Online marketing is as exciting as it is essential. After all, it can be an exhilarating experience to brainstorm ideas, strategize and create marketing campaigns to create exposure for your brand and attract consumers. But with the sheer number of different practices and techniques available, identifying those to use and prioritize can be more than a little overwhelming.
As a business owner, you’ll need to have a good understanding of your brand, its offerings, and the target audience before committing to any method. There’s no such thing as a formula that will guarantee success – it’s all about knowing which strategies work and those that don’t, and in this article, we’ll cover both. Keep reading to learn more.
Strategies that work
One of the most challenging aspects of implementing a digital marketing campaign is selecting the right strategies. Not every technique works, after all. And it’s made even more complicated by the fact that the process is constantly changing. As a result, one method that might produce desirable results today may not be tomorrow. With that said, here are some practical strategies you should use:
- SEO. Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of enhancing a website’s online presence by enabling it to rank high for its chosen keywords on the search results. SEO can elevate internet visibility, boost credibility, and improve organic inbound Web traffic and conversions if done right. Due to its importance, you’ll want to seek the assistance of an SEO company for help.
- SEM. Unlike SEO, search engine marketing or SEM increases internet presence, Web traffic, and exposure on search engines primarily through paid strategies like PPC or pay-per-click advertising. Its primary goal is to help a website rank high on the search engine results pages because the better it ranks, the more visitors it can draw in. With this approach, you’ll essentially purchase advertising space to ensure that it appears at the top of all the searches.
- Content marketing. The core of every digital marketing method is content creation. As the name implies, the process focuses primarily on creating and publishing content online. While it’s usually designed for a specific audience, the delivery of the material can be anything, from articles and blog posts to videos and podcasts. It’s an invaluable tool not only in creating brand awareness and establishing authority. But also in expanding your existing audience and getting more leads.
- Social media advertising. Social media has become one of the most popular digital marketing platforms today, and for a good reason: it boasts a considerable user base that brands can potentially tap into when it comes to reputation management. Strategies used in this digital channel include paid and unpaid advertising, and by posting quality content consistently, you’ll allow yourself to reach a broad market.
Strategies that don’t work
While hits and misses are familiar in digital marketing, some strategies inherently don’t work. Listed below are just some of the techniques that you’ll want to avoid at all costs.
- Content automation. In a nutshell, content automation refers to the use of technical and digital systems to take over the process of content marketing. In other words, it effectively removes any human input from various areas to save time, effort, and money. While this might sound like a good thing, it usually leads to lower quality material and can turn off users from your brand.
- Keyword stuffing. Also known as spamdexing or web spam, keyword stuffing is a Blackhat SEO technique wherein the targeted phrases and terms are loaded in any published content to gain a questionable edge in the search results. You must steer clear of this method because search engines today are more intelligent than they were in the past. If they notice that you’re practicing keyword stuffing, you’ll likely get penalized and lose your search result ranking.
- Doorway pages. Another SEO technique considered a Blackhat method, doorway pages are essentially web pages created primarily to manipulate search engines’ indexes. For example, inserting specific results for particular phrases into its page affects the index because it leads visitors to another page.
Final thoughts
Digital marketing may not be rocket science, but it requires a fair bit of thought and consideration. You’ll need to choose which strategies to use if you want to succeed in the endeavor, so be sure to use only those that work. And more importantly, avoid those that don’t because they can be more trouble than they’re worth.
