Why eBooks are Such Important Digital Marketing Tools

The term “eBooks” simply means “electronic books” which are digital books that are published, accessed, and read on the internet using smart devices, e-readers in particular. They are very much unlike books published on paper. EBooks are extremely popular among digital marketers because they are very handy content marketing tools. As the use of electronic devices and the internet continues to rise, eBooks are increasingly becoming popular as online marketing tools as well. This popularity stems from the fact that when compared to regular traditional books, eBooks are more handy and useful for online marketing purposes. They easily fit into digital marketing strategies most digital marketers are comfortable with.

 

Why EBooks Trump Traditional Books Most Times

With the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like tablets and e-readers and the deepening of the internet for information gathering, processing and distribution, eBooks readily trump traditional books in flexibility and use. Specifically for marketing purposes:

EBooks are Cheaper to use: In most cases, eBooks are relatively less expensive than traditional physical books. They are handy, easy to carry around and easily accessible. Most marketers always have an eye on costs, hence they prefer going for eBooks than physical books. Sharing the same information with their customers using printed media would be far more expensive than using eBooks. When marketers use eBooks for marketing purposes, they are able to strictly control their marketing budgets This allows them to channel their financial resources to other areas of the business where resources are needed more.

EBooks are Interactive: Easy interaction means high flexibility which eBooks are quite handy for. Marketers are today able to tactically use the internet to build deeper relationships with their customers by consistently interacting with them on a more personal level. EBooks are very hand devices for this interactive relationship between businesses and customers on the internet. If professionally written, some eBooks offer interactive features, such as audio or video clips, hyperlinks, or other multimedia elements. These elements help to enhance the reading experience of users. They allow readers to experience and interact with the business in immersive ways that aren’t quite possible with traditional books.

EBooks are More Easily Accessible: Many eBook platforms usually offer highly flexible options for readers. With these options, visually impaired readers can easily adjust text size, font, and background color to make it easier for them to read. As marketing tools, this flexibility makes it easy for markers to use eBooks to expand their marketing reach. With eBooks, marketers can easily cater to the differently-abled and reach a segment of the market that might not have been easy to reach otherwise.

EBooks are More Portable to Handle: Business owners can carry hundreds or thousands of eBooks on a single device, such as a smartphone or e-reader. With eBooks, you can literally take your library with you wherever you go. What this means to business owners is that it has become easier than ever before for them to put long-form information into the hands of their customers. They no longer need to incur huge costs on shipping and delivering physical books to customers. EBooks help them to save money by cutting out delivery processes and their attendant costs.
 
EBooks are Digitally Searchable: For digital marketers , nothing can be more convenient for marketing than searchable content. You can quickly search eBooks for a specific word or phrase. This makes it really easy to find specific information or passages. It also makes it easier for customers to find the information they are looking for. Businesses do take advantage of this to effectively share long-form information that answers several questions their customer base may have. This helps to keep the customers better informed. If customers easily find answers to their concerns, it puts them in a better position to do business with you. Helping customers to easily find answers to their questions can give you a competitive advantage over your competition. 

 
How eBooks are Important in Digital Marketing

In digital marketing, eBooks help businesses to easily reach a wider audience. The reason is because eBooks can be easily distributed online and accessed by anyone with an electronic device and from anywhere there in internet. This makes them a hugely effective marketing tool for businesses looking to expand their reach beyond their local areas. For specific marketing purposes, eBooks are:

Great for Market Analytics: You can easily track the performance of eBooks with online analytics tools. Doing so allows businesses to see how many people have downloaded and read their eBooks. This is in addition to other valuable and important marketing metrics such as how long a reader spends reading and where they were located. This gives vital marketing info to businesses to enable them fine-tune their marketing strategies by making adjustments as needed in their strategies.

Suitable for Lead Generation: EBooks are great tools for leads generation. Through CTAs on your website, you can offer an eBook as a free download in exchange for an email address. This way, businesses can build a responsive email list by collecting valuable contact information from interested users. Such email list can with time become a very valuable marketing asset for email campaigns or targeted advertising. Presently, the internet operates on and relies heavily on data. Business owners can access the right data online to enable them to better understand the spending habits and online behavior of their customers. This vital info can enable businesses to formulate strategies to cater specifically to the needs of these customers. This way, business owners can better market to their customers in a laser-focused way for better results. This is something that was hugely challenging for businesses a few years back.

Great for Showcasing Brand Expertise: Business owners also use eBooks to showcase their expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders in their niche industry. With professionally written eBooks on topics related to their business niche, business owners can concretely and concisely demonstrate their expert knowledge and credibility to potential customers. This is one credible way eBooks can help businesses to earn the trust of their numerous customers.

6 Main Benefits of Customer Segmentation in Digital Marketing

Customer segmentation is a strategic marketing tactic that enables marketers to market to customers based on their unique characteristics. Through segmentation, marketers are able to uniquely package and direct their marketing messages and campaigns to the right audience. This is one major advantage of customer segmentation in digital marketing. Through segmentation, marketers can optimize their marketing messages to separate groups of recipients for better effectiveness. When individual customers receive only marketing messages relevant to their needs, it helps to maximize the power of the messages and ultimately their effectiveness.

Following are six main strategic benefits of customer segmentation in digital marketing.

