With the increase in competition in the marketing world, you need to develop strategies that outshine those of your competitors. This puts pressure on the CMO to come up with such strategies and help promote the company. For this, you must first have a good knowledge of what digital marketing entails and what are the various successful strategies that work. For this, we have compiled a list of 12 digital marketing strategies that you must try if you are a customer-driven CMO.

12 Digital Marketing Strategies for a Customer-Driven CMO

#1. Focus on a Holistic Customer Experience

Making customers feel valued at every stage – right from being a potential customer to the buying experience and also the after-sales services and newsletters – is very important. In the competitive world, making them feel welcome at every moment helps you attract more customers and make people keep coming back to you. If you provide a good buying experience to customers, but a bad after-sales experience when they call you for some problem, customers will not want to come back to your company, and may also keep other people from buying your products, which is certainly not good for your company.

#2. Prioritise Social Media Marketing

Social media is the biggest platform for you to reach out to potential customers in one go. With people logging onto social media almost daily, you can focus and reach a majority of your target audience easily and more effectively. Thus, it is better for you to direct most of your paid advertising budget towards ads on social media. People have gotten used to ignoring ads on traditional media, which renders them ineffective.

#3. Invest in Analytics

Analytics and other tools help you understand the market, the progress and success of your campaigns, and other such important information. Analytics provide you with the metrics for digital marketing. They help you understand which campaigns will work and which ones won’t. Using analytics is essential in the digital age to stay ahead of the competition, as everyone uses those nowadays.

#4. Build Buyer Personas

Buyer personas help you understand your average customer, how they think, what they like, what they care about and other valuable information. This information can help you target them and mould your campaigns to suit what they like. It helps build effective campaigns which are more likely to generate leads from the interested customers.

#5. Use Email Campaigning

Email is not a dead medium of communication. It is still widely used for official purposes and is the best way to reach out to your customers with personalised content to make the customers feel valued, and in turn, helps build brand trust. Also, email has a high ROI of 43$ for every dollar spent. This makes it a cheap and effective campaigning method as email systems can also be automated, making communications easier.

#6. Conduct Market Surveys and Customer Feedback

Conducting surveys and feedbacks from time to time lets you know where your company stands among competitors and lets you know what potential buyers and customers think about your company. This helps indicate what you need to change in your company’s workings for better customer engagement and to rise above the competition.

#7. Build Customer Loyalty

Having a good after-sales experience, like customer care and loyalty programs, helps you retain existing customers. This is important as it helps you build brand loyalty and makes your existing customers the promoters of your company. Having brand trust is good for the brand image as it helps improve awareness as well.

#8. Practice Customer Targeting

Targeting your customers and crafting campaigns specifically for that target audience helps make a connection with them. This boosts lead generation as the customers can connect with your company, and have a greater inclination to visit your website and see what you have to offer.

#9. Engage with Customers

Engaging with customers on social media, replying to their messages, engaging with their social posts and starting discussions helps build a connection with your customer, helping brand recall. This helps when the customer needs to buy a product that you sell.

#10. Build Communities of Your Customers

Building an online community will help your customers connect. In these communities, they can get help for their problems from other community members, building a sense of belonging to the company. This community can help you actively promote your company, and help in customer retention. Such communities also help you understand what improvements can be made in your services and other departments.

#11. Use Influencer Marketing

Social media influencers are an essential way to reach out to a huge follower base. Their followers trust them, and when they say they like your product in front of them, it helps create brand awareness, and people are more likely to visit your website.

#12. Focus on Customer Convenience

People always prefer going for the convenient option. They will like your company if it is convenient for them to reach out to you, buy your product or register complaints. Having complex methods to go about buying, reaching out or browsing your website will make customers less keen on opting to go with your product. Being customer friendly is key to having a good customer base with happy customers.

Thus, if you want to be a customer-driven company, you will have to place the customer before the product. Listening to your customers, being friendly and ease-of-approach are some of the key methods one can adopt to achieve the goal of being customer-driven. You have to form a connection with your customers that they value, which helps in keeping happy customers.

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Inbound marketing refers to a marketing strategy that helps companies bring their potential audience to their business, rather than having the marketing team pay a hefty amount and fight for the customer’s attention. Companies create marketing content in order to appeal to their potential customers, which attracts qualified client leads to the business and keeps them engaged for a longer term.

According to Hubspot, ‘Since 2006, inbound marketing has been the most effective marketing method for doing business online. Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people towards your company and product, where they naturally want to be.’

Due to the perceived lack of funds and experience during the introduction stage, it is pivotal for start-ups to adopt cost effective marketing strategies to promote their services and products. This is where inbound marketing strategies come into play and provide startups with cost effective marketing tools. As a novice in the business sphere, an entrepreneur who is working actively to get his startup to new heights will always find himself in the need for constant guidance.

