Many Canadian and global brands have made large investments into exhausting the growth of their business through the means of digital marketing strategies for brand acquisition, conversion and retention. In today’s day and age, it is imperative for any business to have fully optimized online platforms to align themselves with their competitors and engage better with their target audience. Maximizing your digital platform can enhance the growth of your business exponentially, if executed correctly.
We are presenting you with the tools on how to grow your business successfully, organically and via paid channels, through the means of digital marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is defined by the use of digital technologies used to exhaust the performance of your online platforms to encourage the growth of your business. The use of digital marketing can be an extraordinarily powerful and influential tool for your business and its development when executed the right way.
There are several resources that can be implemented to your digital platform that will increase the growth of your local Toronto business. It is essentially important to identify, research and implement the correct channels of online marketing for your business before going ahead to proceed with an execution strategy for success.
Tools that will grow your business
Digital marketing offers an umbrella of tools at your disposal. Many of these channels are extremely cost-effective and can help to grow your business exponentially, raise awareness amongst your competitors and better connect with your audience, however, this will need to be carefully planned out in a timely manner before going ahead to launch.
Website
First and foremost, your website is an exceeding factor of how your business appears to your target market and even your competitors. The average person will decide whether they want to browse or exit your website within the first 3 to 5 seconds of opening it. Your website serves as the digital face of your business and is an integral part of your marketing strategy. How you choose to present yourself online will give your audience a greater understanding of your enterprise, which will better place you amongst your competitors and help your customers to connect with you further.
Although your website may appear perfect on a desktop, you want to make sure that it is fully compatible with mobile phones and tablets. Many people may choose to browse your website on their phone which means that you want to fully optimize your website for a user-friendly experience on both desktop and mobile.
Search Engine Optimization
Most digital businesses strive to be searched and found on Google and other search engines by their customers, especially new ones. To have a website that can achieve this, you must optimize the back end of your site to allow you to be searched and found on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc; this marketing strategy is known as Search Engine Optimization.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of utilizing your website to organically drive traffic from search engines to your web pages by populating your uploaded content and index to align with search engine guidelines such as Google. To achieve this, you will need to focus on providing high quality content with keywords throughout your website pages. This will even include the written text in your product descriptions, blogs, images and any other uploaded content.
This marketing strategy is a cost-effective tool that can be completed by yourself or in-house however, it does take time. You may want to work on this quickly, which means it might be useful to outsource a specialist to assist you.
To engage with your audience through email, you will want to gather a subscription or mailing list through the sign up or login page. Exhausting an email marketing strategy can make a huge difference to your online traffic when driving sales, encouraging discounts or even to discuss the latest trends.
Email marketing costs virtually nothing and can increase your conversion in sales as well as the overall performance of your website although, you do not want to bombard your mailing list unless it is required, else you may find yourself a number of unsubscribes.
Social Media
Social Media is an incredibly powerful marketing tool when executed correctly and consistently. The channels of social media you should choose depends entirely on the type of business you run, as choosing the right platform will allow you to connect better with the appropriate target audience. A retail brand connecting with consumers (B2C), may want to look further into strategizing campaigns for platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter whereas corporate brands targeting businesses (B2B) may only use LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.
Much like anything else, you want to remain consistent with your content by making it relevant to your business, your audience and even the industry that you are in. You should opt for 1 to 2 posts a day discussing relevant topics, products and even reposting those who have tagged you. The influence of social media can take your business to new heights, bringing you higher conversion rates and more engagement which will secure your brand’s reputation.
The use of social media is extremely cost-effective where you can organize and plan content ahead of time through a variety of software platforms. You will want to use hashtags and even tag locations of images you post to help with targeting those in the local Toronto area. It may even be ideal for you to connect with social media influencers and other industry affiliates with a renowned platform to help with building your brand acquisition, this is known as Affiliate Marketing.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is defined by the use of social media influencers and powerful affiliates in the industry to help boost your products or service. Social Media influencers are individuals with an extremely large following, and perhaps even a verified tag, who can help you to connect and engage with your target audience through the promotion of your business. A number of celebrities have been seen tagging smaller brands to their posts, perhaps wearing or using a product, which brought the brand enormous traffic, recognition and even sales.
To connect with these affiliates, you may want to give them samples or free products and services to promote to their followers on your behalf. Some may do so at a small fee.
PPC / advertising
For many businesses, paid promotional campaigns (PPC) and advertising strategies can be extremely useful for short-term campaigns such as product launches or even weekend sales. PPC campaigns can be created through platforms such as Facebook and Google to help with targeting local Toronto areas. Of course, you want to be sure that you are advertising on the right channels to ensure conversion or you may face the risk of wasting your budget.
PPC and advertising campaigns can also help with brand acquisition as more people will become familiar with your brand, like your posts and even follow your page. This could transform into more subscribers for your mailing list and eventually, a greater sales conversion.
When you run your PPC and advertising campaigns, you should be sure to monitor the performance to make adjustments that will work to your benefit. For example, if you find that your ads are not performing as well on Facebook as they are on Instagram, you may want to pay a little more attention to Facebook to help to figure out the best way to better connect with the Facebook market.
Content marketing
Posting relevant content on your website and social media platforms is essential as long as it is relevant and up to date with current trends. There are several types of content you can choose to distribute across your platforms that may be used to engage with your audience. This can include, but is not limited to, the use of shareable blogs, videos and educational guides.
This marketing tool is tremendously powerful as it builds a sense of trust amongst your customers and a sense of community which helps to drive traffic to your website and improve your overall conversion rate. Content marketing will improve your SEO and search abilities which will only bring organic traffic to your website. Being that it is completely measurable, you will be able to determine which type of content performs better for your platform and create new resources accordingly.
Although you may choose to create some of your content in-house, it may be worth looking to outsource several freelancers who can complete this for you in a timely fashion.
Mobile – SMS
Much like the emailing marketing tool, you may want to store the mobile numbers of your subscribers when they sign up to send messages to. These messages will work as a “call to action” for your customers who can remain updated with discounts, sales and any offers you may have. It is important to avoid sending too many messages via SMS as they may begin to unsubscribe.
As mentioned previously, you want to ensure that your website is optimized to be fully mobile-friendly for your users or you could lose potential business.
Performance – analytics
Once you have implemented the above tools to your website, you should monitor and analyze the performance analytics of your platform against the executed strategies. Monitoring the performance of each marketing strategy will allow you to make informed decisions when selecting the right marketing tool for your strategy.
Where you may have been more successful in one area of marketing, you may want to spend more time perfecting another or perhaps simply focusing on the area of success. How you choose to maximize the use of your performance will allow you to make the right adjustments in order to maintain a successful business.
Before going ahead with implementing your strategies, it may be a good idea to research what your competitors are up to and how they engage with their audiences. It is also recommended to put yourself in the shoes of the end-user to help with deciding how to better situate yourself in the digital market. You want to be sure to deploy content to your audience that they will enjoy and not bombard them with advertising posts or messages.
Your online presence will serve as a direct reflection of your business personality and its values. You want to remain consistent, relevant and up to date for your audience to put their trust into your enterprise.
The more authentic you are, the more conversion you will see.
Good luck!
