10 Tried Tested and Effective Digital Marketing Methods

Many digital marketers most times are not really sure which digital marketing methods to focus on to promote their businesses online. This is because out there, there are many different digital marketing methods various marketers are using but with varying degrees of effectiveness. What really matters however is which of these methods are best suited to help marketers bolster their brand awareness and make more sales through their websites. To this effect, the following 10 major digital marketing methods which have been repeated tried and tested easily come to mind if one is to make any direct recommendations.

1. Content Marketing: In digital marketing, content is king. You must consistently create valuable and informative content that is highly impactful if you want to have any traction in digital marketing. For marketing purposes, you can package this content in form of blogs, videos, infographics, and so much more to attract readership and consequent traffic.

2. Video Marketing: The average human being is visual in perception. This is why videos have really become effective digital marketing methods. Video marketing essentially involves packaging short and highly informative, mostly how-to videos for the benefit of your audience. Effective videos should be educational and even entertaining. Such videos can be really great to attract traffic, build trust and drive sales.

3. Audio Marketing: Since search engines have found a way to index audios, audio marketing is increasingly becoming popular in digital marketing. It involves everything from podcasting, internet radio, and advertising through smart home assistants like Google Home and others.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO is a technical process of optimizing your website with the use of carefully selected keywords on the content. SEO is a very effective marketing strategy marketers rely on to improve the standing of their websites in the SERPs (search engine results pages) of search engines particularly Google. A good SEO on your website helps the site to attract good organic traffic. Such traffic directly helps marketers to get more leads, customers and increase sales.

5. Social Media Marketing (SMM): Most digital marketers now take advantage of the huge popularity of social media to market their products/services. SMM as a marketing strategy is the process of advertising on various social media platforms, particularly the very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes. The aim is to monetize your following and attract more visitors to your website. If well used, SMM can help marketers to grow their following and promote products/services offers by directly driving more traffic to their online business.

6. Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is a business strategy where online business owners use affiliates to market their products and they pay them commissions from the sales they generate. In this business model, business owners rely on affiliates with large followings which align with their target audiences to market their products. These affiliates earn commissions in exchange for their services.

7. Search Engine Marketing (SEM): SEM is another name for PPC, pay-per-click marketing. By this arrangement, if you pay for Google ads, these ads appear at the top of Google SERPs. Every time a user clicks on these ads, the user is directed to your website. You pay nothing when nobody clicks on your ads. The ads are thus highly targeted and therefore very effective. For marketers who can afford to pay for such ads, the ads are usually very effective digital marketing methods for their businesses. Such ads are really quite handy for seasonal promotions and new product launches.

8. Email Marketing: This is “old school” marketing method but it is still very efficient and cost-effective. For best email marketing results, you must first carefully build a responsive email list over time. Through this list, you can stay in constant touch with your audience by sending them regular newsletters loaded with valuable information, announcements, new arrivals, price adjustments, promos, discounts, and all sorts of marketing messages. Emails are thus very effective marketing tools to nurture warm prospects by giving them that really vital little nudge they need to convert. Increase in sales becomes a direct consequence of this.

9. Mobile Marketing: A majority of people now prefer doing business online with their mobile devices particularly smartphones. This is why most business owners now optimize their business websites for mobile devices. Technically, mobile marketing involves every technique from voice-search optimization, in-app advertising, and advertising via SMS or social messaging apps.

10. Influencer Marketing: For marketing purposes, digital marketers now refer to people with large followings particularly on social media as Influencers. Influencers can thus act as affiliates by helping business owners to promote products to their large followers in exchange for commissions from the sales they help generate. Marketers can thus carefully target influencers whose followings align with their target audience and their niche and partner with them to help promote products and or services. In some circumstances, influencers can even directly endorse products they have used or are using themselves to their followers. By this arrangement, such influencers can typically charge an upfront fee for a set amount of videos and product reviews, etc. Some influencers may choose to take their rewards in form of regular supplies of the samples of products they help promote.

Top 7 Effective Ecommerce Marketing Techniques to Boost Revenues

Ecommerce marketing simply means all the marketing techniques online marketers adopt to drive awareness and action to their online businesses. Online marketers drive these techniques through the use of social media, SEO, SMS, digital content, search engines, email campaigns and more. The ultimate aim is to use these techniques through the right online channels to attract visitors who may purchase products/services. These techniques if properly deployed can help your ecommerce business to retain customers, facilitate conversions, enhance post-purchase experience and generate repeat sales. They can directly help to make it easy for a wide range of people to discover your products/services online. Top 7 on the list of these techniques are:

1. Social Media Marketing

With presently about 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media is now the new haven for ecommerce marketing. This is more so in the hugely popular platforms like Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes. Social media has thus become a great market for ecommerce business owners because on the platforms, you can easily share marketing messages widely and you have many ways of creating channels for engagement. Social media users can easily share posts and videos within each platform and across multi-platforms. That allows many other users to interact with your content and share it too. This way, marketers can reach many more people that would originally be out of their immediate reach. That is great for effective marketing. Additionally, since interaction is quite easy on social media platforms, marketers can leverage user data and share user-generated content (UGC) widely. Doing so helps marketers to build trust and to optimize their marketing campaigns.

