Ways to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy For the New Year
Although 2020 has made marketing a more difficult challenge for the typical business — with the unexpected need to respond to the vulnerabilities presented by the pandemic and the call to respond to changed consumer behaviour — this doesn’t necessarily mean that the company needs to follow feelings of uncertainty by 2021.
There is no better time than today to start considering how to take your business to the next level in preparation for a record sales year in 2021. Before you get started, read up on marketing strategies so you can be in the know and at the cutting edge of the marketing scene.
Using the following ways to improve your digital marketing strategy, we’ll help you stay ahead of your competition, and meet your goals for customer acquisition and revenue. We have identified five marketing techniques that are on the rise for 2021 to give you a basic framework for what to incorporate into your business strategy.
Implement SEO on Your Website
Search Engine Optimization, better known as SEO, is one of the most critical components of modern digital marketing leveraged by every successful website development company. With the right strategies in place, effective SEO improves the visibility of your company and boosts brand awareness. A brand that uses strong SEO techniques will rank well on Google’s first page for its most relevant keywords — connecting interested searchers with your content and commodities.
SEO is a complex marketing field that requires formal training or professional assistance, but it is essential to understand at least the fundamentals of it so that you can use it on your website. A good SEO-informed website will yield a dramatically higher amount of web traffic and revenue to your business. Every business can benefit from strong SEO — from small retail stores to law firms.
Do a little digging into these three types of SEO:
- On-page SEO
- Off-site SEO
- Technical SEO
Check out MySmartMove’s homepage. They do an excellent job of implementing on-page SEO. Can you guess which keywords they’re trying to rank for?
Contest Marketing
Everyone loves a contest, especially when it’s low risk and there’s practically nothing to lose.
Sponsoring an online contest or in-person contest is a great way to drive engagement and build brand awareness. Whether that means hosting a giveaway on one of your social media sites, or holding a raffle inside of a brick and mortar store, contests are one of the easiest ways to get your current clientele excited and expand your reach to strangers who are interested in your brand, whether it be Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
A few social media contests you can experiment with include:
- Photo contests: Users submit a photo promoting your product or brand and tag your profile using specific hashtags. The winner is randomly selected.
- Caption contests: Users leave a comment on a picture you’ve posted with the funniest alternative caption they can think of. The comment with the most impressions wins.
- Sweepstakes: Users enter their email or comment on a post and tag 2–5 friends. The winner of the sweepstakes is randomly selected.
TikTok
Throughout 2020, while TikTok has been the subject of quite a bit of debate, it is rapidly becoming one of the most effective platforms to reach Gen Z and millennial audiences. It could be smart to include TikTok outreach and profile-building when developing your marketing strategy for 2021. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the short video app rakes in over 1,000,000 visits every day and has over 800 million active users worldwide.
There is a multitude of reasons to venture into marketing on TikTok. Of those reasons include paid advertising, influencer marketing, and the opportunity to develop a strategic channel. While the first reason appears to be the safest and most straightforward, with blatant paid ads you run the risk of annoying users. You’ll need to be authentic in your approach and truly come up with creative ways to engage users.
Creating a TikTok brand allows you the ability to build and advertise your brands with your own content, while also enabling you to make sure the content produced provides users with valuable information. Influencer marketing is commonly considered the most authentic way to reach buyers by establishing partnerships with TikTok influencers.
Influencer Marketing
Rather than directly selling to a massive base of potential customers, you should recruit influencers from social media to undertake the heavy lifting for you. Someone who has a wide-ranging and devoted following serves as the best candidate for extending the scope of your business due to their outstanding engagement with their community of followers.
You may or may not be able to afford the best influencers out there, based on your available marketing budget. The good news is that there are thousands of micro-influencers who also have strong followings and engagement rates that won’t necessitate any expensive upfront rates.
Old Fashioned Street Marketing
If you’re heading down the highway, taking a subway, or just travelling into the city for a morning bike ride, chances are you’ll run into at least one advertisement. You’re always being marketed to, whether it’s a billboard sign, a flyer stapled to a wall, or a bus stop banner. It’s almost unavoidable, and it’s about time that your organization invested in some smart street marketing techniques.
Street marketing, also referred to as urban marketing, is a brilliant way to advertise your brand on a localized scale, spreading the impact and reach of your audience to people that inhabit your city.
Street marketing can take a range of different physicalities, such as:
- Posters
- Bus/train stop posters
- Billboards
- Bench advertisements
- Murals
- Flyers
Wrapping Up
In the next few years, the realm of digital marketing will inevitably morph and become an even greater force to be reckoned with. If you’re not quick to adapt, your website and your brand will get lost in the crowd without strong, survivable marketing strategies. With these tips on how to improve your digital marketing strategy, you’ll have everything you need to ensure you remain at the cutting edge.
Let us know how these tips work for you and share your own predictions and recommendations for the 2021 year in the comment section below!
Samantha Rupp
Samantha Rupp holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. She is the managing editor for 365 Business Tips as well as runs a personal blog, Mixed Bits Media. She lives in San Diego, California and enjoys spending time on the beach, reading up on current industry trends, and travelling.