1: Helps to Deliver Personalized Messages

Most marketers know that personalized marketing messages are more effective messages. So, customer segmentation helps them to deliver such personalized messages. These messages largely determine the depth of customer relationship and boost customer loyalty. With personalized messages, customers do feel really special in the reckoning of marketers. That helps to nurture a stronger bonding with customers making it easier to market to them.

2: Yields Higher Returns from Marketing

When marketing messages reach the right audience, they become more effective. Customer segmentation helps to make that possible. Effective marketing messages are great for delivering good returns for a business. So, if you effectively use segmentation to personalize your marketing messages, you get higher returns from your marketing campaigns. This directly helps your marketing strategies to be more effective in delivering higher returns and ultimately a great improvement in your conversions and sales. It can be really great for the bottom line of your business.
 
3: Helps to Cross-Sell and Up-sell Products

Significantly, customer segmentation helps to increase your chances of up-selling and cross-selling products. When marketers diligently examine their audience’s personal preferences and demographic details, they’re better positioned to recommend relevant products to them. Such accurate data-oriented marketing decisions help to make the recommendations more effective particularly in up-selling and cross-selling products.

 
4: Delivers Better Customer Service

No matter the nature and size of your business, customer segmentation provides you the relevant data to better understand your customers. If you understand your customers well enough particularly in their personal details and preferences, you can streamline your marketing approach based on the data you have and consequently market to your customers better. If you carefully evaluate the purchase journey of your customers, you can easily identify their hassles or pain points. By taking positive steps to address these issues and smoothening up their journey, your audience is likely to go through a smoother purchase journey next time around. This can be great for your customer service.

5: Enhances Better Price Optimization

Accurate and relevant data obtained from customer segmentation can help marketers to identify their ideal/model customers. This data can help the marketer to determine what prices customers are willing to pay for a product. Doing so helps marketers in optimizing their product prices. Smart marketers can thus capitalize on this pricing data to test different pricing options to find out the prices that best suit the type of products they are marketing.

6: Helps to Focus on Profitable Customers

One major advantage of customer segmentation for marketers is their ability to prioritize the most profitable customers. Segmentation data helps marketers to know the customers who are more interested in their products. When marketers package special marketing messages and tactically approach these customers, they get better results largely because of repeat purchases. It is such customers you can deliberately nurture to grow your business.

Final Thoughts

No doubt customer segmentation helps marketers to do more and better business. So, if you want to stay competitive in your niche industry, you must understand your customers very well. Customer segmentation is one great way to do so. Therefore, if you really want to boost your marketing campaigns, make sure you use the right customer segmentation tools to bolster your campaigns. Doing so will ultimately deliver a more effective marketing orientation that is growth-prone to your business. 

How to Tactically Use Content to Propel Your Digital Marketing

In digital marketing, it is practically impossible to market successfully without good content. Marketers usually depend on specialized, high-quality content to propel their digital marketing campaigns. It is content that helps marketers to share vital marketing information with their audience. With good content, they can successfully nurture the audience, educate them, and convince them to buy the products/services they’re promoting. This is why smart marketers always explore many ways to add content to their digital marketing mix in a strategic way for best results.

 

Here are six tactics you can strategically add content to your marketing to propel your marketing strategy.

1. Landing Pages: The landing page is where visitors to your website first get to when they land on your website. That makes the page strategically important. You can thus create a selection of at least four landing pages that you can use to test different offers. With these four possible landing pages, you can direct ads from your social media accounts four different ways. This way, you can directly experiment with which kinds of messaging that will lead to the best conversion rates.

2. Monthly Guest-Contributed Articles: Practically, guest posts can help distribute your content to new audiences and bring more qualified traffic back to your site. This is their most important use by marketers. So, if you are able to create at least one guest post per month, you can earn valuable backlinks to boost SEO for your webpage. This helps to drive more organic traffic to your blog posts and the landing pages you’ve created.

3. Monthly Email Newsletter: Sending out content via email at least once a month is an effective marketing strategy. But be sure your emails aside helping to stay in touch, also incorporate other relevant pieces of your content. This content should have links to some of the blog posts or snippets of your most recent guest-contributed articles.

4. Monthly Blog Posts: If you can do at least four monthly blog posts, that is, one a week, your content will be effective. What matters most however is that these blog posts should be informative and of high quality. They must be regular as well. If these blog posts are optimized for the keywords you want to rank for, they help attract good organic traffic to your website.

5. Quarterly Piece of Gated Content: At least one quarterly piece of gated content can be great for your marketing strategy. Technically, gated content is high-value content that offer leads the chance to learn a lot in exchange for their email address. These pieces of content mostly infographics and or whitepapers should be tested for effectiveness before use. Doing so helps to identify what information is most compelling for your audience and is best to use.

6. Quarterly Press Campaigns: Press campaigns are great tactics for a marketing strategy particularly when carried out at least once per quarter. If professionally packaged, a press campaign brings multiple messages together in a coherent story. They are effective when they earn press mentions that can hopefully include backlinks to aid your SEO.

All told, content is not a separate strategy from digital marketing, it is an integral part of it. Content aids your marketing success when it effectively helps you to share important marketing information with your audience in order to nurture them, educate them, and convince them to buy from you. It helps your content strategy when you habitually test and tweak your messaging, try different versions of your content, and in different formats to know what works best for your strategy.

