It's more important than ever before for businesses to have a strong digital strategy in place.
Social media and the internet have quickly become the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal, and keeping up with trends is essential to staying relevant and knocking out the competition.
Economic uncertainty may have pushed digital strategy down your list of priorities, but don't be fooled. With a little bit of tweaking, you could manoeuvre your digital output to acquire new customers and boost your profit.
Here are some ideas to get you started.
User-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content is a diverse and cost-effective way to engage with your community and create value for your brand.
This type of content strategy is particularly appealing to millennials, who often go to social media before anywhere else when researching something to buy.
According to Total Retail, social media users consume over five hours of UGC each day, making these campaigns 20 per cent more impactful than other streams.
Whether it’s a post or a video or a graphic, friend recommendation endorsements work wonders for your brand and require little effort on your part.
Cross-device remarketing
Cross-device remarketing is a wordy phrase but a simple concept.
The average person now bounces between several different screens throughout the day. Whether it's an iPhone, desktop, Apple Watch, tablet... it's becoming more and more difficult to track your customers as they move through the buying cycle.
According to Signal, 80 percent of consumers bounce between devices, with 40 percent of online transactions involving multiple devices along the way. By implementing a multi-device strategy, you'll be making things a lot easier for your customer base, and ensure they keep coming back for more.
Influencer marketing
Social media influencers are becoming more and more commonplace. These days, it's easier than ever for even non-celebrities to rack up tens of thousands of followers with little trouble.
Platforms like YouTube and Instagram are creating household names out of unknowns, and with this comes a whole new world of marketing opportunities.
Sometimes all it takes is a single image or video post to convert followers into paying customers. As with UGC, potential customers are more likely to trust people like themselves. And the best bit is the most popular profiles include a contact email in their bios, so it doesn't take a huge time-commitment to reach out and explore this kind of strategy.
Content marketing
Ads tend to annoy people, especially pop-up ads and the like. Customers enjoy consuming content, and digest acres of the stuff on a daily basis.
Content is an organic way to stimulate interest and conversations around your brand, and has become an integral marketing avenue. It's inexpensive to create and can be recycled again and again. It establishes your brand as an expert in the field, and opens up new gateways to your site.
Don't forget to use analytics to see what kind of content is proving popular and track your user's consumption. This will be valuable for planning all future content.
Live video
Thanks to the likes of YouTube and Facebook Live, videos are becoming more popular than ever before. Live videos especially have an exclusive feel about them, as though they're a one-off, offering special content your customers are being given direct access to.
Aside from live video being completely free to use, it also requires minimal time and effort to produce, and there are no restrictions to how long or short you want it to be.
These are winning ways to get your digital strategy off the ground, but don't forget to keep an eye on new trends in digital marketing to customise the perfect plan to suit your own brand. Opportunities pop up all the time, and what is or isn't popular can change very quickly, but with a simple strategy in place, you can easily leverage customers and boost your online presence.