As an entrepreneur, one needs to understand the A to Z needs of their business along with the needs of their teams. From managing a budget, maintaining profit margins, deciding the software for accounting department, handling employees to developing a sales and marketing structure that will attract customers to a brand and simultaneously build a market share; these are way too many tasks with very little or no expertise to address them.

Find out How Inbound Marketing can Help You Grow Your Startup

#1. Cost Effective

Since inbound marketing works in the prism of organic marketing, it is cheaper than traditional methods of marketing. A bootstrapped startup can use inbound marketing strategy as a tool to attract and build up an audience of fans, loyalists, potential customers and followers organically. As long as firms make use of inbound marketing they can save a lot more than before and utilise their resources better. Customers get their services where they want them to be, and businesses get customers from new avenues, hence making it a win-win situation.

#2. Prepare Yourselves for the Future

For a startup, it is pivotal to capture an audience right in the beginning and continue that relationship for a long time. Inbound marketing helps startups to establish relationships with their target audience from the beginning. Hence, it becomes easier for startups to get them to convert into customers and continue growing along with them. A good consumer base helps a firm to understand the prevailing trends keeping in view their demands and recurring nature.

#3. Good relationship with Customers

According to a research by McKenzie, ‘70% of buying experiences are based on how the customers feel they are being treated. Inbound marketing helps companies to ensure that they are able to engage customers, get more qualifying leads, convert those leads and satisfy the customers’ demands. The inbound marketing strategy focuses on the happiness of their customers. Hence, companies can build long and lasting relationships with them using these strategies. Inbound marketing enables businesses to convert customers and also make sure that those customers come back to buy more of their services or products. Inbound marketing helps firms to capture all kinds of customers and ensure that they remain associated with the company – be it first-time leads or existing ones.

#4. Helps in Building Credibility

With inbound marketing, businesses can create and post effective content on their websites which establishes their authority on the web. Hence, inbound marketing helps firms build visibility and credibility in the market place. This provides the potential audience with an impression that the firm is dependable and will be able to help them fulfil their needs.

Though Inbound marketing does attract a lot of customers and converts considerable leads, many analysts and firms believe that complementing it with traditional methods will result in better sales conversions.

Even Hubspot, the dominant leader in inbound marketing, uses outbound and traditional marketing strategies towards the last stage of the sales funnel to convert more customers.

As an owner of a startup, an entrepreneur can run a good marketing campaign by creatively combining inbound as well as outbound marketing strategies that results in more potential leads and higher customer conversion rates. There is no perfect amount of inbound or outbound marketing strategies. It depends on factors like the industry size, the competitors’ strategy, the target audience and the objectives of the marketing team.

Having a balanced mix of both outbound and inbound is pivotal and a must for today’s business ecosystem that is driven by digital-first scenarios.

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Many businesses understand the need of having a digital presence. But understanding the challenges of reaching out to target customers through a Facebook page or a website has its own set of challenges. Consumers online are looking for content that could amuse them or add value to what they’re seeking. Therefore, integrated digital marketing creates a strong, unified presence and positioning for your brand.

Integrated digital marketing requires the business to synergize their marketing efforts across various channels in real-time to improve their customer experience and drive better ROIs. The biggest challenge of integrated marketing is not only to create client specific marketing strategies, but also to increase a brand’s visibility on web.

How to Achieve Successful Integrated Digital Marketing

#1. DIGITAL PRESENCE MANAGEMENT

It is essential for any business to build its online presence. By implementing Responsive Web Design (RWD), consumers can access your website from any device. At times, you might get stuck in a situation where you feel that RWD integration costs you more than the ROI it brings to your business. However, it should be noted that integrating RWDs is long-term strategy and it essentially becomes more cost-effective in the long run.

#2. CONTENT MARKETING

Content Marketing is used massively in the industry to engage the larger audience. The current digital landscape has widened the scope of it, and even the range of users has increased. The audience has become very interactive and wants fresh and accurate information with regular updates. Content Marketing is not limited only to blogging but now has various other creative outlets. Videos and images play a great role in generating traffic as they are more engaging pieces of content and interest various types of consumers.

#3. TARGETED DISCOVERY

The elements of digital marketing are changing rapidly. Mobile device usage and context-based content has fragmented and redefined the search. Major players like Google and Facebook are implementing ads which are targeting users on the desktop and mobile devices separately. In fact, Google is expanding its AdWords to include mobile words automatically and Facebook has introduced a social search engine with graph search.