Last Line

Content writing and digital marketing are kind of inseparable. You can’t do one without the other. If you want your marketing strategy to succeed, just allow your digital marketing strategy to be fueled and fed by content and your marketing will be great. Once you understand how the subsections of your digital strategy work together, you can achieve marketing success.

8 Marketing Techniques that Make Your Digital Marketing Strategy Formidable

Content, good content is the main ingredient of digital marketing. It is the fuel for successful digital marketing. Successful digital marketing campaigns are propelled by specialized, high-quality content. There is not a single digital marketing tactic that doesn’t require some sort of content to work well. Through this content, marketers share vital marketing information with their audience. This content sharing is aimed at nurturing the audience, educating them, and convincing them to buy the products/services the marketer is promoting. This is why smart marketers always explore many ways to add content to their digital marketing mix in a strategic way for best results. You can therefore strategically factor in content in the following techniques to make your marketing strategy more formidable.

1. Web Design and Development: Since your website will be home to many types of content, its design should factor that in right from the outset. Ranging from gated whitepapers to blog posts and even evergreen pieces, content is what attracts visitors to your website and the website should be able to accommodate and display this content for the purpose. Your website design and development must be able to house content well and ease up navigation for visitors who are interested in the content.

2. Email Marketing: Emails help to reach a very wide audience with ease and with the right marketing messages. With emails, you can share marketing messages directly with your audience and even receive quick responses from them through same channel. That way, you effectively use emails to nurture leads into paying customers and get new customers as well. This helps to make your digital marketing strategy more formidable.

3. Video Marketing: The average human being is visual in nature. This is why video marketing is a very effective digital marketing technique. With video marketing, the marketer can employ written content in the form of scripts as well as copy for effective digital marketing purposes. These scripts can be used to introduce videos which you can share across many online channels particularly social media and through emails.

4. Social Media Marketing: For best results, you can host your business in several social media channels particularly the very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others. For effectiveness, these social media channels require regular content updates with feeds. These feeds must be populated with unique posts, image captions, and links to more in-depth on-site content.

5. Conversion Rate Optimization: Through this technique, you can host different offer options on the landing pages of your website. The aim of doing this is to see what pieces of content are most valuable to visitors. These are the pages you can optimize to have the best conversion rates.

6. Paid Marketing: Paid marketing usually involves well targeted ads. They not only contain copy, but also need to be populated with high-quality on-site content that is designed to direct people from your paid ads to the products/services you are marketing.

7. SEO: Search Engine Optimization is a technical term for optimizing your website content with the right keywords to enhance its ranking in the SERPs of Search Engines. These keywords can be strategically used on on-site written content, PR content and guest-contributed content that includes backlinks. With the right SEO, these contents can rank for keywords in search results. If they do, people are more likely to find and trust your brand in their online searches.

8. Influencer Marketing: If you deliberately use unique pieces of your content on your website, it can be shared by trusted voices in your industry. These are influencers who can help market or even endorse your products/services to their large audiences. If these influencers are not in your niche/industry, you’ll need to create educational resources to help them understand your brand and be able to promote the brand effectively.

Wrapping Up

Clearly and from the foregoing techniques, all your marketing sections and subsections require content to attract readers who may yet turn out to be leads and even customers. You can thus effectively use the content in different ways/techniques to connect with your audience and to connect the audience with your brand. Doing these things effectively helps to make your digital marketing strategy formidable.

Most Effective Combinations of Digital Marketing Methods

Most Digital Marketers prefer a combination of digital marketing methods as an effective strategy to promote their businesses. If however you are more comfortable using digital marketing strategies separately in your own business, all well and good. Most experts however recommend a combination of methods for best results. Let’s take a look at how various digital marketing methods pair well together and why.

Content Marketing and Most Other Digital Marketing Methods

Among experienced digital marketers, content marketing is readily one of the most popular digital marketing methods. These days, content creation is almost becoming synonymous with digital marketing. As a traffic-attracting technique, consistently creating high-value, impactful and branded content that resonates with your ideal target audience is imperative. This is the content that invariably adds value to the lives of your audience. So, the higher the value you add to your audience’s lives, the more likely they are going to trust you and thus ultimately convert into loyal paying customers. That scenario can be really great for the business of marketers. How then does content marketing combine with other digital marketing methods?

•    Your blogs and articles can be condensed into Tweets, Facebook and Instagram reels.
•    High-value content provides influencers and affiliates with more valuable and useful information to share, leverage and link to.
•    Good content can be optimized for SEM, PPC and SEO to attract targeted traffic.
•    Good content creation gives you an endless repository of information that you can repurpose into your email marketing campaigns.

SEM, PPC, and SEO

A combination of SEM, PPC and SEO is another digital marketing strategy that works well.
•    If you have a good SEO on your content, you can start attracting valuable organic traffic to your website. If you then use a combination of SEM and PPC alongside, it can increase your potential catchment area significantly.
•    SEM and PPC combine to deliver highly targeted and quick results almost instantaneously.
•    For monetization purposes, you can thus combine SEM and PPC to earn money through your website in the short term, while building up your organic traffic as well via SEO.
•    SEO may take some time to get right but once it is in place, it allows you to effectively own your organic traffic and maintain a constant stream of revenue generation via your website over a prolonged period. It is therefore really great for passive income opportunity.

