clients they fail to address. They also provide you with essential insights into the characteristics of customers who fail to respond to your marketing. Remarketing helps you create better adverts, which increase your conversions with your current markets and open doors for you in new unexplored markets.