Innovation & data-driven digital marketing.
The goal of all marketing activity is simple—to raise awareness and drive sales. However, just because the concept is simple doesn’t mean that raising awareness is easy. 2020 and 2021 have presented their own challenges, and after the past year and a half, your company’s digital presence has never been more critical.
At 10x digital, our goal is to create digital solutions for marketing growth strategies. As such, we’ve shared our best tips for improving your company’s digital presence below.
1. Dig Deep on Social
Social media is a vital part of your digital marketing growth strategy. So what does the social media landscape look like in the second half of 2021? Additionally, how can your business use it to grow?
Leverage video content
Between Instagram reels, Facebook and LinkedIn live and TikTok, it’s no secret that there are plenty of new ways to connect with your audience via video. According to research from Later, Instagram videos generate more engagement than any other content type, and Tweets with video see up to ten times more engagement. It may feel daunting. However, don’t be afraid to experiment and try out video content; your followers will be glad you did.
Don’t underestimate a micro-influencer
We’ve all seen the big influencers—millions of followers, millions of likes, and what feels like millions of dollars when it comes to paying them to promote your product. However, using these huge influencers might not always be the best choice for your brand.
Recent data from Buffer shows that influencers with 10,000 followers or less (micro-influencers) see the most competitive results for businesses. These influencers have small, devoted communities, which means their followers are more likely to engage with the products they promote. Plus, their price tag is likely a lot easier to fit into your budget.
Curious about further refining your company’s social media strategy? Take a look at our best tips here.
2. Focus on Content
Seventy percent of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, according to the experts at HubSpot. But just because you’re creating content doesn’t mean that the content is valuable to your consumers. It needs to be fresh, relevant and targeted to drive results and reflect well on your digital brand. How can you use content as a marketing growth strategy?
- Speak to your audience: focus on what your audience needs when you’re creating content, not what you can offer to them;
- Keep it scannable: walls of text are daunting. Your audience is more likely to read scannable content. Incorporate headers, bulleted texts, graphics or charts;
- Change it up: don’t be afraid to experiment with audio and video methods—content doesn’t just have to be a blog post.
At 10x digital, content is our specialty. Check out our guide to creating great content here.
3. Refine Your Backlinking Strategy
Linkbuilding, or increasing the number of links to your website to boost your search engine ranking, should be an essential part of your marketing growth strategy. However, linkbuilding isn’t easy; 41 percent of SEO experts consider link building to be the most challenging part of SEO, according to Social Media Today. How can you build links to boost growth?
- Guest posting: guest posts are a great way to gain those elusive backlinks. Why? Because it’s a quid-pro-quo interaction—you’re offering a website valuable information in exchange for a link;
- Infographics: infographics are the unsung heroes of the backlinking world. They use colors and illustrations that make your content easy to understand and more likely that others link back to you. They become even more value-driven if you use your proprietary data via a survey or other similar methods.
We have an entire team dedicated to effective linkbuilding methods (as we said, it’s not a simple task). Refer to our six proven link building tactics for more pointers.
4. Keep Your Audience at the Forefront
It’s always in a marketer’s interest to keep their target audience (consumer, customer or client) at the forefront. And Google’s latest update gives us even more motivation to do so. This algorithm update ranks sites by user experience—prioritizing websites with low bounce rates. In other words, Google puts more value on your audience’s experience on your site and the length of time they spend there.
How can you optimize your site for user experience? We recommend the following:
- Conduct a site audit, and look carefully at the bounce rates for each page;
- Assess your website’s content, and be honest about why customers aren’t finding it valuable (i.e., it fails to answer relevant questions, irrelevant call to action, etc.);
- Speed up your website (slow loading time is one of the most common reasons for user bounce).
Keeping track of the latest Google algorithm updates is critical to digital marketing success. Take a look at our blog post—we’ll continue updating with the latest news.
Marketing for Growth—Radical Honesty
All of marketing is about growth, growing your brand, finding new prospects and telling your story. However, sometimes the most challenging part of marketing is focusing on what your campaigns have achieved rather than what you wanted them to achieve. In addition, you need to stay abreast of the latest industry trends and updates to incorporate that within your plans.
During the second half of this year, put aside the vanity metrics and focus on your target audience. Are you connecting with them? Are they finding your site (via SEO tactics like backlinking) and then staying there to complete desired actions? Are you happy with your digital brand presence? If not, it may be time to adapt your strategy with the above points in mind.
Most importantly, marketing is a conversation, and you can’t just shout into the void—it’s a two-way street. Keeping impact at the center of your campaigns is the key to unlocking your marketing growth strategy.