How to Create a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy

Many digital marketers regularly tweak their digital marketing strategies to experiment with tactics that work better. That is how they get to understand which approaches work best in any particular industry and niche. The priority is to always settle for what works best to build their brands, get leads/customers and make sales. The real challenge therefore, is to be able to create a comprehensive digital strategy that suits the marketing needs of their businesses.

To create a successful digital marketing strategy for your business, you can work on the following fundamentals to kick-start the process.

Set Realistic Goals

Right from the outset, a marketer must decide what he wants to achieve in his marketing activities. That calls for setting realistic goals and objectives as component parts of your digital strategy. At the initial planning stages, it is hugely important to establish and document specific targets while leveraging on the SMART approach. If your goals are Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Realistic and Time-bound, chances are very high that the goals will be achieved. Therefore, these goals as properly documented at the inception of your strategy can be referred to for guidance as you make progress. By referring to your set goals, you can measure and compare results with your targets to enable you make adjustments where necessary and as necessary.

Make Diligent Research

In planning for any human enterprise diligent research is fundamental to early preparations. In digital marketing, to develop a successful marketing strategy, you must start by thoroughly researching your competitors, target audience and the market expectations or indicators for your industry. The information/data you gather from this diligent research effort will help you to better understand the goals, threats, opportunities, advantages, pitfalls, and audiences you need to focus on with your strategy.

Maintain Presence Across Multiple Channels

A marketing strategy that does not include how and where your business will be promoted is hugely deficient. To this effect, if you adopt a digital strategy of marketing across multiple platforms/channels, you can effectively reach the right audience and get your message across more successfully. That calls for concentrating your efforts on generating engagement and interaction with your users through several marketing channels simultaneously across the web. By doing so, you have the opportunity to specifically tailor and customize your marketing messaging and content to be sure it is unique, coherent and consistent across all platforms/channels and to leverage on the in-house power of each platform/channel to get good results.

Plan Inclusively

Every business requires team efforts to grow. You must plan with your team in mind when designing a marketing strategy. Make inclusive plans covering your Production team, Customer service team, Marketing team, Communications team, PR team, Sales team, Management team and anyone else whose role is contributory to the success of your marketing strategy. You need these various team insights at the early stages of drawing up your strategy because they will be fully responsible for implementing the strategy. If you involve them all with clear limits and controls, that will help to fully align your digital marketing goals with their own objectives and the business benefits immensely.

Clearly Define Your Messaging

A clear business messaging is a good strategy for building a brand. Sometimes, a business messaging can even become a mantra among customers. For this reason, it is always better to have a few well-crafted and resonating central messages in your digital marketing strategy plan to promote through your marketing campaigns. If such messaging is consistent enough with a clear focus on very few themes, it resonates better with the recipient audience. In furtherance of that, your messaging should align well and be consistent with your business-related and marketing goals.

Final Thoughts

It is rather impossible to create a successful digital campaign if you don't have a concrete foundation that is built on timely, accurate and relevant data. If you take enough time to understand and successfully implement the foregoing fundamentals into your digital strategy, you will no doubt notice some increase in your ROI. This is because a well-planned digital marketing strategy will ultimately enhance your marketing efforts and boost sales for your business. That clearly proves that your digital marketing strategy is succeeding.  

Marketing Tips for Brands to Cope with E-commerce Transformation

As e-commerce world is rapidly undergoing transformation, brands and marketers cannot afford to be left in the lurch. Just as more and more businesses as going online, global e-commerce is experiencing rapid changes in tandem. Brands must take steps to cope with these changes to have maximum benefits from the rapidly changing e-commerce business activities globally. For this reason, marketers now have an urgent need to prioritize e-commerce and to adapt their age-old promotion strategies for better results. That is the only viable way they can continue to reach consumers better and to drive growth for their businesses. Here are a few tips to help drive that quest.

Create Compatible Strategies

Now than never before, marketers need to locate and follow consumers better wherever they are in the world. Thanks to the internet, this is achievable without much stress. If marketers place consumer experience at the center piece of their marketing strategies, they can take advantage of the differences in digital advertising channels to reach them better. That calls for real compatibility in marketing strategies. Marketers thus require different but compatible strategies to effectively advertise across multichannel. These strategies involve how to be found by consumers already in shopping mindset and searching online and direct promos to segmented audiences to attract sales or a combination of both.