2. Content/SEO Marketing

The primary aim of SEO marketing is to naturally cultivate organic traffic to your ecommerce website. This you can by tweaking your target keywords to make your content visible to search engines. If properly done, search engines particularly Google will rank your content high in their SERPs. That means organic traffic to the website. You can in addition to the careful use of keywords in your content arrange to build backlinks from reputable websites to your website, make the website user-friendly and optimize it for mobile devices. All these will help to increase the visibility of the website and lower the bounce rate of the pages. That translates to improved engagement and consequently more organic traffic to the website.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has become a hugely popular marketing technique helping product merchants to widely promote their products and make sales. It is some form of partnership between Product Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers. Affiliates help product merchants to make their products available to consumers and they earn commissions from merchants on the sales they help generate. All the affiliates really do is to widely promote affiliate links on their content. When a user clicks on any of these links and makes a purchase, the affiliate earns a commission. So, when affiliates continue to create impactful and helpful content online, it helps to attract the attention of potential customers. If this content manages to reach a wider audience that is incentivized to buy, the affiliate earns commissions from the sales. It is thus a performance-based business arrangement. If affiliates don’t generate sales, they are not entitled to commissions. This makes affiliate marketing a great marketing technique highly suitable for ecommerce business marketing.

4. Email Marketing

To use email marketing technique successfully, make sure you have a responsive email list. That is the kind of list you can rely on to make your audience aware of new products, discounts, and other items relating to your ecommerce business. Email is not only cheap and easy to deploy, it is highly cost-effective to use. If used correctly, it can help your ecommerce business with lead generation, sales and brand awareness. Regular emails help to keep your customers engaged with your business by keeping them fully informed of trends, promos and new arrivals. They are great for data collection and unlimited sales generation through potent CTAs.

 
5. SMS Marketing

SMS is a form of opt-in marketing. It requires recipients to agree to subscribe to SMS correspondence before it can be effectively deployed. SMS marketing is cost-effective and gets messages into the inboxes of recipients intact and quickly. SMS marketing is therefore particularly great for personalized promotions, new offers and discounts, promos, surveys, and re-engagement of existing customers. SMS communication must however be short and concise to be effective. Make sure to include an option to opt-out for recipients who may choose to change their minds along the line.

6. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is increasingly taking root through social media. Many influencers and celebrities usually have a very large audience/following on social media. This audience at times relies hugely on their say so or even product endorsements to make their buy decisions. Influencers can even directly help to advertise products/services in exchange for commissions or some free supplies of the products they are helping to promote. Through influencer marketing, marketers can build trust with a large incentivized audience to make good sales. This is because influencers can give their audience useful and vital information about your products to enable them to make their buy decisions. Some influencers have a near cult-following online and whatever marketing information they give to their audience usually helps to get good marketing returns. This is why smart marketers can through influencer marketing directly target young potential customers who fanatically follow influencers on social media.

7. PPC/Paid Search

Pay-Per-Click, PPC marketing is a marketing technique where marketers pay search engines particularly Google for each click on their links. When you pay search engines, they place your ads higher on their relevant SERPs. The higher your ads are on these pages, the more organic traffic/clicks they attract thereby making it easier to drive incentivized traffic to your website. With PPC advertising, marketers are only required to pay only if people click on their ads. This helps marketers to manage their ads budgets very tightly and with measurable results for each ads dollar spent. If you directly target the right keywords with your ads, your target audience easily relates with the products you are marketing. That encourages clicks on your links thereby making it a relatively affordable and effective way to drive good traffic to your website. Good traffic means good leads, conversions, sales and more revenues.

Why SMS is a Dependable Marketing Channel for E-Commerce Brands

Many e-commerce business owners usually prefer cross-channel marketing because it enables them to blend different communication channels to reach their customers and to create cohesive shopping experiences. Overall, and because of the overwhelming prevalence of smart devices particularly among young people, the use of SMS mobile messaging in cross-channel marketing has become hugely important in a holistic e-commerce strategy. If used correctly, SMS can be very effective to connect brands with consumers, nurture leads and get conversions. Following are compelling reasons why SMS mobile messaging is now a reliable and effective marketing channel for many e-commerce businesses.

