Digital Marketing Tips to Succeed in Hard Times

Digital marketing is increasingly getting popular as one credible way to make money online. It daily provides new business opportunities for millions of marketers around the world. Under the tough economic times the world is currently going through because of covid-19 pandemic, digital marketing has become more relevant to survive the restricted life styles of most marketers. Online business marketers now use robust digital marketing strategies to promote their businesses around the world and they are earning good money even in restricted living. Digital marketing now opens many doors to targeted and niche-based marketing. Once you have in-depth understanding of your audience with their demographics, industries, interests etc. you can easily frame your marketing strategy around these parameters. Yes, the economic times are hard right now but you can’t give up just like that. With digital marketing, it is possible to weather these tough economic times.


 
These here consolidated digital marketing tips can help you to enrich your marketing strategy to drive your business to succeed even in these hard times.

Build and Maintain a Credible Mailing List

In digital marketing business, a mailing list remains a very valuable asset for marketers. If diligently and honestly built, your mailing list can be a real treasure trove. It allows you to stay in touch and be able to engage your customers on a one-to-one basis, sharing relevant information, promo materials, content, products etc. Your mailing list makes it possible for you to have active on-going relationships with your customers. If properly used, your mailing list helps to convert leads to customers at a faster rate since it tends to generate click-throughs on your ads better.

Join Affiliate Programs

In the restricted living the world is going through, Affiliate marketing remains a potentially huge reservoir of opportunities for marketers to make money. You can select popular products from product merchants, help promote these products from your blog posts and earn a commission for your efforts. This you can do better by helping these merchants to review their products on your website, write about the products, display their banners on your website or have their businesses regularly mentioned and linked-back to in your blog posts. When your blog readers click through from your website to make a purchase, you earn a commission from each purchase.

Regularly Create Relevant and Engaging Content 
 
Good content remains a very strong pillar of digital marketing. Regularly creating and posting good and engaging content from your blog posts helps to attract the much needed traffic from which you can generate leads and customers for the products you are promoting. The good content you create helps to affirm you as a credible authority in your niche. It not only attracts and engages your blog visitors; it also shows that you know what you are doing. That helps people to quickly build trust in you. Most importantly, maintaining an active and engaging blog greatly helps your visibility in search engine results. That helps your blog SEO a great deal. If your blog can be easily found through searches on the web, it boosts your chances of better arresting the attention of millions of free-roamers on the internet. Such good content helps to engage these visitors and somehow converts some of them into leads and eventually long-term customers. A real boost to the earning power of your digital marketing efforts!

Be Liberal with Free-Products/Giveaways

Many Digital marketers have discovered that one of the most effective ways of expanding their mail lists and wooing new customers is the liberal use of free products/giveaways. Interestingly, these are products you can easily create yourself to help attract customers. These products are usually very effective baits to get your website visitors sign up for your mailing list. You can do this by simply creating such-like giveaway products as free info manuals, pictures/graphics or eBooks to share with visitors to your website.

Use Promotional Offers Generously


 
Many Digital marketers generously use promotional offers to lure customers. These are items of value that do help the customer’s purse. Many customers really like discounted coupons to help them reduce their shopping costs. This is one real appealing factor to a lot of online customers. If you generously use extra discounts through coupons and vouchers to your customers, your business can make tremendous gains from such offers. Before too long, positive words about your business get around quickly, giving the business the much needed boost.

Establish Your Business Reputation Through Reviews and Testimonials
 
Nothing promotes a business faster and better than the words from satisfied customers. The reason you must encourage but not induce your customers to freely and publicly give testimonials about their experiences with your business and the products you are promoting. In Digital marketing, online reviews are some of the most powerful promotional tools for the business. They help conversions much faster if well displayed for potential customers to access. Many online shoppers generally like to compare and go extensively through products reviews before buying a product/service.


 

10 Vital Lessons on Ecommerce Marketing

If you run an ecommerce site, just pay attention to these lessons. They are mostly customer based and the persistent search for ways to improve on how to serve them better. For very huge ecommerce marketing platforms like Amazon, what drives their marketing efforts is their deep understanding of the customer and their relentless search for self-improvement. If you run an ecommerce site and you want to compete with giants like Amazon, study these lessons very carefully.

These here 10 lessons if faithfully applied can help any ecommerce site better serve its customers.