Match Branding with Performance

Promoting a brand to have a better brand authority online and growing sales are both desirable for any e-commerce business. Depending on the circumstances, some brands may even choose to prioritize one over the other. Some marketers at times prefer to focus more on performance or direct sales results while others may choose to focus on building the brand first. Both scenarios benefit the business but in different ways. When there is less competition, it is better to build the brand first and expect to reap the rewards much later. To cope with the transformations in e-commerce business worldwide, it is advisable to match branding with performance. Marketers can blend branding and performance strategies to reap the dual benefits of both.

Create Multichannel Roles for Your Team

If you have a marketing team, it is not enough to train them well. Giving them a good focus in addition is also desirable.  It is better to have multichannel roles for your marketing team than to have them focused only on mini roles of the entire marketing infrastructure. Now that e-commerce businesses are transforming rapidly, it is the right time for marketers to rethink their digital marketing methods and media choices. In addition to rethinking their internal organizations, they can effectively work with traditional multichannel retailers, online marketplaces and delivery partners in order to cope with the emerging e-commerce environment. Brands that can do this well in the emerging e-commerce market will be able to build valuable lifelong customer relationships and grow their brands as a result.

 
Focus on ROI

In any marketing campaign, the bottom line is always the Return on Investment, ROI. Even with the transformations in e-commerce business, this remains true. It is only through good ROI that brands can conclusively prove the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. It is smart marketing therefore for marketers to focus on and tie every ad spend to sales outcomes and measure ROI instead of merely relying on softer metrics. However, Key Performance Indicators, KPIs can also be looked at differently to get the overall performance picture of the business.

Be Nimble in Your Marketing Strategy

When things are changing rapidly in e-commerce business environment, it is good to adjust and change your marketing strategies too. That enables your business to cope well. It calls for brands to have nimbler marketing strategies by making necessary adjustments to their marketing plans on the go. It allows brands to easily move advertising resources from offline channels to online channels and vice versa depending on the circumstances they find themselves at any material time. Business communication channels, messaging methods, marketing methods, supply chains, products handling and delivery methods, all require real flexibility to cope with any times and circumstances no matter how they turn out. 

Social Media Tips for Retail Products Marketing

Marketers generally expect retail products to move very fast in the market even as retail products consumers buying habits change from time to time. In recent times, more and more retail products consumers are shifting towards online shopping. What this means for marketers is that they need to promote and market more online. Marketing retail brands really needs this shift in focus particularly on social media marketing.

Here are some tips and tactics expert marketers recommend.

Stimulate Growth with Social Campaigns

With online space rapidly supplanting other marketing channels, social media marketing must now be a very essential component of retail products marketing strategy if it was earlier ignored. Many consumers now prefer e-commerce shopping windows for retail products and marketers must take full advantage of that. Aside its huge popularity, social media is now where everyone appears to be doing their own things around the world 24/7. It is smart to take your own retail marketing business there as well. On social media, marketers get very impressive results if they manage to have an effective social media marketing strategy that combines user-generated content, a bit of influencer marketing, and ample video/graphics content. By doing this effectively on social media, retail brands can grow progressively.

Use Unique Strategies per Platform

Yes, just as social media platforms are different so they are unique particularly the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. For instance, certain common marketing strategies may work well for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube, but in others, retail brands need to adopt unique strategies peculiar to the platforms if they want to market themselves very well on these platforms. It is advisable to study the rules very well and comply with them to avoid sanctions from social media platforms. All the platforms have their own unique and peculiar nuances and marketers must never overlook that.

Market More with User-Generated Content

Content particularly very high quality and informative content is what attracts consumers online. If this content is user-generated from the free social interaction that social media permits, the better for marketers. With it, marketers can harness and hugely benefit from the influence of social media consumers who organically create and spread the word about retail products by way of photos, reviews, videos, and much more. When retail products consumers are happy with products, many do not hesitate to share pictures and glowing reviews about these products on social media. Such reviews usually convince others particularly skeptics to buy these products. That helps social media marketers to get strong growths from their marketing efforts.

Use Influencer Marketing Cautiously

Yes, for many social media marketers, influencer marketing gets results but it must be used with some caution. Influencer marketing no doubt can be an effective strategy for social media but experts say brands must exercise caution to be on the right side of regulatory laws/codes. These regulatory laws/codes vary from country to country though. Therefore, every marketer must go through due diligence to ensure compliance with extant regulations on the matter. Some codes require that influencers disclose their material relationships with products and this may tend to whittle down their real “influencer power.” Some regulations require that influencers state clearly if their post is an advertisement or a mere endorsement out of conviction from the use of the product. No doubt these regulations restrict influencer endorsements but they are still highly effective as social media marketing strategies. For best results, expert marketers recommend that brands must follow four key rules when working with influencers.
1. Provide independent substantiation for any claim that an influencer makes.
2. Encourage influencers to make only claims that are representative of an average consumer’s typical experience with the product.
3. Ensure influencers’ statements and opinions are an accurate representation of their actual experience. Meaning, influencers can’t make claims about products they haven’t really tried themselves.
4. Give influencers clear disclosure guidelines to communicate their relationships with your brand in an unambiguous way.