SMS Helps to Strengthen Relationships

SMS just like email is easy to send and guaranteed to arrive destination hence it is extremely useful for e-commerce business owners to build and strengthen relationships with their customers. For most customers who already have a relationship with a brand, receiving text messages is something they’re open to. It is for this reason many brands can effortlessly use SMS to boost customer loyalty and retention. This they do by routinely using text messages to keep their customers constantly in the know of trends, latest updates, price changes, new products and even on-going promos. For exclusivity and better effectiveness, mobile messaging can be transformed into an exclusive channel with offers that are only available to customers enrolled in the SMS program. With its characteristic two-way conversational application, SMS can help brands to deepen relationships with customers through short surveys and collecting product feedback and customer reviews, very useful data for effective marketing purposes.

SMS Helps to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

SMS has the advantage of instant messaging. So, it can be a great tool for providing instant messaging to shoppers and thus helping to keep them in the customer journey. SMS is very good at this because when sending follow-ups, SMS open and response rates are way higher and thus perform better than emails. Many brands do take advantage of this by sending cart abandonment SMS reminders to their subscribed customers. SMS text alerts can help shoppers to pick up their carts and continue their shopping experience at any time and in any channel they presently are. All these greatly help to reduce shopping cart abandonment to the barest minimum.

SMS Helps to Deliver Personalized Customer Journeys

These days, consumers on the average check their mobile smart devices much more than any other gadget. That is why mobile messaging can be effective by being more personal, immediate and direct. Exactly why, brands can effectively use SMS to personalize customer journeys. Brands that are unable to or neglect to do so risk losing many customers as a result. Brands that really want to encourage and nudge their shoppers along the customer journey must be able to use SMS to give personalized info to the shoppers according to their individual preferences.
 
SMS Helps to Convert Shoppers On-the-Go

For marketing purposes, SMS has impressive click-through rates and conversion rates as high as 70% and 20% respectively. Because SMS is direct, straightforward and can be delivered to shoppers on the go, it helps to increase the chances of a shopper making a purchase. Brands can better convert shoppers on the go by increasing their text messages’ relevance with intent-based data that understands shoppers’ real-time intent.

SMS Helps to Easily Reach Younger Consumers

Google reports indicate that up to 60% online data is now attributable to mobile devices and a very large percentage of young people use these devices. Over 70% of these young people, 34 years and below prefer engaging brands in two-way communication and SMS is their favorite. To this huge demographic, SMS increases easy exclusivity and accessibility for them. For marketers who use SMS, it is quite easy and approachable to interact with this demographic. They are therefore more prone to open and read mobile messages which help to encourage their engagement levels as shoppers.

Last Line

Without a doubt, SMS has become one of the fastest-growing tools that e-commerce brands can use to boost customer interactions, loyalty and retention. SMS is not only personalized, accessible and engaging, but has also proven to be effective in increasing conversions. Because of SMS, business conversations are no longer limited to emails and social media platforms, even though they are still hugely popular among marketers. As a highly effective communication channel, SMS completes a comprehensive and result-oriented cross-channel marketing strategy. The reason it is now increasing in popularity among e-commerce business owners.

Effective Small Business Public Relations (PR) and Traditional Marketing Methods

No doubt Public Relations (PR) still has a huge role to play in modern small business marketing even though it has been around for quite a while. Marketers still have confidence in it to get their marketing messages out here. This is in addition to the fact that consumers trust earned media more than brands, social media posts, or even influencers. If PR is handled by trained professionals, it manages to help build consumer trust fairly quickly. Below are the commonest methods these professionals use to get the best results.

Tested Public Relations (PR) Marketing Methods

What gets the best results is what marketers need in their marketing strategy. If you want to score your business with some positive earned media coverage, get cracking with:
 
PR Stunts

If you are a marketer, and you have no publicity budget restrictions, you can always pull off a PR stunt. It is one great way to organize a spectacular fun fare that attracts a lot of people from the local communities. If the event is well staged and massively attended, it helps to build brand awareness by generating free press.

Press Releases

Well timed press releases are also great marketing methods. The essence of press releases is to get a good story/message out through an appropriate medium to get wide readership. You can get messages out from your social media handles or by giving a good story to a journalist who can quickly and easily turn it into a career-building piece of content for both of you. You can always get good press releases if you focus on pitching only the most important stories that will attract good readership. If you do this consistently, you can build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with your readers and even news outlets.

Community and Industry Events

It is fantastic PR marketing if you can get your business involved in events in your local community. Same goes for your niche industry. You can consider sponsoring local a derby involving Soccer or basketball or baseball games. Sponsoring other sports meets particularly for children and young adults is also a great idea. Contributing employees’ hours to volunteer work in sanitation and cleaning, health and fitness walk in your community are great PR for your business. These volunteer service and sponsorship events do not only make your community a better place to live in, they also help to build your brand and expose your business to new customers.

