Angela Hausman, PhD September 29, 2020 
Today’s businesses find digital marketing a very cost-effective means to generate profits, yet both new businesses and those with a longer track record struggle to get the most from their digital marketing strategy. Today, we share 5 digital marketing hacks that will help explode your business opportunities and profits.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing involves a number of online tactics designed to attract potential customers then efficiently nurture them as they move down the conversion funnel toward becoming customers and, ultimately, brand advocates.
Further, your digital marketing efforts require coordination to ensure you provide visitors and customers what they want and need at every stage along their individual customer journey, that messages are tied to their stage in the buying process and the information needed at that stage, and you develop a consistent brand across platforms.
That’s a tall order given the plethora of digital channels, as you see in this infographic.
Image source: Think Big Engine
When we talk about digital marketing hacks, we’re using the term hacks in the most positive, benign way possible. Hence, instead of referring to hacking into something (usually unauthorized), we talk about hacking as in decoding elements leading to success. In today’s post, I’ll share 5 digital marketing hacks to help you grow your online presence and achieve the market performance goals you set.
5 Digital marketing hacks you need right now
1. Hack your social media
You must update your social media feeds regularly with meaningful content, and by meaningful, we mean content your target market finds valuable, entertaining, useful, or informative.
Just posting links to your latest blog post and website shop pages isn’t good enough. In fact, social media should focus on your customers’ wants and needs with only 10% to 20% of the content focused on your brand. You must curate the remaining content from:
- other websites (Feedly is a good way to find content and easily share it across your social channels)
- explainer videos or other evergreen content designed to help your customers
- user-generated content
- news
Find an informal voice rather than using the formal, stuffy tone of corporate business. This chatty style is what users want and expect on social media platforms.
To really market your business, think about the sorts of posts that direct the most traffic to your website by monitoring metrics provided by each individual platform. Be sure to go beyond vanity metrics, including fans, to measure engagement (likes, shares, comments), as these extend your reach to new potential customers. Also, use tracking codes to assess which content drives the most traffic to your website and which content brings in the type of traffic that converts.
2. Hack SEO
SEO (search engine optimized) websites bring more traffic to your digital home, creating opportunities for conversion. SEO represents both technical (such as meta descriptions, keywords, and canonical structures) and non-technical (content, PR, and backlinks) aspects of both online and offline marketing efforts. Content is the element underpinning your SEO strategy and creating valuable content on a consistent basis has a greater impact on SEO than any other aspect included in the ranking algorithms crafted by search engines, like Google.
If you have any doubt as to the impact of ranking in search on visits to your site, take a look at the graphic below.
Image courtesy of Search Engine Journal
If you don’t understand your Snapchat from your SEO, consider employing a company that can hone you a digital strategy to help you achieve your online marketing goals. Outsourcing to a digital marketing professional helps your website appear higher up the Google rankings. By leapfrogging your competition, you increase the chances of reaching your goals.
3. Hack digital advertising
Digital advertising is a great tool designed to bring new traffic to your site or remind customers to shop your brand again. Not only is digital advertising much less expensive than traditional advertising (you often only pay a tiny fee once a user clicks on your ad), but tools available across platforms also allow you to reach highly targeted users. For instance, on Facebook/Instagram, you can choose who sees your ad based on demographic and geographic variables like age, gender, and city.
Moreover, you can choose audiences based on their interests, whether they interacted with your brand previously, whether they’re a fan, or any of a number of other options. The same ability exists on other social platforms and Google’s PPC ads.
With remarketing, available on Google, Facebook, and several other platforms, your ad selectively reaches users who visited your website in the past.
It is this targeting ability that enhances the return on your advertising than in other advertising channels.
4. Hack monitoring and optimization
One of the most impactful advantages of digital marketing is the depth of data available to monitor performance, which allows marketers to optimize their market performance.
Adobe
For instance, Google Analytics monitors every click to your website and tracks visitors from the visit source through to their eventual exit from the website. Armed with this information, marketers know which platforms generate the most visits and which platforms generate the most sales (which is often different platforms). Multichannel attribution modeling similarly allows marketers to apportion a sale across multiple channels generating the visits necessary to close the sale.
As mentioned earlier, social media analytics help identify content driving traffic to your website and increasing engagement on the platform.
Monitoring these metrics provides marketers with valuable information necessary to improve performance.
5. Hack your user experience
User experiences are as individual as your users themselves. Some users more linearly through the purchase process while others meander around your website, returning multiple times before they finally make a decision. Maybe they check out competitors, maybe they view videos demonstrating your products in use, maybe they simply defer the purchase until reminded about your brand when an ad shows up in their newsfeed. We call these customer journeys and one of the key digital marketing hacks involves designing to provide a great customer experience no matter what your customer journey looks like.
That means providing clear navigation, streamlined buying processes, clean, scannable pages, and easy-to-use filters that reduce the cognitive load associated with decision making when a buyer is presented with many options.
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