Tips to Rejig Your Digital Marketing Strategy

The digital marketing space is hugely crowded. For this reason, no matter how good your digital marketing strategy is, it is imperative you rejig it from time to time. That’s about the only viable way you can get to stay ahead your competition. From valuable experience, there’s always a huge lot that can change in just a few months in the digital space. To remain relevant is such a competitive space, you must find ways to fine-tune your marketing strategy regularly. Most importantly, you must keep re-evaluating your digital marketing strategy to find out what is not working well and to take adequate and remedial steps to get it to work well for your business.

Here’s what digital marketing experts recommend that brands can do in their marketing strategy to effectively engage with consumers in this age and time.

Focus More on Mobile Marketing

Google reports that about 60% of searches are now attributable to mobile devices particularly smartphones. So, if your website is not optimized for mobile, the time to do it is now. If you don’t, you’ll be missing out from this huge search data. If your brand is struggling with getting the attention of potential audiences now, your best advice is to consider mobile marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy. Today’s marketing reality is, if you are unable to leverage the power of mobile, you are missing out from a huge potential market. That puts your business at the risk of missing out from the huge number of potential customers, leads and even sales from mobile market.

Adopt Marketing Automation

In digital marketing, most marketers always worry about costs. What to do to keep costs down and improve on ROI is always a huge challenge. That is exactly where digital automation becomes very handy. Marketing automation helps marketers to avoid wastage of time, valuable resources, and energy. Across the recommended multiple marketing channels, you can consider email automation, content marketing calendar and scheduled content posting, AI, and Auto-responders, to help save time and resources and still be able to service your customers effectively.

Focus More on Quality Content

As expert marketers like to say, in digital marketing, content is king. This content must be of high quality, informative, educational and even entertaining. By serving the right content to the right customer at the right time via the right channels, you can easily build some form of customer loyalty and dedication to your brand. To get quality results from your content marketing efforts, it is not enough to have quality content all by itself. Such content must get to your customers via the right digital channels and must engage enough with your key customer touchpoints.  
 
Market through Multi-Channels

As most experienced digital marketers already know, there’s no scarcity of opportunities for consumer engagement, especially across very popular social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and the like. Incorporating them all into your social media marketing strategy is one great way to rejig your marketing efforts. What multi-channels approach really does for your business is to have a very strong SEO. This translates to increased traffic, leads and sales. Your multi-channel marketing strategy must include, content optimization, social content strategy, social media marketing, email marketing, local/community search optimization, social media advertising, and link building. These are things you must consider and take into account if you want to rejig your digital marketing strategy in this age and time.

How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Drive Better Conversions

With increasing popularity as a very viable online business, Affiliate marketing remains an exemplary business model where brands partner with bloggers, influencers, publishers or other brands to promote their products/services in exchange for commissions. This partnership works well because Affiliate marketing is efficient, flexible and, with a pay-for-performance commission framework that is well defined and understood by all partners.

Here’s how affiliate marketing helps to drive better conversions for your online business.

Brand Management

Every partner in an affiliate program characteristically brings some value to the table in the affiliate relationship. This value is fully within the control and direction of each partner. By working with many affiliates, brands get the valuable opportunity to partner with a diverse set of publishers who cater to a range of audience sizes and demographics that they know and have been working with for some time. Since affiliate marketing allows each brand full control over who they choose to partner with as affiliates and what messages they present through these affiliates, they have the leverage to diversify their marketing efforts and can strategically target customers as a result. Both brands and affiliates manage and control their marketing efforts as it suits their capacities and styles with good end results as the bottomline. Thus, brands can set clear business goals and align with their affiliate partners who help them reach their targeted customer base. That is the reason why brands like to work with the exact types of affiliate partners who are best positioned in their individual managerial capacities to help them achieve their set goals.