#4. ONLINE ENGAGEMENT

Social media has become one of the most influential platforms of audience engagement at present, and it is important to use each of the platforms in their unique capacities. You can use different functions of social media to expand the way for interaction with consumers. You may ask questions, take feedback or comment on what others are doing and then learn from them.

#5. SOCIAL LOCAL MOBILE

Smartphones have become an inevitable part of our lives, and it has embedded itself deeply into our culture. It is important to know where buyers are when they're trying to reach out to you and what sources they’re using. Are they using a cell phone or a computer? When do they most likely need your brand or product services? You can use SoLoMo to track high relevance opportunities by alluring the buyers with suitable deals. Social, local, mobile (SoLoMo) allows advertisers to reach potential customers by providing them with notifications about their brand or product at the right time and right place. Its principles are being incorporated into search engine queries for delivering the location based results to users.

#6. PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Whenever we implement any marketing strategy, it is important to set up the metrics by which we can measure their effectiveness. It might be difficult to gauge the value of their presence, but it’s important to monitor the changes in consumer behaviour and their engagement. This monitoring will help you in gauging what's working and what's not. You can use digital marketing analytics data to analyze the ongoing marketing strategy and also list the predictive analysis through this performance report.

In this age of digitalization, if you don't have an integrated digital marketing plan, you can't gain an edge in this competitive market. Businesses are becoming reliant on various marketing technologies such as integrated digital marketing to keep them engaged with their consumers. Brands who don't interact with their consumers through digital media would lag behind and slowly die out. The ones who makes the best use of this marketing strategy will win the loyalty of the mobile users.

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The way websites are designed and developed has undergone a lot of changes in the past few years. Earlier, mostly HTML and JAVA were used to design the websites, but they were less interactive, lacked behind on the creative front and was less intuitive. The introduction of PHP and Content Management System (CMS) changed the face of web development forever. CMS such as Joomla, Drupal, SharePoint and WordPress are hugely popular and used widely by webmasters to develop websites. It helps in the creation and maintenance of the content of a website. It also eliminates the requirement of the knowledge of coding.

Another facet of web development which has changed is the increasing importance of content. Content was always an important aspect of marketing, and more and more marketers are realizing its importance now. The reason it has gained so much importance is that marketing has become more customer-centric. The importance of having a website has also increased, and it has become a lifeline for the survival of any business. These reasons have led to newer trends in web development, and there will be many more to come in the future.

Some of these trends in web development have become so major and so popular that they are here to stay in the market for a long time. Here are some of the trends which changed the web development game forever:

Web Development Trends For A Long Time

#1. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already changed the way businesses interact with their consumers. Earlier, it was limited to industries such as Science, Tech and Medicine, but now it has also made its presence felt in the IT industry. The potential of AI is huge and is being used to make websites more interactive, automated and personalized. It was pioneered by Facebook and Google, and is being used by many apps and sites nowadays. A widely used example of AI is face recognition, which is used by many devices and apps nowadays. Perhaps the best example is the Facebook photo-tagging feature.

The power of AI can be gauged by the fact that it can automate many functions of websites and devices. This makes the design of the website more intuitive, interactive, as well as easy to use for the user. Most importantly, its high accuracy and efficiency enhances user experience and delivers exactly what the user wants, thus increasing your brand’s value.

With so many benefits, it would not be difficult to say that AI is here to stay, and it is only getting better with each passing day.

#2. Internet of Things (IoT)

The next big advancement in the digital world today, Internet of Things (IoT) is all about making devices smart and enabling them to communicate with its users by being connected to the internet. IoT has been put to a wide variety of uses like smart TVs and refrigerators, which can answer a user’s query by interacting with him. It helps to disseminate content to the user, without restricting it to only PC’s, mobiles or laptops.

In future, the importance of IoT is only going to grow. Web developers may want to develop apps which can remotely control household devices and help in dissemination of content to the users.

#3. Rise of JavaScript

Ever since its inception in 1995, Java has been one of the most popular and widely used programming languages due to its portability, i.e., “write once, run anywhere” feature. In 2016, it was one of the most popular programming languages in use, particularly for client-server web applications, with reportedly 9 million web developers.

The rapid growth of Java has allowed developers to work on chatbots, virtual reality (VR) and many other emerging tech trends.

The growth of Java has also enabled the improvement the overall language, grammar and efficiency of the apps. This indicates that it is here to stay.

#4. Static Site Generators

Static Site Generators (SSGs) are softwares which take content from markdown files instead of a database, and produces a completely static website ready to be served by HTML or other web servers. The main advantage it provides is that you don’t need to create a database in order to create a website. You can create a static website directly from the text stored in files. Its other advantages are that it reduces the website loading time, provides better security and makes dissemination of content to the user much easier.