Social Media and Video Marketing

Social media and video marketing are a great combination as a marketing strategy. Social media lends its huge popularity to the combination while video brings its strong visual power on board. This is why the two strategies can pair beautifully together. It is even more effective with popular social media platforms that attract an audience who prefers consuming visual content. For instance:

•    You can create entertaining and educational how-to videos to build trust and teach people about your products/services and how the products/services can best be of help to them.
•    You can occasionally throw in a highly targeted video ad.
•    You can effectively market on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok that specialize in video content.
•    To a lesser degree, you can also market in all major social media platforms that support multiple video formats.
•    You can take full advantage of the easy way to share content on all major social media platforms to get as much reach as possible on your video content. If any of your videos manages to go viral, so much the better for your marketing efforts.
 
Audio Marketing and Affiliate Marketing

Since podcasting and online radio are increasingly becoming popular with digital marketers, a combination of both with affiliate marketing can yield significantly valuable results. Here’s is how:

•    These two marketing strategies used together can help to quickly spread your marketing messages far and wide to as many new prospective customers as possible.
•    Affiliate celebrity products endorsement is a very powerful way to get new customers.
•    Influencers, who have a popular podcast, can help to grow your brand awareness significantly because many are “industry experts” with tremendous following.

SEO and Email Marketing

SEO and Email marketing as a combined strategy can work wonderfully well together if well executed. If you can effectively combine SEO and email marketing, you are essentially creating three new and more effective ways of attracting new customers. First, organically, via SEO, second, through a compelling sales copy, and third through further nurturing in your mailing list. Here is how:

•    Since it is very important for you to have a responsive email list in place, with SEO, you can build it organically. An organically built email list has the best possible chances of converting well.
•    You can use powerful lead magnets like eBooks to get users to join your email list.
•    Your website visitors, who don’t follow the CTA at the end of your eBook, can be further nurtured by way of follow-up emails.
•    If your eBook is valuable and free, it will be powerful enough to grow your email list. Visitors who want to claim your free eBook will be required to share their emails and opt into your mailing list in exchange for the eBook.
•    Your email newsletters can be well optimized with SEO to attract relevant organic traffic that can enhance your conversions.

Wrapping Up

From the foregoing, you can see that the ingenuity of marketers when combining marketing strategies is hugely important. Therefore, it is advisable to always go for what works best for you in whatever combinations. Since it is good marketing results you want, whatever combination of strategies that gives you the results is what is best for your business. It is advisable therefore that you should not limit yourself to just one form of digital marketing. Be open to all the available digital marketing strategies and their combinations and your business will be remarkably better for it.

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.

7 Digital Marketing Techniques that Deliver Quick Results

Digital marketing is a vast and rapidly evolving marketing field with many strategies and tactics. If you are a digital marketer, the results you get can never be really good if you are unable to to utilize effective digital channels like search engines, social media, email, and websites to promote your products/services. Doing this successfully involves various techniques and strategies which you really need to reach and engage with a target audience cost-effectively and measurably. Digital marketing can include various tactics, the most effective of which are discussed below. 

Effective digital marketing allows businesses to easily reach a global audience, increase brand awareness and generate leads and sales. You can effectively track your results with Google analytics to know if and when you are doing well. As technology advances and more and more people are going online to do business, digital marketing has become hugely essential to any successful marketing strategy. Here are some of the most popular types of digital marketing that can help you deliver quick results.

1. Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing entails partnering with other business owners or individuals to promote products/services. In this marketing arrangement, affiliates help product merchants to promote products in exchange for commissions from each sale or conversion they help to generate.

2. Social Media Marketing: This involves leveraging popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to build brand awareness, engage with customers, and drive website traffic as well as conversions and sales.

3. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): This is a very effective online advertising technique where you have to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. The most common and popular form of PPC is search engine advertising. By this arrangement, marketers have to bid on keywords related to their businesses. That enables Google to display their ads at the top of its SERPs. This translates to good organic traffic for the marketer.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO entails optimizing your website and content to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That way, it manages to help drive more organic traffic to your website/blog.

5. Content Marketing: Content marketing involves consistently creating and sharing valuable and impactful content multichannel online. Such content can be packaged in form of blog posts, infographics, videos and e-books to sensitize, attract and retain a clearly defined audience. This is with a view to stimulating or inducing a favorable customer action.

6. Email Marketing: Email marketing entails sending targeted promotional messages or newsletters to a list of subscribers with a view to driving traffic, sales, or any other desired actions. Email messages can reach hundreds of thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds with just the press of a computer button.

7. Influencer Marketing: This involves partnering with influential people who have a large following on social media. These people may be popular bloggers, celebrities, sports personalities, famous people and entertainers. The partnership is with a view to promoting your products/services to their large audiences.

Best 25 Techniques to Get Free Advertising for Your Small Online Business

Most small business owners are always operating on a very tight budget particularly for advertising. This is why they always look for cost-effective ways to promote their products and reach new customers. Online, the most cost-effective way to promote products/services is by way of free ads. However, knowing exactly where or how to get free ads is always a huge challenge for most small business owners. I believe this article can hugely benefit such small business owners. If you are in that category, following are 25 of the best techniques that can help you to advertise your products/services for free and to reach many more new customers.

