In today’s competitive digital landscape, there are many brands and companies similarly fighting for brand awareness and for top-of-funnel traffic to convert into customers and e-commerce sales. Although your product or service has a unique selling proposition in separating you from the crowd, it takes more than a great product to stand out in your target market — you need strong digital marketing.
With billions of people actively engaged throughout the internet, it can be challenging to place your product or service in front of your intended audience. Implementing a holistic digital marketing approach can help your company develop a consistent and recognizable brand presence that will build customer relationships and differentiate you from competitors.
With our vast digital landscape growing every day, these strategies can help your brand stand out and capture your share of customers and sales.
1. Optimize Your Website
To increase your online presence, investing time and resources into optimizing your website can help grow your business into a memorable and successful brand. Your website is your opportunity to become visible to your target audience on search engine results pages (SERP) and provide your visitors with a great experience.
Search engines like Google look for relevancy, content quality, speed, and a responsive website design when ranking and positioning websites on results pages. To increase your site visibility and rank, building a strong site architecture with search engine optimization (SEO) techniques will help your site become indexed quickly and easily when relevant keywords or phrases are searched. Internal elements on your site that may influence your visibility include semantic keywords, meta descriptions and title tags, web design, domain names, headings, image alt text, and internal linking.
Since relevancy is likely the most important factor in search results, including highly relevant keywords to your brand as well as commonly searched words or phrases like “how-to” or “tips” can be an influential part of your SEO strategy. When implementing relevant keywords on your site and in your content, avoid keyword stuffing and be sure to remain cohesive and grammatically sound. Overuse can reduce your rankings via poor readability quality or a penalty from “black hat” penalty SEO practicing.
The quality of content in which your keywords live influence your site’s authority (score) and your visitor’s user experience (UX). After all, web content is intended for people, not a search engine. To further achieve organic visibility, provide clear messaging and navigation to increase your website responsiveness, and design a user interface that yields a good UX.
2. Create Content, Content, Content
In the business world, cash is king. But in the digital marketing world, content is king. Creating original and unique content targeted to your audience will help increase your brand visibility and promote authority, gain trust, and build relationships with customers.
Content marketing includes text, images, videos, articles, blogs, podcasts, or anything that can be uploaded to your website or social media channels. The most effective types of content or marketing collateral to produce is dependent on your industry, but keep in mind that less is not more when it comes to content marketing.
A B2B business, for example, might highly benefit from publishing a high-level, research-based, or problem-solving white paper that is highly unique and targets a very niche audience. Whereas a SaaS company might benefit from a video or case study. For B2B and B2C alike, content that increases your brand presence and reputation are necessary to stand out in the digital crowd. An e-commerce business may find higher value in visual content providing users with quick product information and instant gratification without having to read lengthy text.
Meaningful content can help increase your recognition and promote your brand. For example, storytelling is an effective style of promotional content marketing that can present authenticity and gain trust. Since it only takes a few seconds for a visitor to abandon content that doesn’t value, avoiding a sales pitch by subtly promoting your brand by telling your story is a great way to engage with your audience, create rapport, and sell your brand, product, or service without trying.
Publishing quality content as mentioned above, can further increase your organic SEO rankings and your site’s authority score by gaining backlinks, external links from other websites. Producing high-quality content or submitting guest blogs to other websites might promote them to link to your pages, giving your website a vote of confidence to search engines and increasing your domain authority.
3. Participate in Social Media Marketing
Wherever there are customers, businesses should be there too, especially when we are talking about digital marketing. Since 80% of the U.S. population is on social media, it is a great tool for your B2C or B2B company to increase your brand presence online and promote your product or services. Content marketing, shopping, and advertising on social media is a great way to become more accessible to customers, especially for e-commerce retailers.
Posting content on social media is one of the most effective ways to engage with your audience, increase brand awareness, and raise interest. Social channels are a great place to leverage user-generated content (UGC) by initiating hashtags or posting shareable posts, especially if you are a retail B2C e-commerce brand. If that does not match your line of business, you can also encourage UGC by asking for reviews to post on your site since consumers trust other consumers more than marketers!
As Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook are highly visual platforms where consumers engage most with brands, integrating your e-commerce store on social media is ideal for businesses who sell visual products. Many users turn to their feeds for shopping inspiration where they discover new brands. With in-app shopping and checkout, you can create shoppable posts that include product tags in the image for an instant and seamless purchasing experience without leaving the site. While publishing social media content helps with brand awareness, shopping pages further convert visitors into customers.
To boost your sales or conversions via social media marketing, advertising is a great way to place your product or brand in front of your target audience and stimulate demand. For retail e-commerce businesses, creating a social media marketing campaign with shoppable posts and social media advertising may be a great investment because users depend on social media to make buying decisions. However, social media marketing is not just for B2C. 72% of B2B content marketers use social media advertising and generate content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and even Instagram to increase their digital brand presence and recognition.
4. Personalize Marketing and the Customer Experience
In today’s digital mass consumerism, there are growing amounts of businesses finding niche competitive advantages and offering everything imaginable to consumers. To navigate the vast amount of options, consumers expect personalization, and are willing to share personal information to get it.
To deliver an exceptional and highly personalized website experience, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can help businesses create personalized user experiences. By altering the landing page content based on the visitor’s previous site behavior, purchase data, or products related to ones they recently searched for or viewed, you can provide the right content to the right person at the right time. Having a dynamic website and conveying a personalized experience can better deliver your customer’s needs and potentially lead to more business sales.
Also, using geo-targeting on your site can ensure that you are displaying accurate data for pricing, shipping, sales tax, and can also provide your visitors with geographically personalized content such as weather-related promotions or natural disaster relief.
After a website visitor converts to a customer, your brand can continue engaging in a personal way via email marketing and sending Birthday greetings, asking for feedback, or offering exclusive discounts. With AI utilization, you can further set up personalized email automations that personalize micro-elements, such as greetings, and segment email lists to send relevant products or promotions based on previous buying history or behavior. For example, when potential retail customers are only a click away from becoming paying customers but abandon their shopping cart, this insight can be utilized for retargeting via email or advertising.
Running retargeting ads leverages AI personalization to send ads to users who have already interacted with your brand. Based on analyzing site behavior, retargeting ads target prospects, such as previously engaged customers or recent page visitors that are predicted to be interested in your product, and promote ad content accordingly. Personalization that was once obtrusive is now expected from consumers bringing your customers’ considerable rewards with an enhanced and tailored experience and delivering your business increased sales and higher conversions.
Running a business has its challenges. And in an increasingly competitive digital landscape, navigating it requires some creative and optimizing marketing strategies. If you want your company’s voice heard, stand out against the crowd, and become a memorable brand, embrace these digital marketing techniques to help increase your brand’s online presence and therefore increase your sales.
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