Digital marketing communications have come to stay – and will soon become the dominant marketing tool across all countries. Digital or online communications are expected to expand with more innovative inventions springing up in the near future to assist this kind of marketing. No business can afford to ignore the online tools needed to successfully market their goods and services.
We’ll examine in detail how digital cannot be disregarded. Apart from the well-known forms of marketing online like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), e-mail newsletters, price comparison websites, link building and affiliate marketing, the social media’s many networks provide great opportunities for digital marketing communication. Why you have to include mobile in your marketing media plans is borne out by the fact that in the United Kingdom roughly half of the country’s marketers are using some type of mobile strategy. Besides this, SMS marketing is expected to grow a whopping 160% in the coming 3 years!
Let’s examine the channels that will give you optimal returns in your 2016 marketing communications plan:
- SEO or search engine optimization aims to achieve for your business the best possible position in search engines like Google and Bing. Once visitors get attracted to your website, the CTAs – calls-to-action – will hold them for longer periods and will begin to guide them on the path of your marketing channel.
- Crowd-sourced content of your brand. Allow your fans and customers to create more content, conversations and stories of your brand that you could hope to buy or build. A recent survey revealed that 99% of content related to a brand on YouTube was created by the brand’s fans.
- LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are some of the prominent social media networks that enable you to do your marketing communication. Facebook allows advertisers to focus on more than a billion people listed by age, location and other characteristics. Each network has its own system and you must choose what suits you best.
- Sign-up e-mails encourage clients or visitors to sign-up or opt in for e-mail newsletters. The simple idea behind this technique is that the permission of visitors is taken before they opt-in and they are not added to your database without them knowing it. The cost involved is a mere fraction of what you would pay for print or TV advertising.
- Blogging is a great way to improve search visibility and consequently, leads. Among other benefits, blogs help you to improve your rankings on search engines. If your website has more content, it results in more of your domain pages getting indexed in search engines. This leads to greater search visibility and more website traffic.
- Display ads – the ads that are seen on any website — get many eyeballs. You can opt for banner ads which run horizontally from corner to corner on top of the page, or the complex and richer video ads.
- There are many other ways in which to use digital for your marketing communications, like price comparison websites where the amount of cash charged for holidays and insurance and other consumer items are compared. Affiliate marketing, where a website advertises items that complement their wares, is also popular. Finally, there’s link building which is used to develop online relationships. Links play a major role in deciding how you rank on Google.
Summing Up
Digital marketing communication enables you to track and monitor the results of your campaign. You don’t have to do any expensive and extensive consumer research. You can view customer response quickly and in real time. All this helps you to plan your next campaign more effectively.