#5. Virtual Reality (VR)

Technology is slowly diminishing the lines between the virtual world and the real world. And virtual reality (VR) is a technology which is just able to do that. VR is not a new trend in the digital industry, and many big players like Google are using it in their APIs to make VR transition into the web. But the latest development in the world of VR is that many web developers are using it in their apps, and it is being used by various industries. For example, it is being used by the real estate industry to enable their consumers to take a virtual tour of the property that they want to take possession of, or about to get possession of.

Virtual Reality (VR) is a very common term to hear nowadays, and is so widely used by different industries since it helps companies to provide a superior user experience, which in turn increases their loyalty for the company.

#6. Graphics Interchange Format (GIFs)

GIFs have become so popular that everyone might have gone through it once, or – at the very least – heard about it. It is considered a fun way of communication, and is widely used across social media platforms and chat boxes. Cashing on its popularity, many brands have utilized it to market their content on social media platforms, websites, or other types of medium on the web. And the response they have received is overwhelming!

In the coming times, GIFs are only going to be used in a bigger way. Web developers can use it in their sites or apps,for better engagement with users. And since it uses pictorial representation, it can convey the message better than plain text to a consumer.

#7. Bot

We all might have come across a bot without even realizing it. Bot is an umbrella term given to a group of softwares which use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate repetitive tasks. Using bots is not new, and it is used by many big brands and companies. For example, Facebook uses chatbots to engage with users by personally communicating with them.

With advancements in technology, bots are being improved to create more personalized and better user experiences. Bots are able to respond in a more “human-like” way with a user. This can be a great marketing advantage for businesses. Hence, web developers can use various bots in their sites or apps to automate the repetitive marketing tasks and create personalized user experiences. This will enhance the user experience, and keep them engaged with a brand for a long time.

These are some of the major web development trends which were buzzwords in the tech industry last year, and have gained momentum from then till now. And going their popularity, we are sure they are here to stay for quite some time!

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Every marketer dreams of creating and implementing the greatest buzz-worthy marketing campaign on social media platforms to gather the attention of the masses. Brands have come up with a blend of traditional and new media tactics to get the people talking about their brands on social media platforms. A social media campaign is a marketing effort to reinforce a brand’s awareness by using various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Before the execution of the campaign, you can set a baseline and the target metrics, and then track the changes in the performance throughout the campaign and beyond using these parameters.

6 Must Read Award-Winning Social Media Campaigns of 2018

#1. Buzzfeed- Tasty

Buzzfeed is a media company that has a massive following on social media platforms. It started with Facebook and expanded to all the traditional social networking platforms. Tasty is an example of how to dominate the niche audience. Since July, it had 52 million likes and 2.2 billion views.

Their target audience is 'foodies', and the channel has been top-rated among them. They have a series of videos of mouthwatering recipes which interests all the cooking enthusiasts. They delight the viewers with their quick and easy-to-make recipes. The right use of content in their videos is impossible to ignore. In a short span of time, they have accumulated a huge following on Facebook, and this campaign resulted in the launch of Tasty Junior and Nifty as their other competitors.

#2. Paramount Pictures: #BlueSteelSelfie

Paramount Picture's #BlueSteelSelfie placed their bets on fans to share their style by motivating them to click selfies in Derek Zoolander's signature Blue Steel pose for the promotion of their Zoolander 2 release. This campaign said that you could go on the Paramount Pictures' website, take a selfie by making Derek Zoolander's signature expression and do it until your Blue Steel is perfect. Then you can share it on social media.

It was a straightforward and fun campaign which was trending in 24 hours with over 1000 posts per hour at its peak. It wasn't any groundbreaking campaign but was an excellent example of how a product or brand can leverage user-generated content to create a buzz.

#3. Amnesty International: #GayTurtle

According to the 2014 UN Universal Periodic Report of Human Rights Violations of LGBT individuals in Turkey report, Homophobia and Transphobia had reached absurdly high levels. The country saw hundreds of hate crimes and more than 41 hate murders due to homophobia. Amnesty International launched a campaign where they did a sting operation with a hidden camera in a pet shop in Turkey. Several customers quickly bonded with the turtle in the beginning but changed their thought of purchasing it when the shop owner revealed that the turtle was gay. There were various reactions made by the visitors like, "give me an average turtle; a non-gay, standard turtle."

This campaign was a smart use of content marketing to deliver a particular message and raise awareness with the use of #GayTurtle to track the effectiveness of the campaign. At the end of their video, they deliver the message of "Love is Love, Hate is a choice."

#4. L’Oréal Paris: #WorthSaying

#WorthSaying picked up steam on social media when multiple anti-sexism campaigns encouraged journalists to question female actors about their work and everything important to them, not just their clothing and makeup. L'Oreal Paris kept the discussion alive by launching their campaign #WorthSaying in the Golden Globes Award in 2016.

