The Internet changed the way businesses promote their products or services, creating a wide range of new marketing mechanisms in the last couple of decades. If you want to build lasting success, you have to take advantage of digital channels and allow your brand to flourish long-term.
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What makes online marketing so important?
The answer is simple: There are almost four billion Internet users worldwide, which means you can reach out to more than half of the global population in mere seconds. But it’s not just about the numbers since the benefits of online promotion stretch well beyond user count:
- Cost-efficiency: The strategy generates over three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.
- Data availability: Powerful data research tools allow you to analyze prospects and create carefully tailored offers.
- ROI: With so much information at your disposal, it’s easy to get the most of your budget and maximize ROI.
- Brand building: Online marketing efforts are never ending, so you can gradually build the brand and grow customer loyalty.
The benefits of executing digital marketing activities are evident, but do you know which tactics promise the best results? If not, keep reading our post to learn 10 secrets of successful online brand promotion in 2024.
1- Write Blog Posts
Blogging is one of the basic and most popular channels of digital marketing. How come?
First of all, almost 80% of Internet users regularly read blog posts. Secondly, nearly 50% of buyers check out three to five pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. In such circumstances, it’s not surprising to learn that successful businesses publish new articles consistently.
Now, the real question is how to write high-quality blog posts. People and organizations publish millions of articles each week, so it’s necessary to take care of content quality and craft standout posts to outclass direct competitors.
Source: Pixabay
Our advice is to come up with a topic that focuses on customers’ practical problems and then explain all the ways to solve the issue. Such a strategy forces you to be diligent and create long-form articles to discuss a subject from all points of view.
According to the report, the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words. The stat clearly proves that both users and search engines prefer quality content that comes in longer formats and takes care of consumers’ real-life problems.
2- Optimize Website for Better Performance
If you have any experience with digital marketing, you must know and appreciate the value of search engine optimization (SEO). After all, 93% of all traffic comes from a search engine and 75% of users never click past the first page of search results.
This practically means that pages ranked lower than the first 10 search results get limited or no visibility whatsoever, which is why you have to pay special attention to SEO activities. What can you do to make the website easily discoverable?
If you followed our first tip, then you are on the right track as websites with blog posts tend to earn much more indexed pages than sites without any articles. However, SEO is much more than writing a blog. Here are some things you can do to optimize the website for engine searches:
- Use the best keywords that perfectly match users’ intentions. A tool such as Google Keyword Planner will help you with that.
- Ensure effortless website navigation. Search engines love user-friendly sites, so do your best to minimize the number of categories and keep your site as simple as possible.
- Improve page load speed. A tool like Pingdom will show you how to do it.
3- Make Some Multimedia Content
We’ve covered some of the main content creation stuff already, so it’s time to move on and discuss the importance of multimedia formats. Namely, a growing number of users are excited about alternative content types and demand more than simple text posts.
This tactic demands additional work and investments, but it promises delivery. Studies show that visual elements increase the desire to read content by 80%. As your brand keeps growing, you should be gradually adding new formats to the content creation strategy. The list of options is long:
- Videos: People love watching videos because this format combines textual, audio, and video content. This is exactly why reports predict that video content is going to make over 82% of the entire online traffic by 2024.
- Infographics: It’s a type of content that combines colorful templates with brief lines of text. According to the research, an infographic is 30 times more likely to be read than a purely textual article.
- Podcasts: A lot of people enjoy listening to audio podcasts while commuting or doing boring tasks in the office.
- Memes, GIFs, animations: These are relatively new formats, but they can definitely enrich your content creation strategy.
4- Live Streaming
Speaking of relatively new content formats, we have to emphasize that live stream videos have recently become a huge trend in the online universe. We strongly encourage you to think about going live and creating this sort of content because it promises to skyrocket user engagement.
The secret of live streaming lies in the fact that it’s not staged. Viewers don’t know what’s going to happen next and so they are willing to spend more time watching a video. Besides that, you can encourage followers to post questions in comments. It’s a great way to skyrocket engagement and grow the number of active participants while increasing watch times.
Another important detail about live streaming is that, unlike professional videos, it doesn’t require high-end equipment or actors. On the contrary, you can do it all single-handedly using nothing more than a smartphone. Users don’t expect the live stream to look as great as prerecorded videos as the only thing that matters is the idea behind your story.
5- Inspire User-Generated Content (UGC)
Promoting your brand using various marketing mechanisms is excellent, but one trick is even better than this. Of course, we are talking about UGC as a powerful brand promotion model. What’s the idea behind UGC? Here are a few important aspects of the tactic:
- UGC saves you time and effort to create unique brand-related content
- UGC boosts user engagement
- UGC turns your fans into active brand promoters
- UGC helps you to strengthen relationships with consumers
- UGC is free promotion
How can you encourage fans to create promo content on your behalf?