1. Seamless and Pain-free Transactions
 
Because of habitual constraints in online transactions, ecommerce by nature may engender a lot of customer constraints and pains. Shipping costs, damaged or missing products and return of unsatisfactory products are usually areas of concerns. You can mitigate some of these constraints by way of free shipping, free return-shipping of damaged and unsatisfactory products, money-back guarantees and convenience to drop-off returns at designated/convenient collection centres.


 
2. Know Your Customers Closely
 
To be able to deliver personalized service which many customers really like, you can get to know them deep enough by way of their behavioral data from your ecommerce site. This data is not too complicated to collect. With it, you can help to ease a customer’s shopping experience by way of suggestions and tips to help them make a buying decision seamlessly. That way, it is easy for you to position yourself to the customer as a sympathetic partner in his otherwise complicated shopping forays.

3. Leverage Your Customers to Get More Customers
 
“Word-of-mouth” remains a very powerful customer referral effort in aid of marketers. It usually comes from satisfied customers who are easily believed by other people. On your ecommerce platform, if you manage to make customer experiences unique and positive, such customers willingly and happily tell others. Before too long, the word gets around that you are the best there is in the business and many other people will be looking out to do business with you. The force multiplier from the “word-of-mouth” of your satisfied customers can do amazing things for your ecommerce business.

4. Allow Buyers a Wish-List Store

Habitually, many online shoppers do spend a lot of time researching products before making the decision to buy. By allowing them an onsite wish-list store, buyers can store in a list items they like, but are not yet ready to buy. That list simply means they have a deep interest in such items which maybe for lack of sufficient money or time not yet due to buy them, they are earmarked for purchase at a later date. Such list usually gives them the impetus to return to your site to do business at some later dates of their choosing instead of going elsewhere to shop.

5. Have a Membership Rewards Program in Place

Membership rewards have many variants such as paid subscription for prime membership, free and priority shipping or access to special discounted products. It is a good way to retain loyal customers. Rewards programs may cost the ecommerce site some money which is recoverable from the increased patronage from Prime members. It has been established that Prime members on average usually spend much more shopping than non-Prime members. That is a win-win situation for all parties.


 
6. Make Testing and Innovation a Priority

Out there on the internet, the competition is always very fierce for ecommerce marketers. The reason you must be really proactive if you want to remain relevant in ecommerce business. You must always think ahead, innovate and stay at least one step ahead your competitors. That is proactive competition which is a credible survival strategy in ecommerce business.

7. Use Mixed Personalized Recommendations

Every customer likes to feel important. Nothing boosts that feeling more than the ecommerce platform taking personalized interest in serving its customers. With customer behavioral and purchases data at the disposal of the ecommerce site, it is easy to make targeted recommendations to customers to help their buying decisions. You can make personalized recommendations not only based on recent purchases, but also for your next buy including a variety. This variety usually derives from your wish list, past browsing sessions, or recent buys encapsulated in your behavioral data. The ecommerce site can also entice you by showing you other products that could go with your past purchases or some new pieces in the same range you like to buy. That way, a customer may end up at times buying more than she earlier intended.

8. Simplify Regular Repeat Buys for Customers

If you want to retain customer delight and loyalty you must find ways to simplify repeat buys. Because of the many easily exhaustible household items needed month after month, you can encourage customers to have “standing orders” for some purchases. This gives these customers the advantage of buying these products at discounted prices and having them automatically delivered up at given times of the month without them having to make any fresh orders. That way, such customers don’t necessarily have to remember to stock up on such regular items. That is one great value-added service to customers and guaranteed purchases from the ecommerce marketer. 


 
9. Give Customers Wider Products’ Insights

Characteristically, one of the major drawbacks of buying online is that we cannot touch, feel, turn, or hold products. We can only see virtual images of such products. This limitation tends to slow down buying decisions. Many ecommerce sites are now providing for better and more detailed examination of products by using near 3-D images, image guidelines to sellers on close-ups and image insets by way of more robust literature and brochures which are very vivid in virtual space. All these tend to make online buying more distrust-free.

10. Deploy User Reviews Very Generously

There is research evidence that about 85% of online customers trust online reviews of peers. This is the reason why many people usually rely on the opinions of their peers and even social media influencers before making their buying decisions. Many marketers now regard customer testimonials as hugely important for any online marketing business. For effects, these testimonials are usually genuine and truthful and are neither coerced nor induced. The reason they’re easily believable. When these testimonials are made available right below each product on display for sale, they help to make customer buying decisions faster.