The campaign title was rooted from their tagline "Because you're worth it." According to them, they believe that all women have something worthy to say.

“We recognised the importance of fueling the powerful words of women everywhere, so their conversations reach, affect and inspire as many women as possible.” - Karen Fondu, president of L’Oréal Paris.

This campaign was launched by McCann and Alison Bord Relation. By indulging into various award shows, L'Oreal seamlessly incorporated celebrity spokeswomen into their campaign, amplifying their message.

#5. Lowes: Fixinsix

Lowes created a social media campaign using platforms like Vine and Snapchat which offered quick home improvement tips. They are 6 seconds DIY tricks which you can try at home.

These clips have stop motion techniques along with claymation to make it a fun and engaging video which delivers valuable content for their viewers with an educational takeaway. The tricks in these clips are informative and useful. These vines generated more than 15 million impressions and had thousands of shares on social media.

BBDO was the agency behind this short and creative idea. The stop-motion shorts won awards at Cannes Lion, Mashies Awards and much more. The whole campaign is a counterpoint to the traditional Vine marketing, and this idea can be used by other brands too if they want to engage their audience.

#6. Knorr: Love at First Taste

Knorr has done an exceptional job by leveraging the connection between food and romance. Their #LoveAtFirstTaste campaign combined video, Twitter cards and trend promotion to boost brand awareness around Knorr foods.

It's a storytelling approach of making an emotional connection that reminded people of those amazing firsts in dating.

The effort takes a lighthearted approach, opening with the question, “Can flavour help you find love?” MullenLowe, the agency attempts to answer the question with an experiment of matching up couples by the characteristics they prefer. After that, they set the couples out on a date with a catch: they had to feed each other the entire meal. In the end, there's an effort to engage the viewers by bringing them back to the brand, inviting them to discover their flavour profile with the Knorr Flavour Quiz.

Conclusion The aforementioned award-winning marketing campaigns show just how important it is to enlist professional social media marketing services to initiate a successful marketing campaign. It might seem challenging to pull off a successful marketing campaign and increase the brand and/product recognition among the masses, but by utilizing effective social media marketing services, this goal can be successfully achieved as a result. You May Also Be Interested In

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Public relations is often considered a job that must be done but actually, cannot see conversions in real time. This is an old school pattern of considering how PR works. With PR integrating very closely with marketing and advertising a brand, these days, PR is considered more relevant and is measurable in terms of how much return on investment (ROI) it brings to the organisation. There are many tools used by top PR Firms – the most common of them, Google Analytics - that bring the vital information on the amount spent and the leads that spend has procured. However, PR can be separately measured for its effectiveness. I’m not talking about ways to measure the PR value which is not relevant anymore. PR Value = Ad value (for print/online coverage) x 3? You get the cost of ad & then multiply it by 3 (PR value Factor) is a way old way to measure the ROI. Here are some of the concepts to keep an eye out for while measuring your ROI, specifically on PR spends.

1. Brand perception building Building your credibility and authority within the industry and the world at large is certainly very important for any brand. If your competitors notice you and your consumers want you, there is hardly a better indicator of the ROI from your PR initiative. Your conversation must help your consumers make the decision to go with you. Engaging with your audiences, appearing in the news, podcasts, webinars, radios are all important ways to show your visibility.Example: In a recent press unveiling during CES for a wearable startup (boltt) we secured a 3 min prime-time live broadcast coverage in CNN International. As a result, the brand perception for a startup has been built in a league of global competitors like under armour and Fitbit
2. Sentiments It is necessary to monitor the sentiments of the brand, PR can make & break the brand in a day. There always is a huge impact on brand mentions before & after PR announcements done right. For measuring the ROI, you can track the +ve & -ve cloud within the time span using tools like Meltwater, brandwatch, simply measured & others.
3. Referral Traffic Visitors arriving at your website from other website are considered as referral traffic. Here by gaining insights from referral traffic to a client’s website, the public relation team is capable of drilling down deeper into who the target market is, how they were driven to your website, what they are interested in, and what are activities performed by them. For instance, if you know the exact demographic of your audience based on the referral traffic, apart from measuring your current reach, you can additionally tweak future PR efforts to target it to your right audiences.
4. The Share of Voice (SOV) SOV can be defined as the % of share for your brand while considering the total number of competitor/category mentions ie it is the percentage of all online content and conversations about your company, compared against those of your competitors.Since the new share of public relations is Digital PR, most of the online mentions are inspired from the media coverages, their posts on social channels & hence making anything go viral with visitors/followers comments. Example #1: SOV can influence the purchase decision of buyers. See how e-book buyers discover books vs the role of blogs/reviews.
5. Social media mentions & new followers from PR coverages
6. Increase in inquiries and sales inspired from awareness created from PR Example: The recent tea for trump viral marketing campaign that we executed results in 1100% increase in international business enquiries, 9900% increase in website organic traffic.