 
Growing Trusted Partnerships

Every business is based on trust particularly in affiliate partnerships. When a partnership thrives on trust, it is effective. Building on this trust somehow increases the effectiveness of the partnership. With trust, brands collaborate closely with their affiliate marketing partners to develop messaging that showcases the brand’s selling points and at the same time also appeals to the affiliate partner’s carefully cultivated audience. The partnership grows stronger when brands and their affiliate partners work together in pursuit of mutually agreed upon objectives based on trust, rather than working on conflicting priorities in an opaque and unaccountable process which distrust engenders. When trust exists and brands and affiliate partners fully collaborate well, affiliate marketing helps to drive increased conversions.

Optimizing Affiliate Efforts

Because of the efficiency and flexibility of affiliate marketing, with a pay-for-performance commission framework fully in place, each marketing partner’s performance in an affiliate model is individually and separately tracked and measured through affiliate technology providers. This allows brands to make real-time evaluations to determine which partners are most effective for driving conversions.  Each partner’s performance being well known can thus be individually optimized for better performance. Brands which get most value out of affiliate partnerships tend to work more closely with their affiliate partners to tailor their campaigns to receptive audiences. These brands see and work with their affiliate partners as an extension of their brands and this helps conversions a great deal.

Maximizing Promotional Efforts

Partners in affiliate partnerships are all individual and separate business persons/entities who are in the business for profits. They thus do their promotions separately based on their individual resources and capabilities. The audiences they promote to are also separate and diverse. Since commissions payment directly relates to individual marketing efforts, affiliate marketing helps to maximize promotional efforts for more conversions. The reason why Affiliate marketing also allows brands to maximize their promotional offerings and best-selling products by specially directing them at a trusting and loyal audience! It helps conversions a great deal if brands deliberately dedicate their marketing budgets on actions that help them to generate better returns on investment. One of such actions is to explore all ways to maximize the promotional efforts of all partners in the business.
  

Common Mistakes to Avoid With Global Affiliates

Affiliate marketing has become a very powerful means of generating revenue in our fast-paced digital world. Because of the very characteristics of the Internet, affiliate marketing cuts across regional and geographical barriers and it appears to be a real rage of the moment. Companies are now looking to partner with affiliates no matter where they are in the world. These companies need local and international affiliates to effectively power their activities in many aspects of their business.  Such activities range from helping to raise their brand awareness in new territories to managing brand reputations in new and existing overseas markets. Expanding affiliate activities globally may have many advantages but there are drawbacks as well. These drawbacks are actually avoidable mistakes which you can take deliberate steps to avoid.


 
If you are keen on having an effective international affiliate marketing program, here are some common mistakes to avoid:

Marketing with a Language Barrier

Worldwide, language remains the medium of doing business. You cannot effectively do business with anyone if you are unable to communicate in a language you both understand. That makes it imperative for brands to be able to deliver their marketing campaigns in the local languages of the people they’re targeting. No being able to do so makes language a barrier to your marketing efforts and that is a marketing mistake you can do well to avoid. Making sure your website and its contents are easily translated with the help of Google tools into appropriate languages is one great way to avoid language barriers in international marketing campaigns.

Not Being Locally Well-Informed

Brand messages are most effective when they are in concert with local opportunities. Every good marketer must know with concise records what exactly the local trends are where campaigns are being targeted. That way, they can easily take advantage of great shopping dates/periods like Thanksgiving Days, Singles Days, Black Fridays, Double Digit Days and suchlike days worldwide where shoppers expect premiums and discounts.

Not Being Able to Seize Seasonal Opportunities

Worldwide, as the seasons vary, so are sales/marketing trends. Your website flexibility plays a big role in helping your business to seize local opportunities for business around the world. If your website is not flexible enough for different customers and doesn’t target them with content and products that are relevant to their local needs and location, it can greatly impede the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Not Dealing in Local Currency

Money is a means of payment and an effective medium of exchange. If you are not offering your affiliate campaigns in the local currency of your target market, it can be a potential barrier which deters international customers. All costs, taxes, fees and duties associated with your marketing campaigns must be in the local currencies of your target audience and convertibility issues handled by the sellers.

Underestimating Your Brand Popularity

With the internet, it has become fairly easily for brands to get known around the world. This is a very vital marketing asset which you cannot afford to underestimate or ignore. Your key partners or affiliates around the world may very well know already what they expect from you and you cannot afford to disappoint. That is why it is vital that your affiliate program presents your brand to new audiences in the right way in order to build trust and strong working relationships. Presenting anything less than what they expect based on the impression they already have may lead to dampening their marketing enthusiasm.