1. Word-of-Mouth: This is one very effective technique many business owners tend to ignore to their own disadvantage. Smart small business owners can always effectively leverage their social networks to encourage customers to spread the word about their businesses to their friends, associates and family.

2. Affiliate Marketing: For free ads, you can effectively partner with affiliates who can widely promote your products/services to their own various audiences at no ads cost to your business. Even with this free service, affiliates are only entitled to a commission on any sales they generate.

3. Social Media: You can create a social media presence on very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. This will enable you to reach a much wider audience and get more new customers mostly for free.

4. Content Marketing: If you can consistently create high-value and impactful content and share multichannel, your business can reach many people online. This is more so if the content is packaged in form of blog posts, videos, infographics, and more and shared to your target audience.

5. Email Marketing: If you build a responsive email list over time, you can send regular newsletters or promotional emails to keep customers engaged. That helps to give your business a wide exposure and at minimal costs if any.

6. Community Involvement: Another great way to get free ads for your business is by community involvement. You can participate in local events, sports derbies, charity road walks, sporting and athletics events, community clean ups to get free ads for your business, In addition, you can support any other community initiatives which can help build brand recognition and goodwill for your business.

7. Cross-Promotion: You can partner with complementary businesses and businesses in your niche to promote each other’s products/services to your various audiences. This helps your own brand exposure a great deal.

8. Online Directories: To get free and unlimited exposure for your business, you can submit the business to popular online directories like Google-My-Business, GMB, Yelp, and Yellow Pages.

9. Online Contests and Giveaways: If you occasionally host contests or giveaways on social media or on your website/blog, you can attract more new followers and effectively engage your current audience. That translates to good exposure all for free.

10. Google Maps: If you make sure your business is listed, up-to-date and accurate on Google Maps, it can improve real visibility for the business. That enables the business to attract many more local customers.

11. Business Blogging: Blogging is readily the most popular form of content marketing among small business owners. If you can create a blog on your website to share your small business news, promos, discounts, price adjustments, industry insights and helpful tips with your audience, your business benefits from free ads as a result.

12. Web Directories: You can submit your website/blog to online Directories like Best of the Web to improve your website’s SEO and increase visibility for free for your business.

13. Influencer Marketing: If you partner with influencers in your niche or industry, you can more easily reach their diverse and wide audiences. That way, your business can gain unrestricted exposure through sponsored posts and or collaborations.

14. Networking Events: If you want free exposure for your business, you can choose to attend Networking Events or join Networking Groups to meet potential customers and business collaborators.

15. Referral Programs: If you have being in business for a while, you can get free publicity if you encourage satisfied customers to refer friends, associates and family members in exchange for discounts and or any other incentives.
 
16. Guest Blogging: You can become a guest blogger and get wider exposure on the websites of popular and reputable blogs. If you consistently write impactful guest blog posts for other websites, you can showcase your expertise, get more attention and attract their readers to your business.

17. Business Directories: When you list your business pages in online business directories like Dun & Bradstreet, it can improve visibility and attract new customers to your business.

18. Free Samples or Trials: You can selectively offer free samples or trials of your product/service to attract potential customers and generate word-of-mouth buzz for your business.

19. Video Marketing: If you have the right skills, you can create engaging videos about your business/products and share them multichannel particularly on popular social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or other popular video platforms.

20. Mobile Marketing: From anywhere you find yourself and you have a smartphone, you can use SMS marketing, push notifications, or mobile apps to reach customers on their mobile devices. It greatly enhances exposure for your business at just the minimal cost of an SMS.

21. Press Releases: PRs are very effective tools to get free publicity for your business. You can carefully write highly informative Press Releases and distribute them widely and multichannel to announce new products, services, or your business milestones. If your PRs get to journalists and popular media outlets, they receive unrestricted publicity which enhances visibility for your business.

22. Public Relations: You can carefully package your business story or expertise and pitch it to media outlets like newspapers or even podcasts. If they publish, it earns your business free publicity in the bargain.
 
23. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You can technically optimize your website/blog for search engines to improve your chances of appearing tops on their SERPs. Your business will benefit from increased visibility and good organic traffic as a result.
 
24. Online Forums: You can actively participate in online forums or groups related to your industry to establish your expertise in your chosen field. That’s one great way to freely promote your business in the forums and to forum members.
 
25. Online Reviews: If you encourage customers to leave positive online reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook business page, it can significantly boost your online reputation at no cost to your business. That equates to free publicity for your business.

Free Online Advertising Tips to Attract Potential Customers

Did I hear you say no ads are really free? Well, somehow yes. You can talk of minimal cost then if that makes you more comfortable. As an online small business owner, your business cannot grow without customers. Even as important it is to attract potential customers, attracting them at minimal cost is even more important. This is where free ads become very important to your business. Attracting the right customers without spending too much money is great for the bottom line in your online business. Fortunately for marketers, there are several ways you can get free advertising for your business without spending a fortune. These here tips will show you how.

 
Most Popular Places Online to Get Free Ads

GMB-Free Business Listings: Do you know you can register your small local business on Google and advertise it for free? Yes, that’s the valuable service Google presently renders to businesses through Google-My-Business, GMB. If you register, the service allows your business to appear in Google Maps and local search results particularly when you optimize for local searches. For best results, you should optimize your GMB-free business listings with accurate and up-to-date information and photos. That helps to increase its visibility and consequently attract more potential customers.

