With the rise of digital marketing, it’s never been easier to reach your customers with the right message and build brand loyalty at the same time. In fact, some of the most powerful tools are free or cost next to nothing! Check out these eight ways to market your business digitally so you can get started on the right foot today!
1) Define your target audience
Identifying your target audience is a crucial part of formulating an effective digital marketing strategy. After all, if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach and what they need, how can you tailor your message for them? If you haven’t already done so, take some time now to research your target audience: What are their specific demographics (age, gender, race/ethnicity, education level)? What are their hobbies and interests?
2) Outline your goals
What do you want your business to achieve? With all of your other requirements laid out, now's a good time to look at what you'd like your business to accomplish. What does success look like? If you're opening a small ice cream shop, for example, you'll probably want it be in a profitable and sustainable location that enables you to continue operating even after periods of slow sales or bad weather. Write down all of your goals and make sure they're specific. You can always refine them later. Remember: Good planning leads to good results!
3) Identify your strengths
Understanding your company’s strengths is a good place to start in your digital marketing efforts. What are you best at? Start there, and go from there. Whatever you do, don’t waste time or money on things you know aren’t going to work for your business. You could find yourself wasting lots of resources on something that just doesn’t fit with what your company does—and that isn’t going to help anyone (including you). A good example would be someone in real estate using a blogging strategy. If they can sell houses through blogging, then by all means—go for it! But if they can't even sell homes with their website, how effective would a blogger truly be?
4) Research your customers
When you know who your customers are, it’s much easier to figure out how best to reach them. Knowing what your target market cares about is a key factor in an effective digital marketing strategy. For example, if your niche is middle-aged parents concerned with nutrition, you need information about how that demographic uses their phones, which apps they use, and for what purposes. Once you know those things—the kind of content they respond to and what websites they visit—you can create more targeted ads that appear in front of exactly who will be interested in your product or service. Knowledge is power when it comes to digital marketing; keeping an ear (or eye) on industry trends and changes can help you build a better marketing strategy that attracts relevant consumers.
5) Create Brand Awareness
One of your top priorities, when you’re building a new business, is creating brand awareness. Brand awareness is important because it makes people recognize, like, and trust your company. Put another way, it gets potential customers to notice your products or services without explicitly asking them for their attention. While getting people’s attention can be hard in a noisy world, creating brand awareness allows you to rise above the din of competitors and get noticed. One of your top priorities, when you’re building a new business, is creating brand awareness. Brand awareness is important because it makes people recognize, like, and trust your company. Put another way, it gets potential customers to notice your products or services without explicitly asking them for their attention.
6) Set up an Email List
Having an email list is a great way to market and promote your business. It’s free, effective, and doesn’t take any time at all. Even if you don’t have many subscribers, it’s still worth setting up.
7) Work with Influencers
Influencers are leaders in their fields, and that means they have dedicated audiences who follow them. Brands work with influencers in a variety of ways, such as giving them products to review or sponsoring a campaign. But one of the most valuable partnerships is a collaborative effort: brands can invite influencers to create content based on their product, share it across their social networks, and use it on their own channels as well.
8) Use the Right Hashtags
Hashtags can help you gain visibility on social media. They give your content a boost by allowing users to click into a stream of like-minded content, and then find yours in that stream. If you’re new to hashtags, experiment by creating some unique ones that are relevant to your business or industry. Just be careful not to overdo it; don’t use more than two or three per post. Instead, focus on choosing keywords that relate specifically to your brand.
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