 
Not Working with the Right Technology Provider

Since worldwide affiliate marketing campaigns rely hugely on the use of technology, your technology provider must be up to the game. That way, it can be in a good position to be able to give you very valuable insights about local opportunities worldwide. Therefore, if you want to give your campaign programs the best head start, you should opt for a provider that has extensive operations in the countries you’re hoping to move into and market to. Such technology providers are always best placed to deploy their valuable knowledge of each market’s unique characteristics and trends into a strategy that works for your brand. That is some very helpful knowledge brands can always leverage on for good results.

Ignoring Cultural Differences

You cannot be a good marketer if you are culturally insensitive. Worldwide, culture is one very vital aspect of peoples way of life which if not carefully handled can backfire with very disastrous marketing results. What you are marketing and the way you are marketing it can be very culturally sensitive in most parts of the world. You can therefore not afford to undermine the culture of a people if you want to market to them successfully. 

Smart Ways to Identify Valuable Affiliates

If you’re an affiliate marketing newbie, it may at the beginning seem to you as if choosing an affiliate partnership is no big deal. Ordinarily it is, but with the preponderance of effective affiliate marketing software and tools on the internet, it really isn’t a big deal. No doubt every merchant needs to be concerned about who they choose to represent or market their brand since most consumers see affiliates as real extensions of brands. In addition to that, carefully choosing the right partners can save merchants valuable time, stress and expended efforts in dealing with evasive, unserious and at times very difficult persons as affiliate partners. It is for these reasons many expert marketers believe that it is well worth the while to spare some extra time and efforts to source for and find the right affiliate partners.


 
Because of the intricate relationship between Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers, the partnership arrangement is as good as the weakest affiliate. Every merchant thus needs a good affiliate who is already doing very well as an influencer on the internet. Such affiliates must be persons who’ve already built up a body of engaged fans and followers and have worked hard to gain and maintain their trust over some time. These are the types of affiliates you can really benefit from if you’re picky about whom you choose. In a well-chosen affiliate partnership arrangement, it is the affiliate’s job to personally refer a merchant’s business to his/her followers. The reason adequate care must be taken to make sure he/she is the right partner for the job. It is the duty of the merchant to ensure that the affiliates he/she settles for have the right capacity to bring real value on board the partnership since it is the affiliates who must act as true representatives of the brand. As such, they must have the right capacity to promote and educate others about the product/service they are marketing.

Here are some tips which can assist you to determine which affiliates are really capable of adding value to your business.

Dutifully Track Affiliate Performance
 
The only credible way to truly measure affiliate performance value is by way of in-depth analytics using available tools online. It is easier to make decisions on whom to work with when you have the correct performance data at your disposal. That is irrespective of whether the affiliate is a new, up-and-coming affiliate or he/she already has considerable experience in affiliate marketing. The data you get from the analytics helps with the decision to determine which affiliate is bringing in real value to the business.

Evaluate the Quality of their Content 

In influencer marketing, content remains king. It is good content which attracts readers and retains followers. In affiliate marketing, the best affiliates to use are the ones who are steadily churning out high-quality, heavily trafficked content on their website, blog and social media profiles. The key is to always look out for original, well-written affiliate content featuring rich imagery and graphics. That is, the type of content which major search engines such as Google like to rank high. That is what guarantees the much needed traffic every marketer craves for.

Examine their Online Presence 

Expert marketers believe that it is best to partner only with influencers and publishers who have a positive and commanding online presence. That is, online presence which is devoid of controversy or damaging criticisms. You can easily gauge affiliate reputation from the comments and replies to their contents on social media from the general public. Since it is best to work with affiliates who have solid online presence, it helps to look out for affiliates who are actively engaged with their audience by way of quick responses to comments/concerns and the quality of the responses. 


 
Pay Attention to their Ethics Indicators 
 
An affiliate partner is a very important link in affiliate marketing strategy. That is why it is good to make sure you know how much information affiliates willingly reveal about themselves and their business without deliberate embellishments. It pays to research this information as affiliates’ ethics indicators. Such indicators are usually voluntary disclosures on an affiliate’s website or social media posts. The more affiliates reveal about themselves, the better for the indicator judgements. These indicators are good for affiliate partnership because they help build trust between the consumers and the promoters. Affiliate marketing works well through personal referral which relies heavily on trust.  Personal referrals can be grossly ineffective unless there is trust in the relationship.

