Digital marketing is a massive industry for a reason: if you want to get noticed online, you really need to put in a major effort. There’s simply too much of everything in the online world to stand out through quality alone: too much content, too many platforms, too many discussions, and far too many brands. If you just sit back and relax, you’ll be completely ignored.
Because all ambitious brands know this, though, there’s an arms race raging at all times: the more marketing work is done, the harder it gets for any given campaign to get attention, so
marketers must consistently innovate and tweak their tactics to get ahead of their rivals.
If you’re planning to start doing some digital marketing for your business, or you’re already doing it but not getting the results you need, then you need to figure out how your campaign can outperform those of your competitors. To that end, here are some key digital marketing tips:
Review the landscape
By this I mean the digital landscape, of course, seeing what other marketing strategies look like. What PPC ads are comparable companies running? What pieces of content are they creating? How are they presenting their brands? Standing out can be as simple as being different. If you see 99 similar ads then just one that takes a distinct approach, you’ll remember that one.
Your path to success could be as simple as filling an obvious gap: maybe no one is writing about a particular topic, leaving you to tackle it and pick up some easy
organic traffic. Or maybe you can do something like focus on short-form content where others are preferring long-form. In essence, if your campaign is just like every other campaign out there, then it doesn’t really matter what quality level you reach: it won’t prove effective.
Let your staff get creative
Creativity comes from freedom to explore different ideas, and a problem with many businesses (even in the digital age) is that they’re far too restrictive about what their employees can and can’t do. They ask them to work 9-to-5, even when they feel more alert at other times. They make all decisions by committee, ensuring that they never take any creative risks. They hire talented people, then prevent them from ever using that talent to good effect.
There’s no reason for you to do this. Let your staff work more freely and they’ll deliver better work. Allow them to work flexible hours. Give them the equipment they need in the form of laptops and flexible working space (you can set up monitors for them to use when they like, and there are
KVM switches at StarTech that you can use to configure shared keyboards and mice). Let them work remotely whenever they prefer, and the results will vindicate that decision.
Pick out key metrics
Too many digital marketing campaigns are launched with unclear goals. Sure, profit is always the key objective, but how do you get there? How do you measure progress towards it? The more specific you can get with your selection of key metrics, the more easily you can devise a strategy that efficiently moves your business in the right direction.
Which metrics you should choose will depend on the nature of your business, of course, so I can’t tell you exactly what to run with.
Scoro has an expansive guide, so take a look through it and start to narrow things down: aim to end up with a shortlist of no more than four or five.
Vary your content types
Blog posts, blog posts, and more blog posts. That roughly sums up the content marketing strategy of the average online business — well, you can throw in some half-baked social media posts for accounts that might as well be inactive. What’s wrong with blog posts? Nothing, in truth: this is a blog post, and clearly I think it’s worth your time. But it’s tough to get attention.
Video, on the other hand, is a relatively-untapped medium. Plenty of businesses still don’t use it, even for basic talking-to-camera guides, which means there’s a lot of value to be picked up through adopting it. And why not try other formats too? Infographics, for instance, or podcasts. This ties neatly into our last point, so let’s move on and wrap things up.
Try things and iterate
An exceptional digital marketing strategy isn’t something you cobble together in isolation and unleash as a rigid 12-month plan. Even if you could know ahead of time which tactics would work, you couldn’t account for changes in the zeitgeist (driven by new technologies and events that can’t be anticipated). Trying to run with a fixed strategy is a terrible idea.
Instead, you must commit to trying new things, seeing how they work, and building upon them by revising your strategy. Try PPC to see how it fits your brand. If it gets results, do more of it. If it doesn’t, move on to a new option. For as long as you’re running marketing, you should keep making your strategy better: it’s that determination to improve that will make you stand out.
Eager to make the most of your digital marketing efforts and outperform your rivals? These tips should help, so start implementing them and see how you fare. Given some time, you should be pleasantly surprised with the results.
