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Practical Digital Marketing Strategies For Today’s Business

Are you in need of practical digital strategies to boost awareness and drive sales? We have great options for you.

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Digital marketing continues to attract much excitement among marketers. It is future-forward, innovative, offers impressive reach, and hey just about everyone is using it. It’s easy to just start. You know—jump into the thick of the digital marketing space, grab catchy strategies, and roll with them. Think about outcomes later.

Or you can first determine the tactics that work best for your organization and maximize ROI. It’s a far better way of utilizing money, efforts, and other resources. For the team that’s starting out and doesn’t plan on wasting resources, here are some practical digital strategies you can consider. 

As you move forward, you can adopt other strategies besides these.

  1. Make Customer Experience Better

According to a Gartner report, close to 77 percent of buyers consider the purchase process overly complicated and time-consuming.

They want increased efficiency when making purchases, cost savings plans, and solid relationships with the seller.

How can you improve their experiences?

  • Improve speed. Your responsiveness influences both purchase and customer loyalty. Consider incorporating self-service functionalities and syncing tech stack to streamline experiences.
  • Make shopping experiences smooth. Identify and remove friction points and simplify your website’s usability to help buyers place orders.  
  • Increase transparency. Transparency helps set the right expectations and minimizes nasty surprises. Communicate the correct prices including shipping terms upfront, acknowledge mistakes, and correct them quickly.
  • Personalize experiences. Share information that may benefit your customers’ businesses, send handwritten thank you or congratulatory notes or organize annual meet-ups to strengthen relationships and expand networking possibilities.

2. Cold Calling

Say you’ve been eyeing a certain prospect, will sitting back and expecting them to call you work? Sure, you can warm up them via email marketing or on social, but eventually, you’ll need to call them up. 

Waiting too long increases your anxiety and who knows, a competitor may swoop in and grab them up. So, don’t wait, start cold calling.

Best practices include:

  • Make yourself comfortable. Cold calling is stressful enough without your state of mind and environment worsening the situation. Cut out distractions, maintain level-headedness, and understand your prospect. The more you know about them, the easier you can speak their language.
  • Don’t just dial. Dialing 100 numbers every day is easy, but did you accomplish your goals? Be sure to extract value from the calls you make. Learn something about the prospect that may help your agenda forward or secure a second call, a meeting, or demo—don’t walk away empty.
  • Be a human. People shut down anytime they encounter sales reps who sound robotic. Practice your script until you can speak it naturally and have a valuable conversation. Remember to match the tone and emotion level of your prospect.
  • Outline your offerings as solutions for their troubles. Many of us get caught up in showing off the bells and whistles of our offerings when clients are actually looking for utility. Frame your script to show prospects how you can solve their problems.

3. Search Intent Marketing

A core principle of B2B marketing is connecting customers with the solutions they need. But you can only offer the right solutions if you know and understand their needs. The search intent strategy helps you understand why people need what they need. 

With this information, teams can refine and align their marketing efforts to reach the right audiences with exactly what they need.

For this article, we’ll focus on research intent and buying intent.

Research intent

Here, searchers use certain phrases and terms to seek information. These phrases are typically used for comparison or review searches. If you search “accounting services” on Google, the search engine will most likely serve up several companies offering bookkeeping services.

You can optimize for research intent by incorporating these keyword phrases in headers or sub-headers in your FAQ section. You can also create comparison/contract articles piting your offerings against competitors to keep customers from further research and shepherd them.

See >> Daniel Maithya Turns Social Media Marketing Into Profitable Business

Buying intent

These are keywords that signal a searcher’s purchase intention. They are typically used by people who’ve conducted research and now want to buy.

Optimization tactics include making it easy for searchers to request a quotation or make a purchase.

Introduce eye-catching CTAs and use copy that focuses on the value your solutions provide.

4. Create Thought Leadership Content

Let’s start by describing what thought leadership is not.  It’s not running self-promotional content about your organization or products/services. Rather, a marketing tactic that puts together content resources that build up audience perception of your company.

It revolves around creating valuable content that educates audiences and provides answers to pressing problems. Used well, this strategy can build credibility and increase brand awareness.

Best practices include:

  • Know the questions your target audience is asking. A successful thought leadership strategy is one that digs deep to identify key questions people in your target market are asking and answers them.
  • Reevaluate your buyer personas regularly. Business circumstances change, new challenges arise and new questions come up. Keep a pulse on consumer needs to ensure you’re creating content that’s relevant to their present needs.
  • Strengthen your social presence. Identify at least three social platforms where your customers and prospects chill out and build a strong presence there. Join community forums, interact with audiences, and promote your thought leadership pieces there.
  • Take a peek at what the competition is doing. Plenty of research goes into thought leadership pieces, so look at competitors who are already producing such pieces to measure popularity, engagement, and loopholes you can fill.

5. Own Your Audience

“Are you renting audiences or do you own them?”

“What?”

Rented audiences are typically followers or subscribers found on social platforms who’ve expressed interest in your organization. They receive your messages through these platforms.

Since the renter owns these audiences, they dictate how you communicate with your followers. Any changes the renter deems fit, they enact, which can easily place you at a disadvantage.

Read >> Digital Transformation Creating a New Work Ecosystem In Kenya

So your ultimate goal should be to convert these rented audiences into owned audiences.

Owned audiences are your customers and site visitors who consume your content and willingly subscribe to newsletters and other marketing campaigns. You have their contact information and communicate directly with them.

Own your audience by: 

  • Building brand affinity. Use branded content like podcasts, blogs, and ebooks to tell meaningful stories that show audiences you have the same values and priorities in common. This kind of content builds your connection and breeds trust.
  • Building reciprocity. From free trials to consultations, cheat sheets, interactive calculators, and industry reports, offer free but valuable stuff that educates or helps them move towards their goals. You’ll be giving them a compelling reason to reciprocate aka reading or buying from you.
  • Asking for feedback. Asking for feedback lets your audience feel that their input is valued and needed. The feedback can help improve your approach and offerings to reach more prospects and convince them to move off the rental and onto your property.

Next >> Social Commerce and The Rise Of Influencer Marketing

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BT Reporter
BT Reporterhttp://www.businesstoday.co.ke
editor [at] businesstoday.co.ke
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