The first solution is to promise small incentives or giveaways for users who create the most interesting content related to the brand. The second option is to organize contests and launch an avalanche of reactions.
Sample products or free trials are common prizes, but sometimes you can even reward fans simply by mentioning them in your posts. It will give them the notion of public acknowledgment, which is always a great tactic to strengthen the bonds between the brand and its followers.
6- Social Media Marketing
Do you know that social networks attract over two billion daily active users? It’s a precious online promotion resource that you have to exploit and grow the visibility of the brand.
Source: Pixabay
Just like the website, social media also require a whole lot of quality content, but this time you are supposed to focus more on entertainment and brand personality. The goal is to show the personality of your business and prove that the brand can offer fans that much-needed human touch.
However, don’t fall into the trap and create accounts on every social platform. You should select the most valuable ones instead and concentrate efforts on networks that really make an impact on the target audience. There are so many options to consider here, but the usual suspects include:
- Facebook: The largest social network is a must for all types of businesses.
- Instagram: It’s a perfect solution for product-oriented companies targeting younger consumers.
- Twitter: The platform is suitable for brands with proactive, middle-aged, educated, and high-income followers.
- LinkedIn: If you are dealing with B2B clients, LinkedIn is the place to go.
- YouTube: In case you need to create a lot of tutorials to explain your services, we suggest using YouTube for video content.
7- Email Newsletters
Emails are by far the oldest trick in the digital marketing book, but they still play a major role in relationship building. As a matter of fact, users consider it to be a primary means of professional communications – almost 80% of people prefer to get permission-based promotional messages via email.
But like all the other items on our list, email marketing also demands a fair share of planning and strategic thinking. Keep in mind that users receive dozens of emails daily, so you have to create content that really stands out if you want them to read the message.
First of all, you should start by writing appealing subject lines. It’s the first thing a person sees when opening a message, so you better be impressive enough to inspire him/her to keep reading.
Secondly, you have to write brief and concise copies, making sure to mention the most relevant points only. You don’t want to bother users with unnecessary details, so keep it all as clear as possible.
And finally, always add a call-to-action and invite subscribers to do something upon reading the message. For instance, you can encourage them to visit the website, read a blog, sign up for a free trial, etc.
8- Paid Advertising
Organic brand promotion is essential, but sometimes you simply won’t be able to win over the target audience without paid advertising. It’s a common strategy and no one can run away from it, including the biggest players in any industry.
This is particularly important for brands trying to boost conversions. Namely, Google Ads results receive 65% of the clicks that started with buying keywords, while organic results only receive 35%.
The best thing about paid advertising is the potential to address highly specific audience groups. Let’s see how Facebook Ads functions targeting-wise:
- Core audiences: You can target Facebook users based on their interests and demographic features such as age, location, gender, marital status, education, income, etc.
- Custom audiences: It is also possible to identify and approach users who already established some sort of interaction with your business through mobile apps, social media, websites, email, and so on.
- Lookalike audiences: The last option is to target users who are very similar to your existing buyers. That way, you make sure to reach out to verified leads exclusively.
9- Cooperate with Influencers
Social influencers have become a strong force in the digital marketing world. According to one study, over 70% of teens trust online influencers more than traditional celebrities. It’s a valuable brand building resource that you should utilize to grow fan base, build relationships, and increase conversions short-term. You can choose between two sorts of influencers depending on the business objectives:
- Micro-influencers: These are key opinion leaders with up to 30 thousand followers who have a great impact on the target audience. They are the right choice if your goal is to drive engagement.
- Macro-influencers: These are famous people with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. If your goal is to raise awareness, macro-influencers are the way to go.
10- Local Search Optimization
Over 70% of consumers who conduct a local search visit a store within five miles. It’s a clear signal for brands with physical stores to invest in local search optimization and approach nearby customers.
The easiest way to do it is to create an account on Google My Business. That way, users who search for targeted keywords or similar businesses will be able to spot your location in Google Maps. Besides that, Google will display basic info such as emails, phone numbers, addresses, etc.
Conclusion
The Internet has changed almost every aspect of life and business, altering the way we approach our daily tasks and duties. Modern marketing is by no means an exception because you get to use a number of previously unknown mechanisms to build and grow the brand.
In this post, we analyzed 10 secrets of successful online brand promotion that will help you succeed in 2024. These are not the only digital marketing tricks you could try, but they definitely prove to be the most influential. Which tactic do you believe to be the best here?