Tested Traditional Marketing Methods

Traditional marketing may sound old school when compared to digital marketing, but it is still a very effective marketing strategy particularly in certain industries and geographical locations. Marketers do get appreciable returns in traditional marketing even though it is quite difficult to really track the ROI accurately. That is not to say it is ineffective though.

Below are marketers’ favorite traditional marketing methods that can be of use to you in your small business marketing.

Direct Mail

If you are a smart marketer, you can use direct mail to stand out even in this digital age. You can mail brochures, promos, how-to messages and other forms of messages through direct mail to consumers in their homes. If your messages are great and well timed, you can be lucky to break through the clutter and catch the attention of the consumers.

Billboard Ads

Yeah, everyone still finds billboards on the highways as they drive along. The attention catching giant constructions work to catch the attention of everyone passing by. Billboards may be quite expensive to erect over a wide area but you can cut your budget and concentrate on the ones you can afford only in a selected local community, making sure you have the right permits though. For effectiveness, you need to be very strategic in erecting billboards. It is hugely impactful if you erect a billboard at the main entrance to your business premises particularly if you are into factory work or manufacturing.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing can be a very effective marketing strategy if done right. Getting the correct telephone numbers and knowing when to make that all important call is crucial if you don’t want to suffer excessive rejections. If not done right, telemarking can make you to waste time and money making annoying calls and even to unlikely buyers. If done right, it can be quite effective to turn many prospective buyers into customers.

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing can be quite effective to get new customers. Unlike telemarketing, SMS marketing does not rudely intrude into the privacy of prospective buyers. Recipients can always open their SMS messages at their own convenience. This is why SMS messages have open rates as high as 98%.

Radio and TV Ads

Radio and TV are still effective marketing channels for ads. For most marketers, the problem is not that of effectiveness but excessive costs to advertise on Radio and TV. Many homesteads do afford to have Radios and TVs and people habitually rely on them for their main sources of information. Depending on the products you are marketing and your target market, Radio and TV can easily and quickly get your message out if you can afford the cost. You can however cut down on costs and still get good results if you purchase ads on other audio platforms, such as podcasts or Spotify.

Newspaper Ads

Newspaper ads are an effective marketing strategy particularly in a society with high literacy rate. That is where you have the type of audience that regularly picks up a physical newspaper. Inside newspapers, an insert, digital ad, or classified ad are great ways to send out a marketing message that gets results. However, you must always endeavor to choose your outlets carefully, negotiate rates, and spend time creating engaging content if you want the best results. Settling for mediocre visual design or lackluster copy won’t get you impressive results in newspaper advertising.

How to Choose a Good Email Marketing Service

To choose the best email marketing service that perfectly fits your needs, you must first decide which tasks you wish to tackle with it. The good news is that whichever email marketing service you choose will most likely provide you with a built-in email template builder. Many of the services support custom email templates. What that means is that you can on your own code your HTML, use a template engine or a third-party email template. The choice quite frankly depends on your preferences and your type of business. There are a variety of email management tools on the internet, but marketers have preferences for bulk email software tools, CRM and user management tools and full-fledged marketing automation tools.

  

Marketers greatly depend on some of these tools to help them with creating and setting email campaigns, managing subscribers and tracking marketing results. Many experienced marketers for a variety of reasons like to recommend Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Sendinblue and AWeber from among several of such services online. These services tend to have features that are fairly common with most others. Many of the services provide a similar set of functions for email marketing but each of them has a particular focus. If the service focus tallies with your marketing needs, it is advisable to settle for such service.

Mailchimp: This is an all-in-one marketing platform featuring such very powerful marketing tools like, email campaigns builder, email automation, real-time analytics, marketing CRM, digital ads, website builder and landing pages. It makes both free options and paid subscription options available to marketers.

 

Sendgrid: This service focuses on both email marketers and developers providing email marketing tools and email API. Its main features are, email automation, email design and templates, email statistics, web API and SMTP service, transactional emails and email validation. It features mostly paid options but with a free plan for very small marketing needs.

Sendinblue: This is a bulk email service that prioritizes the interests of both marketers and sales managers. It provides marketers with an advanced analytics dashboard and a robust range of templates for newsletters, transactional emails, and other types of content. Its main features are, email marketing automation, SMS campaigns, live chat features, in-build CRM, subscriber segmentation, in-built templates for newsletters, transactional emails, and other types of messages, sign-up form designer and lots more. It offers both paid and free options to marketers.

AWeber: AWeber is designed for and aims at helping small businesses with simple but powerful email marketing solutions. Its main features are drag and drop and HTML template editors, subscribers’ segmentation, email automation, split testing, sign-up forms, email tracking and analytics. They offer free trial periods and fully paid subscriptions thereafter.