Actively Search for Good Affiliates

The internet has lots of individuals and enterprise affiliates who are actively looking to partner with merchants. An active and deliberate search on the web can unveil many good and reputable affiliates looking to partner with merchants. Some deep searches can actually reveal highly informative stats indicating how active and successful some affiliates have been with previous campaigns/promotions.

Evaluate Affiliate Communications 

Effective online affiliate communication is indicative of how active such affiliates are. It is possible to know even from the very first couple of e-mails whether or not a person is going to be a good partner for your business or not. A lot depends on how quickly affiliates respond to inquiries and how much sense their responses make. Their response time and meaningful engagement are indicative of how serious they are with their marketing business. Tardy and unintelligent affiliate responses to inquiries are real indicators of poor affiliates.


 

How Affiliate Marketing Enhances Your Small Business

When modern day small business owners want to build their own clan of marketers to help promote their brands with a strong force, they turn to affiliate marketing. These days, around 70%, according to reliable estimates of online shoppers trust and rely on the advice of an influencer to purchase products. This high statistic is sufficient to ginger small business owners to invest in affiliate marketing because they need new and effective techniques to influence the buying decisions of this huge numbers of buyers. Many affiliate marketing platforms as a matter of course offer some of these new techniques. Small business owners also know that one very useful way to ensure an increased customer base is by way of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing is quite a self-explanatory concept involving partnerships and collaborations to market goods/services worldwide 24/7. Many thanks to the internet which never sleeps! When small businesses link up with affiliate marketing platforms, they get mutually beneficial rewards from such associations. It presents a win-win situation to both the businesses and the affiliates who are in the marketing relationship. These relationships are cost-effective because the businesses involved are only required to pay commissions on the sales generated through the efforts of their affiliates. No other directly related fees/costs are involved. With that arrangement, affiliates get rewarded with handsome commissions for merely driving buyers to their partner e-commerce stores. Great and hugely rewarding relationship if you ask me!


 
Mentioned below are a few tried and tested ways affiliate marketing helps to enhance small businesses. Affiliate marketing:

Helps Build Reputation for Your Business

Many affiliate marketers traditionally enjoy great credibility and repute with their website visitors. This because they are trusted bloggers/content marketers who work as a third-party opinions that people mostly trust and rely on to purchase products/services online. Thus, when a business decides to join forces with them in partnership, their top repute also helps your business in generating credibility with them. When they promote a product/service, it is a way of endorsing the products/service to their audience, which already trusts their calls. Such good reputation easily influences buying decisions.

Helps Build Business Partnerships
 
Every business relies hugely on reliable and profitable partnerships to grow. When businesses take on affiliates, it comes down to business partnerships. Such partnerships grow as the business gets more leads through the relationship. Long-term, such business relationship will pay your business dividends arising from an increased number of people who tend to trust your brand. That is how businesses get long-term experienced marketing professionals to promote their products/services and affiliates get reliable and reputable clients that help them to earn cool commissions. Great and mutually beneficial partnership!

Helps to Broaden Your Customer Base

All businesses grow as a result of good customer-patronage. Affiliate marketing is a perfect way for any business to broaden its group of customers and audiences. Because most affiliated influencers and websites already have a huge audience, it is easy for businesses to latch on to their wide reach to automatically market their brands without much additional add-on efforts. As a business, that saves you the huge overhead costs of hiring and maintaining a sales-force. It is costs saving no doubt. What works to the advantage of your business is to simply offer a pre-determined percentage commission on each sale to the affiliates who consciously invest their time and energy in promoting your brand to their followers/viewers. That helps to broaden your business customer base no end.

Offers Low-Cost Marketing Solutions
 
As is generally well known, most businesses operationally spend huge sums of money on their marketing strategies on and offline. With affiliate marketing partnerships, such marketing efforts can be done at very low budgets. That is cost-saving which is good for the bottom-line and profits. A preferred cost-saving marketing solution for most marketers who want to have a huge cut back on their marketing budgets is to simply enroll trusted bloggers and influencers as their affiliates. These people get the same marketing job done at very low costs because they are entitled to be paid only pre-determined and agreed commissions. That helps to enhance cost-control measures for the business.

Gives Real Time Access to Worldwide Markets

The internet is global and it never sleeps. Many small businesses now take advantage of that to hit global markets. With Affiliate marketing, many small businesses easily gain access to foreign markets and make considerable impacts with little efforts. When you have a product/service that has global appeal, you can always find people in the user-base of affiliates who would be interested in what you are offering.