Digital PR is a way to create brand perception using content marketing via digital super users like media, bloggers, journalist & super influencers (like YouTubers, Instagrammer’s & others) It is public relations for new age having a hybrid mix of marketing & PR for driving defined business goals. It provides add-on benefits to brands existing digital marketing efforts like SEO & social media. It bridges the gaps traditional PR approach, we use our psychometric perception building frameworks to identify the brand problems & hence define personalized solutions for different objectives like brand awareness, audience engagement, a higher share of voice (SOV), thought leadership, product leadership, reputation management & other. Digital PR Framework: How it works?

1. Research about the category & create a benchmark of content strategies that can work for the brand.
2. Identify the topics of influence that speak to your brand’s target buyers.
3. Vet & improvise the influencers who are a good contextual fit with your brand.Look for content quality, reach, engagement and an alignment of brand values.
4. Relate and engage with to your target influencers via email and other social channels. Ask them to partner with your brand and offer them compensation to create mutually beneficial relationships.
5. Measure all earned media and identify which influencers and which topics lift your brand the most.
6. Repeat Once you’ve identified who and what works best for your brand you can build a stronger influencer marketing strategy each time around.

Digital PR amplification framework that we use in #ARM Worldwide:

With the world’s focus shifting from traditional marketing to digital marketing, it is important to distribute your budget to achieve good marketing strategies effectively. Digital marketing strategies can take up unlimited funds, which is why you need to set a budget which is comfortable for your company to spend.

Within this budget, it is important to allocate the right resources to help maximise your efficiency. If you don’t divide and pay in an organised way, digital marketing can become a big hole for your company, causing problems that will be tough to deal with.

10 Essential Digital Marketing Spends for Your Business

#1. Content

This is the most important part of any marketing strategy. Without this, no company can gain enough traction with their marketing strategy. In digital marketing, most campaigns revolve around content to interact with people online. This content may be in the form of videos, photos or written pieces. Thus, hiring talented content creators or companies to handle your content requirements are important.

#2. Content Marketing Specialists

This is the new age of marketing which means there is a need to hire new people who are experienced with or specialise in content marketing. Without having these people on board, running a successful campaign is tough as there is nobody experienced enough to handle tough situations or have the ability to think of the best ideas by utilising all resources available to the fullest. In the competitive world, being on top with the best resources and people in order to craft the best strategies is important.

#3. Content Distribution

Content distribution avenues on social media are endless in nature. While brands can look at some paid avenues, they can look at other free options as well. Investing in the right ones for your brand is key. Getting paid ads everywhere is not the best way as a large number of people ignore these paid ads or block them. Using only unpaid avenues makes your brand hidden in the wave of information that exists on the internet. Striking the right balance is crucial to expand your viewership base and have a successful marketing strategy.

#4. Email Communications

No matter what people say about it, email is not dead. It is still the primary medium of communication for all official purposes. A lot of customer engagement still happens via email. Thus, it is important to invest in email communication and automation. It is the easiest and cheapest way to have personalised communications with your customers. According to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the return on investment for emails is $43 for every dollar spent. Thus, spending on email is essential for a successful digital marketing budget.

#5. Influencer Marketing

Social influencers who have an enormous social following help you get access to wider customer bases. It allows you to tap into the trust certain people have in specific circles online. Doing so helps you build credibility and trust among influencer’s followers as well when they advocate your product on their social handles. Not only is your brand promoted in front of a bigger audience, but it also helps in building greater brand awareness.

#6. SEO

This helps you boost your organic search ranking in search engines. Most people never go beyond the second page of search results. Thus, it is important for you to get ranked higher in search results; doing so will exponentially increase the traffic on your website, helping you boost sales. Many tools are used in the process of SEO, and they require specialists to use and work on them. SEO is an important part of marketing in the digital sphere. It exponentially increases website traffic, generating more leads.

#7. Marketing and Analytics Tools

Analytics is critical to measure the progress and success of any online campaign. Using analytics, you can check the reach of your social posts, measure social traffic, website traffic, online engagement, retention time and a lot of other valuable data which provide metrics for measuring the effectiveness of strategies. This data is essential as it gives you an insight into what to tweak, what works, what doesn’t and what is your average buyer persona. You can mould your strategies to fit your buyer personas to reach your target audience.

