Digital Marketing: Meeting Your Customers Where They Spend the Most Time－the Internet.

Digital marketing channels have three categories－brand awareness, lead generation, and direct sales. Depending on your business goals, you might need to include all three digital marketing categories into your strategy. You will also want to consider the following:

• Target audience: Who are they? What channels do they engage on?

• Budget: What is your budget towards each channel? What ROI do you expect?

• Competitor benchmarking: What channels are they using? Are they successful?

Determining your business objective is the critical first step in creating your strategy. You need to engage with your customers where they spend the most time, whether that is scrolling through Instagram or browsing the internet top-ten lists.

Social Media Stories:

Look at stories as a way to enhance your online presence and to tell the company narrative better. Experiment with different formats that work best with your audience—tutorials, testimonials, funny how-tos, interviews, GIFs, and more. Have fun with it and use a creative mix. Businesses can implement stories into their regular social media strategy as a way to engage with their audience. Show behind-the-scenes, employee interviews, or event videos to promote brand awareness and drive engagement.

Chatbots:

Chatbots are software programs that offer instant responses to help customers with online tasks such as ordering items and personal account information. With quick response times, customers are able to retrieve information without picking up the phone. Chatbots can save your company time and money, generate leads and sales, push users to better products or services, provide 24-hour support, and personalize the customer experience.

Video:

Businesses are gaining high engagement rates for interviews, product demos, how-tos, and more by incorporating video into their digital marketing strategy. According to these stats, 70% of consumers have shared a video, 72% of videos have improved sales conversion rates, and 52% of consumers watch videos to make informed purchases.

Personalized Email:

Emails may be piling up in your email box, but personalization is the key to every email marketing strategy. Generic emails sent to a long contact list isn’t going to cut it. You need to show your customers that you care about their problems. And by setting up email triggers, you can automate emails to respond when users engage with your website or content.

Voice Search:

We've all used Google, Siri and Alexa to ask questions. Now's the time for marketers to start thinking about how people use voice search to find their company and products/services.

As the digital landscape continues to grow, it’s important that marketers determine which channels will meet their goals and crush their ROI.