Helps to Extend the Lifespan of Web Stores

On the internet, the competition is always very fierce among marketers. That is the reason why many e-commerce sites are perpetually struggling to get by. Such struggling e-commerce stores/websites can be helped to remain in business by far longer with the activities of affiliate marketers. Therefore, it is always a great idea to offer affiliate programs to the influencers who literally add years to the life of your brand. Some influencer content with affiliate links embedded can go viral and remain evergreen for years. That is hugely beneficial for the lifespans of e-commerce stores.


 
Guarantees Sustainable Traffic
 
Undeniably, one of the many reasons for the failure of a web store is lack of traffic. Directing traffic to a web store is one of the primary responsibilities of partner content markers/publishers. This is one key motivation for any business to offer an affiliate advertising program to publishers, influencers and bloggers. They indirectly work for your brand as they generate their content for their own products. Such traffic is generated mainly from their own websites/blogs, their social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube channels.

Makes Progress Tracking Easy
 
Traditionally, every affiliate in partnership with an e-commerce store gets to have an ID number unique to the affiliate. That number helps for unmistaken identity for traffic, leads and sales attribution to the affiliate. It is the unique ID from affiliate platforms that makes it easy for all parties to keep track of their overall performance in terms of impressions, clicks, and sales. Affiliate marketing characteristically offers businesses and affiliates this unique wherewithal to keep track of their respective progress in their marketing efforts. With that, businesses are always fully aware of and therefore make no mistakes about the resources that generate traffic to their web stores. As for affiliates, it allows them to easily keep track of their progress and earnings through an automated system everyone relies on and believes in. It is this simplified and automated platform which helps to forestall any chances of dispute since everything is clearly displayed and open to the participating partners.

How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Drive Blogging Success

It now appears that no marketer blogs just for the fun of it, least of all affiliate marketers. Most people are in it for the volume of business it drives and ultimately for the money particularly now that most bloggers are able to deliver brand messages in a succinct, creative, and engaging manner. With that, brands can now leverage affiliate marketing effectively to maximize ROIs on marketing expenses even though many bloggers still face a major challenge of monetizing their blogs for good financial returns. The keyword for blogging success is leveraging. That is what enables bloggers to benefit immensely from association with affiliate marketing networks.

Here’s what gets good leveraging returns.

Bloggers Collaborations


 
As technology changes, the landscape of digital marketing continues to change as well. That is why it can be really challenging to honestly examine what truly works and what doesn’t. What is now not in dispute is that if affiliate networks offer enhanced support to bloggers, better results are obtained. That is collaboration and it is a win-win situation for both parties.  By joining hands with affiliate marketing platforms, bloggers can easily browse through a host of affiliate programs and campaigns before selecting the ones that are best suited to their needs and preferences. Traditionally, affiliate marketing has been one of the most popular ways for bloggers to monetize their online traffic. Smart bloggers are beginning to really understand the value addition that partnering with affiliate networks can drive for them. With online tools from Google chrome extensions which allow bloggers leverage several advertiser programs from just one account, bloggers now work smarter with better results. These tools do help to save bloggers time and the hassles needed to register with multiple affiliate networks and the results can be staggering.

Partnering With Affiliate Networks

Many bloggers often lack the technical expertise to manage attribution, tracking, traffic quality and other intricacies of affiliate partnerships. That is where partnering with affiliate networks has become really important. Partnering with affiliate networks helps to save bloggers the energy, time and valuable resources to research suitable affiliate networks with their preferred type of content, target audience, demographics, etc. That arrangement allows bloggers to concentrate mainly on good content creation while leaving other intricacies for their partner affiliate networks to handle. Thus, bloggers expect these affiliate network partners to provide for them holistic, high tech-backed solutions which facilitate seamless revenue generation opportunities that help them to save time and money. Many of the affiliate networks do not disappoint in that wise. Which is why partnering with leading affiliate marketing networks helps a great deal to enhance valuable benefits for bloggers.

Realizing Market Potentials
 
Social media platforms have become very handy to quickly promote brand popularity in this age and time. These platforms have become very useful to marketers who deploy them to helping their brands realize their market potentials much more rapidly with the power of the internet. Thus, many Brands have been quick to realize the marketing potential of bloggers using social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc. With social media, many bloggers are presently delivering very rich viral dividends for brands online. Both parties through deftly managed digital marketing strategies are bringing social media influencers, owners of online forums and bloggers on board as affiliates for higher engagement, ROIs and ultimately helping to realize many brands market potentials in amazing ways.


