Digital marketing is a core strategy for any modern business. It assists in creating awareness, driving leads, and — hopefully — eventually producing sales. Since digital marketing is constantly evolving, marketers need to be on the cusp of the latest trends and techniques. This can be challenging, as many marketers are also responsible for executing these new tactics.
If you’re looking to amp up your digital marketing this year, you’ve come to the right place. Here are four ways you can make the most of your digital marketing efforts in 2023.
1. Focus on Customer Retention
Meeting or exceeding your consumer’s expectations is of the utmost importance for your business. By knowing and understanding what they want and need, you’ll be better able to serve them. And the happier your customers, the more likely they will come back to your brand. That’s critical to your business’s profitability, as it’s more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to go out and find new ones.
This is where retention marketing enters the equation. The purpose of retention marketing is to create a loyal relationship between the consumer and your brand. If you sense you don’t have a clear fix on your customers’ wants and needs, you’ll need to rectify that. Developing customer personas, engaging in social listening, and scouring past purchasing behavior data will enable you to hear the voice of the customer. Once you have, you can take retention-promoting steps, whether that’s improving your website’s loading speed or sending promotional offerings via email.
2. Implement a PPC Campaign
Of course, you still need to attract new leads to your brand no matter how loyal your current customers are. A pay-per-click campaign can help you reach and attract new customers. As a brand, you’ll pay a fee each time a user clicks on one of your ads. Typically, the cost of a click is minimal — perhaps a few dollars per each. But if a visitor purchases tens or hundreds of dollars’ worth of product from your site, the ROI is significant.
You’ve likely come across PPC campaigns yourself without realizing it. They can live on search engines such as Google, social media platforms, and other sites. Creating a PPC campaign looks different based on the hosted site or platform. In general, you’ll establish your main objective and refine settings based on your target audience, such as geographic location and device. It’s a fairly quick process, and you’ll soon get the hang of it as you test and learn from various PPC campaign builds.
3. Spotlight Your Leaders
Consumers want to feel personally connected to the brands they buy from. They want to get to know the founders and creators of the brands they love. A recent study found that 70% of buyers feel more tied to a brand when the CEO is active on social media. They like to learn more about their personal life, including how they incorporate their brand’s products into their day-to-day routines.
Elizabeth Stein, the founder and CEO of organic granola company Purely Elizabeth, is at the heart of her brand’s Instagram account. In fact, it’s her personal profile, so she shares all of her travel pix as well as new product launches and exciting news. Supplement brand Arrae’s founder Siffat Haider has her own podcast called “The Dream Bigger Podcast,” where she interviews fellow entrepreneurs. She discusses her own hurdles in building Arrae as well as her personal wellness routines and habits with listeners. These are just two examples of how brands can strengthen their connection with consumers by giving them a glimpse behind the curtain.
4. Look Into Podcast Advertising
Speaking of podcasting, this is a huge revenue-driving opportunity for brands in and of itself. Currently, there are over 464 million podcast listeners globally — a number that’s expected to rise to over 504 million by the close of 2024. While the demand for podcasts is growing, it is still a relatively untapped market for advertisers. Radio was once a mainstream form of advertising, but it was largely put on the back burner due to the rise of digital technologies. Because of this, many brands are just slowly returning back to audio advertising formats.
One of the easiest ways to jump into podcast streaming is to work with a podcast network group. These groups produce multiple podcasts within a specific field or topic, such as wellness, business, technology, self-help, and pop culture. Finding a group that aligns with your brand is a seamless way to distribute your audio ad among numerous podcasts. You can determine which podcasts are providing you with the highest ROI by offering a specific promotional code tied to individual podcasts.
Takeaways
Every day, brands are rising to the challenge of upping their digital marketing efforts. They are investing more of their budgets in digital forms of advertising, from social media to SEO. In this competitive landscape, it’s a matter of finding the best ways to gain the consumer’s attention. Trending tactics may provide a shot in the arm, but don’t neglect tried-and-true ones like customer retention. A mix of novel and tested techniques can be the key to propelling your business toward long-term growth.