#8. Paid Media

Ads are a good way to reach out to people who may not be in your target audience but still would be interested in buying your product. The majority of digital marketing efforts go into targeting particular audiences. This strategy neglects potential customers you are not targeting. Ads are a good way to reach out to untargeted customers. They will let people know about your company and product without engaging them in any activities with your business. The people interested in this can participate further if they want.

#9. Web Design

Your website will be the first self-owned page through which people will engage with you. For this, your site needs to be very intuitive and user-friendly, or else people will not want to stay on your website and engage further. The site helps form the first impression based on which people judge your company while deciding between you and your competitors. Hence, having a great web design is of utmost importance to your web team. Thus, putting this high up in your budget is important as a significant part of your sales depend on it.

#10. Social Media

Social media is an essential online medium to connect with people. It lets you reach out to a large number of individuals at the same time and engage with them. For making the best use of this medium, it is essential to invest in a team to manage all posts and engagement on it, and also on tools that help you analyse and make the best use of social media.

Dividing your budget according to your requirements is essential. Wasting extra money on tools don’t always ensure better results. Smartly optimising the money spent in every avenue helps ensure better strategies and best use of resources, maximising results in the given resources.

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With the emergence of the digital era, two-way communication process has diversified into computer-mediated communication these days. Blogs have frequently become a source to generate content on websites and connect to millions of users on the internet. Text, pictures and sound files have become various approaches to reach potential customers through their high-quality content. Readers have the option to give feedback, comment or connect to any individual posting or the website. For any marketer, blogging has become a necessary tool for a successful business.With the emergence of the digital era, two-way communication process has diversified into computer-mediated communication these days. Blogs have frequently become a source to generate content on websites and connect to millions of users on the internet. Text, pictures and sound files have become various approaches to reach potential customers through their high-quality content. Readers have the option to give feedback, comment or connect to any individual posting or the website. For any marketer, blogging has become a necessary tool for a successful business. Here is a list of reasons that states the benefits of blogging on any website.

1. Boost Search Engine Optimization

Regarding search engine optimization, the more you add content to your website, the more pages from your domain becomes indexed in search engines. This helps to improve organic search visibility and increases the traffic on your website. Blogging frequently provides Google and other search engines with a new content to add to their index which creates opportunities to plug in the all-important keywords and increases the visibility on search engine results pages. Therefore, the more blogs you post, the more chances you have to rank for various keywords.

2. Helps to convert the traffic into leads

With the help of blogging, you can drive the attention of the potential customers. It generates traffic on your website, and you have the opportunity to convert your potential customer into leads. Each blog is an opportunity to generate new leads. The way this works is effortless – just add a lead generating call to action for every blog post. Often, there are various approaches to generate lead like free eBooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials or any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information.

3. Positions you as an expert

The business blogs answer common questions their customers have. If you are consistently creating content that is helpful for your target and existing customers, they will love you! Can you imagine the impact of sending an educational blog post you wrote to clear things up for a confused customer? Blogging posts is one of the best ways to establish yourself as an expert in your genre as it gives you a platform to share valuable insights and industry-related information. You can build up an authority in your niche. This authority incorporates trust and familiarity and keeps you on the top of your customers’ mind.

4. Humanizes your brand

The possibilities of what you can blog about are endless! You can start answering real customer questions, write about staff members, upcoming events, charity events, community-related projects and publish case studies & testimonials. Blogging gives your website a way to touch on the concerns of interest of your customer and also shares the passion for your employee. Showcasing the areas of your organization ‘humanises’ it and gives the marketers a platform to raise their voice, build up the trust and build up the brand's presence for existing customers, prospects and followers.

5. Shows consistency

The only route to convert your potential customers into leads is that your website has blog post consistently. Blogging about fresh and valuable content from time to time commits your readers. You need to produce great contents on a consistent basis, and you need to promote your blog and content on a regular basis. If you don't blog frequently, irrespective of the blogging platform you are using or how beautiful or stylish your blog is, you will simply not succeed. For your marketing strategies, you need to be CONSISTENT with things that would make your website a success.

6. Develop Relationships with Customers

Blogging helps you to connect with your site’s visitors through a two-way conversation. This interaction can be accomplished by asking questions at the end of your posts to get the conversation going on or by simply allowing comments and feedback or even criticism. By responding to readers’ comments, you can create a relationship with your readers and gain valuable insight into what information they require.

7.  Supports your social media initiatives

It is essential to maintain an active social media presence in the world of web with the access to effective and high-quality content. Businesses want to interact with their customers collectively and make them interact with their content, sharing it and promoting lead generation. Sharing a blog post raises the traffic on the website. The sharing of content on the social media platform gives a boost to the website and its e-mail marketing.

