Thinking of expanding the reach of your goods and services to a wider audience or increasing your customer base? Then digital marketing is an effective way of archiving this goal. In the last decade, the use of the internet has grown exponentially increasing the reach of digital marketing campaigns. To effectively market on the internet a digital marketing plan is vital as it ensures that your content reaches your target audience. Internet trends and tastes change rapidly, and this makes it essential for the adoption of a new digital marketing plan in 2018.
Recommended reading: How to Create a Social Media Marketing Plan
Contents
1. Lean into Your High-Quality Content
High-Quality Content is content that offers free and useful information which attracts and engages audiences and allows you to build your brand image. A number of online marketing campaigns fail as their content is aimed at ranking higher in internet search engines. High-quality content makes content marketing easier as the audience will tend to share this content with friends and family as it is relevant and helpful to them. High-quality content reduces your website’s bounce rate and prevents problems such as deceptive content and deceptive practices like click-bating. To effectively incorporate high-quality content into your internet marketing campaign it is essential to present unique, accurate, relevant content and to link this content to other pages to reach a wider audience.
2. Launch a Growth-Driven Website Plan
A growth-driven website plan is a process of website design that focuses on the growth of a website in incremental steps rather than redesigning the whole website after a two-year period which is a hallmark of traditional web design. The website is launched and starts out small, and growth is determined by small steps based on data and analysis that improve the overall performance of the website. The growth-driven website plan is based on the traditional scientific method that follows research-hypothesis-experiment-analysis but it this case it follows plan-develop-learn-transfer. The importance of a growth-driven website plan is that it minimizes the risk of wasting time and resources associated with website design as the incremental steps allow for greater control and analysis of ineffective features that result in a more productive website.
3. Ramp Up Your Social media Marketing
The use of social media has increased drastically in the last decade with Instagram exceeding one billion users. Social media marketing offers an interactive platform that an organization can use to advertise, communicate and receive feedback from its audience. The relatively low cost of social media marketing is a big advantage to marketers who can release a significant amount of content without having to pay advertising fees. Social media gives marketers access to a large audience across the globe. To ensure the effectiveness of a social media marketing additional focus on content is required as it has to be engaging and relevant to the target audience.
4. Test Live Chat and Chatbots
Live chats are an interactive feature on websites that allow customer support to chat with clients. This feature allows clients to receive helpful information and to solve problems with the aid of customer support. In recent years the overall increase in the number of internet users has made it impossible for websites to have enough staff members to handle all incoming live chats. Chatbots have become an alternative to live chats where a computer program interacts with clients either through voice messages or text messages. As a result, a large number of client’s customer service needs can be met at a lower cost as compared to using live chats. A major problem with using live chat and chatbots is that they tend to malfunction. Chatbot program software may fail, and network problems may affect the availability of live chats. Testing these live chat and chatbots is vital as they play an important role in a website.
5. Increase Your Video Marketing Budget
Increasing your video marketing budget is an essential part of ensuring the success of your 2018 Digital Marketing Plan. Video Marketing is a useful tool as videos are very informative and can convey a lot of information to the audience in a relatively short amount of time. The entertainment aspect of videos means that they can receive a cult-like following from the audience if they are creative or funny enough. As a result, the video will be shared across multiple social media sites reaching a wider audience, and this will reduce the amount of money a company will have to pay to advertise on websites to reach a similar size audience. To ensure that a video marketing campaign is effective additional budgetary funds are needed to increase video quality and to hire creative directors to ensure that the videos appeal to the target audience.
6. Leverage Data-Driven Marketing
Leverage data-driven marketing is the use of data that is collected by an organization or market data to gain insights into market trends. In addition, data on consumer demands and tastes are also collected. The insight gained from data collections allows for the formulation of effective marketing plans and strategies. Data-driven marketing is an effective form of marketing as it relies on actual data which enables organizations to make better decisions and predict future changes in market trends and consumer demands.
7. Use Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is marketing that does not focus on the audience but rather on prominent individuals that can influence the audience. In the last five decades, advertisements have become less effective due to the increasingly large amounts of advertisement campaigns and a growing distrust of adverts by the general public. A target audience is more likely to be influenced by a prominent public figure that they admire than an advert. Influencer marketing combines the appeal of an influential individual to advertising to attract potential customers while gives advertisers access to the influencer’s loyal fans. Influencers such as celebrities can expose a brand to a large domestic and foreign audience and can be an essential way for a market campaign to target a specific audience.
Evidently, in 2018 to increase your audience or customer base you will have to implement a new digital marketing plan. To increase the effectiveness of your website you will have to launch a growth-driven plan that incorporates high-quality content. To improve the overall performance of your digital plan it is vital to expanding social media marketing, video media marketing and to employ leverage-data marking. Frequently testing the chatbots and the live chat features on your site will ensure that the customer care needs of your customers are met.
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