 

5 Effective Digital Marketing Tips for Small Business

Smart marketers now know that using digital marketing strategies helps survival in the stiff competition that exists in online business world. The world is presently in a digital era. For that reason, if you want your small business to succeed, it must have an online presence. Incorporating digital marketing into your business strategies can be quite beneficial on the long run. It helps promote and position your brand online to attract more clients/customers. Digital marketing, if well deployed, can help boost sales in your small business enormously. But, to get the best results from it, you must endeavor to be consistent and patient bearing in mind that at times, good results do take some time to manifest.


 
Here are some effective digital marketing tips which have helped many small business entrepreneurs to succeed online.

Creative Content Marketing

Whether visual or written content, you must be creative to assert your authority in any niche business. Content helps to communicate about your product or brand to online visitors to your website. Unarguably, content remains key in the digital marketing world! It plays an essential role in the growth of any small business online. That role is more essentially enhanced if the content you create is unique and original enough to persuade and induce your target audience to make a purchase from your business.

Social Media Marketing

These days, nearly everyone is on social media. If you are a small business owner, you should know that social media marketing has become an essential trend in digital marketing. It is one of the main factors that contribute to any small business presence online. With the extreme popularity and ease of use of social media, you can seamlessly interact, communicate and share with your customers and potential customers. Smart marketers always device means to take advantage of the wide audience of social media to promote and market their products/services.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing. Its effectiveness is directly dependent on the email list of potential customers you have built over time. Without a credible email list, email marketing is grossly ineffective. A simple marketing message sent to hundreds of thousands of persons in your email list has an uncanny effect on getting some good responses. The more responses you get, the higher your chances of getting good patronage for your business.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO
 
For online marketers worldwide, it is usually with Search Engine Optimization, SEO that the men are separated from the boys. Having decided to venture into digital marketing, then you must at least familiarize yourself with SEO even if you are yet to fully master it because of the technicalities involved. SEO techniques are simply strategies used to position your website/blog online with a view to helping it rank high on Search Engine result pages. Here is how it works. Whenever an internet user searches a keyword related to your product or service, they could be presented with a thousand similar websites. SEO ensures your site is at the top of such Search Engine result pages. That helps to enhance the number of clicks it receives and eventual traffic it gets. The more the traffic, the higher your chances of getting good customers! 

Random Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Most marketers are going digital and they have no apologies to anyone for doing so. They have since discovered that digital marketing is vital for most small businesses looking to increase their customer base and patronage. Digital marketing comes in really handy to do so because it allows everyone to showcase their brands and products offering to a much wider audience much more seamlessly by way of digital technology.

Here are randomly selected digital marketing tips helpful to small businesses.

Invest in a good website

This is where to start. Your business website must be user-friendly and easy to navigate. Digital marketing experts say, your website is one of the most vital parts of your business. This is because it is the place where consumers will make judgements about your brand and decide whether to buy your product or service. It serves as an online front office for your business.


 
Google My Business

Free web service for business promotion is always a welcome idea to digital marketers who always keep their eyes on costs. The reason many of them use Google My Business. Google My Business is a free web profile service where you can provide key details about your business, such as your address, opening hours and services you offer. Information that most buyers are interested in!

Put Customers first

In any business, the customer is always king. In digital marketing, targeting customers online is the main objective. As every marketer very well knows, customers are the lifeblood of any business. The reason marketers are best advised to always place customer interests at the heart of any marketing decisions.

Research and spy on your competitors
 
Every marker is in competition with others 24/7. Every one of them fights hard for its own share of limited business out there. The reason you must always be in the know of what your competitors are up to and what they are doing. Researching your competitors is important because it enables you to see what you’re up against at all times. With that information, you explore ways to differentiate your brand so that it can always stand out in the very crowded digital market.

Go Blogging

These days, every serious small business owner runs a blog about the business. Marketers find blogs as excellent form of content that allows you to engage, inform and entertain your readers and potential customers. You can blog about anything but ideally the topic should be related your industry and showcases your expertise in the chosen field.

Be consistent

Consistency helps to build trust and reliability. Consistency is very important when it comes to digital marketing. The reason you must make sure the tone, voice and general feel of your marketing efforts are representative of your business at all times. Doing so is one great way to present yourself as a strong and reliable brand to your customers.


 
Get your business on social media

It is no exaggeration to say most small business owners are on social media these days. The reason everyone must try to be social media savvy if they want good results in their business. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, because of their huge followership if used correctly, can give you great access to their huge audience at no cost. It is within this huge audience that many customers can be found fairly easily.