Free Ads on Facebook Messenger: If you want to advertise for free on Facebook Messenger, you can create a Chatbot using the Facebook Messenger API. Chatbot is powered by Artificial Intelligence, AI. So, you can program your Chatbot to offer customer support, provide product recommendations, and even complete transactions directly within the Messenger app. If you leverage this important AI technology well enough, it helps your business to reach more customers where they are already spending their time.

Techniques to take full Advantage of Free Ads Channels

Consistently Create Valuable Content: You can do this by way of various formats, and then publish them as blog posts, videos, or infographics. Such content that can provide value to your target audience and showcase your expertise even if advertised free can get good results.

Get Listed on Popular Directories: You can register your business on popular online directories like Google-My-Business, GMB, Yelp, and YellowPages. Doing so helps to increase visibility for your business in search results.

Collaborate with other Businesses: If you take steps to partner with complementary businesses, particularly businesses in the same niche you are, it can help you to reach wider new audiences and gain more exposure.

Tactically Utilize Email Marketing: You must first be sure you have a credible and reliable email list in place. It is usually a very valuable marketing asset to have. Through this list, you can regularly send out email newsletters, product promotions, discounts, price adjustments, and other important updates about your business.

Leverage Social Media: Yeah, social media is now where nearly everyone is at around the world 24/7. One great market place if you ask me! You can take good advantage of the very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes to promote your business and engage with potential customers mostly for free.

How Best To Use Affiliate Links in Your Digital Marketing

In digital marketing parlance, an affiliate link is a unique URL given as a referral to affiliates for tracking traffic movement from the affiliate website to the merchant website. Digital marketers rely on these links to help them track the traffic and conversions generated by each affiliate. The commissions due to affiliates are determined on the basis on these conversions. What this means is that without unique affiliate links, it is practically impossible to attribute conversions correctly and accurately to affiliates. This is because the links help affiliates to track their performance. Data from the tracking helps affiliates to refine and improve their strategies to attract more traffic, get more leads and conversions. To get these results, an affiliate must promote these unique links in the right places and via the right channels that can help enhance their visibility. It is not really the affiliate links per se but the ways the links are promoted that greatly help to enhance their effectiveness.

 
Following are tested and effective ways to efficiently promote your affiliate links in your digital marketing to get the most benefits from the links.

Use Affiliate Links in Your Product Reviews

Affiliate marketers use product reviews to attract engagement from their audience by building interest and curiosity. So when affiliates promote affiliate links to the products they are marketing in the content of these reviews, they help to generate traffic and even conversions. For better results, you can also create affiliate review videos to promote your affiliate products and links. Reviews may be directly responsible for driving traffic to your content but the affiliate links you promote along the content help to generate leads, conversions and sales from the traffic.

Use As Affiliate Banners on Your Website

Banners as ads tools on your website are highly visual. They directly appeal to your audience thereby increasing the chances of clicks. If this happens, the affiliate links on the banners will direct the visitors to the products you are marketing. That increases the chances of conversions and sales. But, the locations you place these banners on your webpage is of paramount importance. For best results however, you can best place banners on the top of your web pages and on the sidebars and footers of the pages. On these locations, banners tend to be more visible and as such generate more clicks.
 
Use Links on Repurposed Video Content

Marketing videos are highly visual and naturally help to increase traffic to websites. Therefore, adding video content to your website is highly beneficial to the website. If the videos carry affiliate links, they help direct traffic to your affiliate products. It is smart marketing therefore to add affiliate links to your video content by simply mentioning the link in your video or in the description. If your video is of high quality and impactful enough, it will attract a significant number of clicks on your affiliate links. That can be great for conversions and sales.

Add Links on Your Landing Page

Your landing page is a webpage on your website where every visitor first makes contact with. It usually has details of the merchant tools, applications, software and apps you use and the products/services you are marketing. You can add your affiliate links to these products’ descriptions for maximum exposure to visitors who land on your website. When your visitors understand these descriptions, they may be tempted to click on the links. That gives you the ultimate benefit of getting conversions and sales.

Add Affiliate Links to Your Email Newsletters

In digital marketing, emails Newsletters are a very effective way to build great relationships with your audiences. This is more so when you already have in place a responsive email list which you can segment for more effective marketing. With such list of subscribers, you already have a very valuable marketing asset in place to handle your promotions. It contains a list of persons who already subscribe to what you are up to and as such well positioned to read your newsletters. Newsletters to such a list usually serve as veritable channels to promote affiliate links. They help you to build the much needed trust with your recipients and that helps to enhance more clicks on your affiliate links.

Run Links on Pay-Per-Click Ads

Running ads particularly on Google is one great way to promote your affiliate links to attract clicks. In digital marketing, this is about the most direct and straightforward way to promote affiliate links. Characteristically, it manages to bring in the most clicks and conversions. It is a very efficient way too because you are only required to pay for clicks successfully delivered and nothing more.
 
Add Links to Your Posts on Content Publishing Platforms

If you are a blogger, aside adding links on the blog content of your blog, you can also add links on the content you publish as a guest blogger on other platforms or on the content you publish on content publishing platforms like Medium. Such platforms allow you to do link promotions in your posts directly. That means you are allowed to add your affiliate links to your posts on such content publishing platforms to generate traffic and clicks.