8. Take Control of Your Online Identity

For every business or marketer, it is essential to mark their presence on a digital platform. There's too much information available to the customers that they need to attain and you want to make sure that customers get the complete picture about your website, your objective and the content the website produces. With the help of a blog, it lets you have an excellent control of your online identity, and with the integration of SEO and Content Marketing, it makes sure that your website reaches the top result on the search engine.

9. Cost Effective approach

Every blog you publish is a long-term asset which helps to build brand awareness and promotes expertise for the products and services. Unlike other tools of developing the business, blogging comes as one of the most cost-effective processes which are enriched in its content and the customers reach to the website looking for the information they require instead of the product's hunt to its customers.

10. It drives long-term results

Blog posting will benefit immensely in the long run. It is an investment towards the future growth of your website. The blog posts you generate become an ongoing source of value to grab the attention of visitors and promote the website. Even after a period, a blog post keeps the high ranking in search engines. That means for the couple of days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can get traffic and leads from that blog post. >>To know about great Marketing Tools for SMB’s.

Today, technology has changed the way we market and promote our products and services. Websites and Applications have become an important marketing model to maintain a digital presence on the web for any business. An active site helps the marketers for generating the leads. But there is a need to analyse the user experience while designing that website. While reviewing the superior user experience (UX), there are some ways to approach this process.

Lean UX method generates the user experience designs to a more efficient and lightweight process, emphasising on a quick process of the Building, Measuring and Learning rapid cycle.

Lean UX is continually validating UX designers’ assumptions to build a user-friendly website that provides information or highlights a product or service. Everything about analysing user experience begins with research and strategy. There is a need to understand user’s goals while they approach any website. This analysis helps to create a wireframe to identify the features of a website or application. Along with understanding the users need, Lead UX unlocks the pain and frustrations the users are currently facing while using the site or an app.

Lean User Experience to Capture User Behaviour

#1. Research

While experiencing user-friendly experience, traditional research methods like surveys, interviews, usability testing and focus groups can be considered. Focus groups tend to take more time and comparatively a costlier research process.

Usability testing comes when we have some interface available for users to test (wireframe, prototype, and mockup). Therefore, regarding Lean UX, we can discuss and focus on the first two methods, i.e.,.e surveys and interviews.

Lean UX process helps to understand users within a short period. By asking essential questions based on the audience experience, while continuously validating our assumptions, we can refine these hypotheses. This method helps to achieve user solutions more rapidly. One of the most important reasons to do research is to know who our user's insights which include where and when they bounce off a site or application.

#2. Defining the User

Lean UX research begins with determining the actual users. We can create users' personas and assumptions to identify their pain points and difficulties. Personas are the user profiles outlining their demographic, consumer behaviour, as well as their needs and goals. After we create the hypothesis persona, we should validate the proposition.

To generate customer-centric experience, we need to authenticate our assumptions with limited resources. As discussed, one rapid way is through traditional research method like surveys which is a quick and cost efficient way to capture a better understanding of customer's needs and goals. Surveys can be sent out to many users. Then the information gathered through those surveys can be compiled and help to create the UX.

Another method to capture users, needs and goals is through interviews. It brings out more personal information about the users, unlocking their behaviour patterns to build a better website profile. Interview questions can be open-ended or close-ended. For example, an open ended question like "What do you want out of the site/application can be put forth? There may be several items that the users are looking for or they may provide a brief description of it through their answers. Then, close-ended questions could be framed like "Do you prefer open menus or pull out menus?” where there are multiple options provided to the answer, and the user has to choose one accordingly.

These two forms of questions allow getting a concrete answer to particular questions you may have and unique perspective of the individuals utilising that site or app.

#3. User Validation

You can create two types of validation questions while going for a user's research i.e. screening questions and interview questions. Screening questions prove whether the individuals you are talking fits in the right segment of users whereas interview questions are to reaffirm the user hypothesis.

The process of making an interview validation, hypothetical user persona and learning from the end users defines the Lean UX method. Their approach is to build, measure and then determine cycle. Lean UX approach helps the UX team to identify the users, their needs and goals instead of making assumptions.

There are possibilities that Lean UX is not in-depth as other processes where the same traditional user research methods are used like in Lean UX, but it provides a better understanding of the users within limited time and resources. It helps to understand the user-behavior, their pain points and difficulties of their audience.

The information gathered through surveys and interviews; the website designer can create a persona with some certain assumptions about their users and make the site easier and approachable for them. Finally, revise the persona based on the findings.

Lean UX is essential for any website or app making to understand because the process will help the website strategy, understanding of the users and monetization of the site. The approach does not stop here. It should continue to apply to the next steps of user research, such as creating prototypes, and usability testing.

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