How effective is your digital marketing strategy? Would you consider yourself a successful digital marketer?
If that question makes you feel queasy, you’re not alone. Digital marketing is hard to get right, and it’s changing every day.
The only way to keep up with these changes and get ahead of your competition is to innovate. Get out of your comfort zone, experiment, and test new methods to improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing.
If digital is a big part of your business, then you’d be familiar with terms like link building, content marketing, social media marketing etc. These are umbrella terms covering a number of marketing techniques that can really up your game.
But knowing this alone is insignificant if you don’t know how to make the most of each technique with new and interesting tactics. So let’s walk through some techniques that can increase the effectiveness of your online marketing.
1. Guest posting
While you may have heard arguments that guest blogging is being overused as a tool for link building, and losing value as a means of useful content deliverance, none can deny its effectiveness in the marketing world.
Guest blogging is here to stay, so you better make it part of your marketing strategy!
Ironically, the hardest part about guest posting is not the content creation; rather, it’s sourcing the blogs. Thankfully, the internet is a great place where you can find solutions to every problem imaginable.
BuzzStream is one solution to the ordeals of guest posting. It carries out a number of tasks for guest bloggers, such as:
- Prospecting links
- Keeping track of unique projects
- Keeping track of good links
- Analyzing results for you.
2. The Skyscraper Technique
As interesting as its sounds, the skyscraper technique requires that you find the tallest skyscraper content in your niche and improve it with stories of your own.
Once you get going, you will realize the numerous ways you can edit and improve people’s content and make it so much more useful. Also, you will be amazed by the grand attention your content receives through the skyscraper method!
Here are three fairly easy steps to guide your way through the skyscraper technique:
- Dig out linkable assets – topics and content that are already faring well and earning laurels in the niche of your business.
- Make it better. You can make it longer, update it, better design it, and/or add more detail to it.
- Reach out to people to provide you backlinks. The website you choose should have already posted something relevant to your linkable asset, be part of your business niche, and should be ranking higher than your own.
3. The Moving Man Method
This relatively new term coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko has taken marketing agencies by surprise. The method is the marketing equivalent of revamping old clutter to create something way more useful than the original.
This marketing technique requires you to:
- Search for sites that share your market but have moved to a new URL, changed names, stopped offering services, stopped updating resources, or have completely shut down their online business.
- Produce content that is up-to-date, more powerful, and more relevant than what the defunct website had to offer.
- Access the hundreds of people still linking to the old website and ask if they would be interested in linking to your webpage in lieu of the defunct, outdated webpage.
Simple and witty, just like what we expect from marketers of the twenty-first century!
4. Internationalizing SEO
Internationalization is a method not too common but of great significance. You make your website/blog accessible to more people by offering it in languages of more than one country. Makes sense!
Offer translations of your website in multiple languages and localize words to get your fair share of an international audience.
Image Source: Moz
5. Psychological techniques
Many times while implementing your marketing strategy, you will have to think like more than just as a marketer; you will have to think as a psychologist.
Understanding the psyche of your audience and creating content that they can actually relate to are skills possessed by only rare, true marketers. If you learn the art you can conquer the hearts and minds of your audience.
This psychological effect is sometimes created by the use of powerful words. Don’t hesitate or fall short of researching such power words within your niche as they can compel new customers to join your community.
Image Source: Buffer
The second strong psychological effect is that of social sharing and caring. Use social media sites and communication to your full advantage by being humanistic and generous in your approach. Connect with people and other companies as people. When they share your content, always remember to return the favor.
6. Increasing your website’s click-through-rate (CTR)
Increasing your CTR in search engines is a time tested method of improving search engine ranking for websites.
Business blogs and websites have been going through the struggle for a long time. However, it’s really not that hard if you have a systematic approach to it.
CTR can be increased fairly easily by:
- Wise keyword selection
- Quality content
- Eye-catching titles
- Comprehensive, engaging descriptions
- Prompt Calls-to-Action
- Using breadcrumbs in the URL
- A Table-of-Contents plugin
- Getting Google sitelinks
7. Sharing through LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn is a wonderful place to run into new businesses and clients, stir up conversations, offer deals, and market your products in the process. In order to provide value and engage in a conversation with members of your target audience, share content through LinkedIn groups.
- Comment on and share popular content
- Begin conversations by asking a question
- Post your own content (videos, blogs, Infographics, etc.) in the group
Image Source: Soho Tech Training
8. Innovative emails
Who hasn’t tried email marketing in order to address a wide audience? But the process and content of email marketing has become so monotonous and predictable that most companies usually get ignored by email recipients.
It’s about time we start getting innovative with email marketing;
- Instead of blindly sending your emails into the vast expanse on the internet, aim for specific people with certain interests. You can email all the people who tweeted about a certain product in your niche as an example.
- Long gone are the days of pesky looking emails. If you wish your emails to be read by recipients, design and compose them with grace and wit.
- Use less text and more compelling images in emails.
Learn from the geniuses, such as Dropbox which designed this sleek, beautiful email you just cannot ignore!
Image Source: HubSpot
9. Innovative link building
There’s no point in trying to target and build connections with random websites which have no correlation to topics in your niche. You can better spend the effort on reasonable prospects. Companies employ a number of methods when trying to identify and reach to potential websites which can backlink to their content.
One such technique is email marketing to people who have backlinked to relevant content already. Get in touch with these websites which have established positions in the market. Break the ice with them and ask politely for a feature or two of your own website.
10. Using advertorials
Advertorials are the way forward in the present age of content marketing and promotion. They are unique and unlike traditional advertising because the content imitates editorial content but serves to fulfill the goals of a brand.
Following are ways to make advertorials advantageous for your brand:
- Find the right match of magazine/online publication for your advertorial.
- Make sure your advertorial is clearly labeled as ‘advertisement’ as per the FTC’s latest laws and guidelines, or else it may get banned.
- Remember, advertorials are more like blog posts. You don’t directly sell the product; you sell content related to your product.
- Don’t forget to share your advertorials on social media sites.
11. 301 redirects
Redirection is a process of sending both users and search engines to a URL different from what they requested. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which transfers almost all of the link juice to the new page.
A 301 redirect is the most preferable type of redirect because it indicates to browsers, search engine bots, and the users, that the page has been permanently moved. Search engines may take some time to discover your new page but once they do, they will take your new page to the same rankings where your former page stood.
Wrap
The 11 ways of making online marketing more effective are the latest and most responsive of their kind. However, online marketing is a long, on-going process which cannot be summed up in 20, let alone 11 techniques.
Go beyond your threshold, employ all the methods discovered here and you might eventually find what works best for your business.
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