Use Affiliate Links on Your Own Products

If you run your own e-commerce store, it means you have your own products to sell. You can add affiliate links to the descriptions of these products. Be careful though to ensure you naturally add affiliate links to your products in relevant places. If your audience already trusts you enough to come over to your store, they will also trust the affiliate products that you market with the affiliate links in your products. That translates to more clicks and a rise in affiliate sales.

Use Links on your Content on Social Media and Forums

Social media is one hugely popular hangout for most people these days. Smart marketers target their audiences there as well with affiliate products. To leverage marketing on social media effectively, a marketer must have a sizeable following and a good online presence particularly on the very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. Once you’ve created this online presence, you can tactically promote your affiliate links leveraging the in-house marketing tools of the various platforms. Some of the platforms allow you to add affiliate links to your social media bio and descriptions. You can also create posts tactically promoting these links on the platforms. You can in addition promote affiliate links on popular forums with like-minded discussants and with good results as well.

Last Line

If you are able to promote your affiliate links well enough, it is possible for you to earn more in affiliate marketing. No doubt affiliate marketing is one great way to earn money online. But, you need to know the right strategies/techniques to promote your affiliate links online to make this happen. All the foregoing strategies/ways/techniques as discussed come in very handy in that quest. 

9 Twitter Marketing Tips to Boost Your Digital Marketing

With presently over 450 active users worldwide, Twitter is one huge market out there in the digital marketing world. Digital marketers who want to boost their businesses cannot afford to miss out in this huge market. Yes, many may already have accounts on Twitter but how effective are these accounts to their businesses. Without the right marketing tools and strategies, it is pretty difficult to boost your business and gain brand recognition on Twitter.

There are many marketing tools and strategies that can help your business reach more people and gain brand recognition on social media. Some of these tools and strategies are better suited for Twitter because it is one of the most popular and easily accessible social media platforms out there. For digital marketing purposes, Twitter has unique advantages such as, it is free to use, content can be shared easily on the platform, it is suitable to widely expand business reach, you can engage customers one-on-one on Twitter and discuss business with them and above all, you can quickly build brand recognition on Twitter. Following tips are quite handy to help you build brand recognition and boost your business on Twitter.

1. Basic Twitter Business Tips

If you want to build your business with Twitter, there are some basic things you must do to set up your Twitter account properly. Make sure you customize your Twitter page with all the basic essentials for easy recognition such as, the right logo, branded image for the header, direct URL link to your business website, proper, up-to-date and informative bio, your profile-pic and any other basic info for unique business recognition. Next step is to work consistently to increase your follower count and drive people to your website.
 
2. Effectively Use Keywords Targeting

Effective keywords targeting on Twitter Ads allows you to reach users interested in your content through words and phrases. You can take deliberate steps to optimize growth on Twitter and broaden your reach by connecting with your target audience using selected targeted keywords that should be no less than 25 in number. These keywords if properly selected can help you to reach exactly who you want on Twitter. Once you understand your target audience well enough, you’ll know the right keywords to use.

3. Generously Use Images and Videos

The average human being is visual in nature. That is why images and videos can be very effective marketing tools on Twitter. Make sure the content you create on Twitter always includes images and videos to attract quick attention. Since people are generally visual, good visuals accompanying your digital content on Twitter can be directly responsible for the success of your marketing campaigns. Videos are particularly very impressive on Twitter because they are directly responsible for increasing engagement significantly. Even ordinary simple posts on Twitter tend to attract better attention when accompanied by images/videos. 

4. Directly Interact with Followers

Engagement is key in Twitter marketing and direct interaction with your Twitter followers enhances engagement. It is essential to have your followers, click, react, and interact with your content at all times. If Twitter users know they are engaging with a human being, they feel encouraged to engage more meaningfully. Direct interaction with them encourages that. Therefore, it is hugely important to directly interact with your followers on Twitter, liking, responding, and showing them you care. Doing so makes them feel seen and appreciated. That helps you to build your following more quickly and increases brand loyalty as a consequence.

5. Widely Share Media Mentions

You must pay attention to media and other businesses that share articles, URLs, and anything else related to your business because there is a lot of interrelationship on social media particularly Twitter. So anytime you see your business mentioned or referred to on Twitter, do not neglect to widely share the mention since it serves a number of purposes. Sharing your mentions on Twitter helps to confer legitimacy on your business, shows business recognition and helps you with more valuable content on your Twitter page. It also helps you to really appreciate all those who mentioned you or referred to you. It can help improve brand loyalty for your business because the media mention can really be persuasive in the minds of your followers who in turn will focus more on your business and  likely share your content more intensely.

6. Regularly Echo Your Content

Characteristically, Twitter as a popular social media platform is unique and fast moving. Content can be easily missed on the platform as a result. Regularly echoing your valuable content at different times of the day can help fix that. By doing so, it is possible for you to reach many more people if you send out your content again at regular intervals but not too frequently though. Echoing your content helps you to reach more people who may have missed out on your earlier post because of time constraints.
 
7. Diligently Research Competitors

It is smart marketing to keep a keen eye on your competition particularly on a uniquely fast moving social media platform like Twitter. You cannot afford to ignore your competitors in a marketing environment like that. If you have an eye on your competition, you’ll know what works for them and what doesn’t. You’ll find out why they do what they do on the platform then shape your own interaction from these lessons to get better results in your marketing. You can use their marketing efforts and tricks as a guide to craft and post content that fits your business and where it is at. It can help you discover new marketing trends and new ways of marketing on Twitter that get good results. Knowing what your competitors are up to in their marketing campaigns can help you to price your own offers more competitively. You can intelligently respond to rival campaigns with your own initiatives as needed if you know what your competitors are doing on Twitter.

8. Regularly Check Direct Messages

A huge volume of open communication usually goes on Twitter with tweets but direct messages provide avenues for private conversations. Many followers may want to take you on directly in what they consider as private concerns. Do not ignore these messages because they are incredibly useful and provide the much needed privacy. Check your direct Twitter messages regularly to address any questions or concerns your followers or any other users might have. Doing so can be great for your customer service as a business owner.

9. Have a Content Sharing Schedule

Twitter as a popular social media platform is used around the world and across different time zones. Since sharing content at the right time significantly adds to its effectiveness, you must be time conscious when making your posts depending on whom and where you are targeting. You must however be consistent though no matter who or where you are targeting. If your followers know you are consistent, they’ll know what to expect and at what times. That way, they’ll habitually check on your page more often for possibly new posts and content. If you do diligent research with your Twitter Analytics, you’ll discover perfect times to make your posts to get maximum audience attention. This includes the right time of the day, the right day of the week, weekends, mornings, afternoons, and or evenings. Having a content sharing schedule helps to maximize your digital marketing efforts to significantly boost your business.

Lead Generation Strategies to Boost Your Sales Revenue

In digital marketing parlance, a lead is any person/entity expressing interest in the product/service you are marketing. Obtaining such persons/entities by deliberate marketing efforts is lead generation. Marketers acquire leads to grow their customer base by way of leads, conversions and sales. More sales in your business directly translate to a boost in your sales revenue. So, to generate more sales, you must deploy effective strategies to get more leads and eventual conversions. Following are some of the best lead marketing strategies you can deploy to get more leads for your business.

 

Compile a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is like profiling the individuals you want to target with your marketing messages who may be interested in buying your products/services. If you use the right parameters and segmentation, you can have the right insight into the prospective buyer's needs and wants. You can have an insight into their specific purchasing attitudes and the criteria that can drive them to purchase your products/services. If you have these vital insights of your products/services buyers' persona, it becomes easier for you to create actionable and efficient lead generation strategies. With this persona in mind, you can easily fine-tune all your marketing efforts/strategies to resonate well with the buyer who wants and needs the products/services you are offering. That way, you can get more leads, conversions and sales.
 
Enable Sales Chat Feature on Your Website

Communication is really key to successful marketing efforts in this age and time. If this communication is instant and two-way, so much the better! When visitors take advantage of the chart feature on your website, it is easier for you to deal with them real time, address their concerns instantly and eventually convert them to leads. The presence of a sales chat feature on your website can easily turn ordinary visitors into leads because they can talk to you to know more details about the products/services you are marketing. With chat features like Skype for instance, visitors are easily at ease knowing they are talking to “someone.” With AI like Chatbots, you can have a 24/7 chat feature that helps you to maintain a great customer experience no matter what time of the day or night customers are on your website. These chat features are inevitably handy to help you to nurture your website visitors and convert them into leads and customers. The more leads and conversions you get this way, the more sales you make.

Rev Up Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content remains king in digital marketing particularly for ecommerce business owners. When links to products are embedded in content and promoted widely online, they help to get traffic and clicks back to products on the ecommerce website. The best content is content that is highly informative and impactful. If such content is optimized with the right keywords, it attracts the attention of search engines. Search engines like to go for optimized content, rank it higher in their SERPs and send organic traffic to it. Without good content, your website cannot reach the top search results whenever an Internet user keys in a search. The more good content you create on your website therefore, the more traffic it attracts and the more leads it gets. When your web visitors like your content, they stay with it, read it and may eventually subscribe to your products/services. When the traffic to your website leads to sales, it helps to boost your sales revenue. That is what good content helps to enhance.

Collaborate with Influencers

The advent of social media has really made influencer marketing popular. Influencers are celebrities in the online world particularly social media with huge audience and at times fanatical following. If you partner with and collaborate with influencers, they can help talk about your products, try them out, endorse them and even recommend them to their huge audiences. They can even serve as affiliate marketers to your products and earn commissions on the sales they generate or earn discount codes on your products. That way, influencers can help to promote your products/services, bring in more leads and eventual sales. Most influencers are known for constantly creating a buzz and hype in the online world. This can have a very positive effect on the products/services they are helping to market. This celebrity buzz can help to drive interest to your products/services. That translates to leads and sales for your website.
 
Task Your Current Customers for Referrals

If you want to task your current customers for referrals, there are some marketing strategies you can deploy to help turn them into a good source of leads. This is because there's no one better to ask for referrals than your current customers. Your customers already know your brand, they are delighted with it and are thus in the best position to refer others to the brand. For this reason, you can directly reach out to your customers tasking them on referrals. This you can induce with incentives like discount codes, coupons, or thank you gifts for each referral they send to you. You can also encourage your current customers to send new referrals to your business by giving them a warm follow-up and thank you message after each purchase. Doing this routinely can help you to generate more leads through customer referrals.