Are You Thinking Outside the Box with Your Digital Marketing Strategy?

Digital marketing, it’s everywhere, filling our email inboxes, appearing as promoted social media posts and popping up in our online videos. It’s quite a general term however and covers a wide range of marketing routes, from content marketing to social media marketing and influencer marketing to search engine optimisation.

They all fall under the digital marketing title and can leave some companies a bit boggled to what the best method of digital marketing is for them.

Unfortunately, just picking a single route is no longer a viable option of getting ahead, while there are still a huge number of businesses with no website or social media presence at all, there are plenty more businesses and brands that are utilising digital marketing opportunities and doing a good job of it.

Businesses that are attempting to establish an online presence should delegate their digital marketing needs to a dedicated digital marketing agency. Because they are experts in this field and can assist you in developing your online presence.

If you have been tasked with managing your digital marketing strategy, consider the following “outside the box” marketing opportunities that offer something different to the onslaught of promotional posts your potential customers usually see.

What Is Content?

Content is all over the internet and in fact what you are reading right now falls under the category of “content”. You are likely familiar with the common “Top 10” and “Top 5” posts that appear when searching for a certain topic.

These posts are great for people looking for the answer to a single question and done right with effective SEO,will help your website appear top in Google’s search results, however, they aren’t the best method for retaining visitors.

Retaining Visitors

To retain visitors and get them reading more content on your website, you need to be answering their initial question and offer links to answers for further questions they might have.

For example, someone searching for “how to teach my dog to stay” is likely to follow links to “how to teach my dog to sit” or “how to housetrain my dog”.

By anticipating their need for answers you can create a quality, informative piece of content that naturally links through to content on the same topic but covers a different subtopic. Content should always be created for a reason, rather than “just because” as it will likely end up uninteresting and uninformative, putting people off coming back to you for facts in the future.

Other Methods for Content

Content doesn’t just have to be text and moreover should never be text by itself, always accompany text posts with high-quality, licensed or internally owned images.

Gifs are better in place of pictures where appropriate as they are better at grabbing attention, especially when used on fast-moving social media.

If you have well-researched and informative content that can be turned into a video, make sure to put resource aside to do so or seek guidance from a digital design agency. Videos are not only better for gaining engagements on social media, but one-third of all online activity comes from watching videos. That’s a lot of attention you could be missing out on by neglecting visual forms of content marketing.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a fairly young subsection under the digital marketing umbrella and for a time became mostly popular amongst companies with big budgets that could afford celebrity and popular social influencer personalities. Recently, micro influencers have been making some more noise on the scene and have shown to be a more cost-effective method of influencer marketing with an increased chance for engagements.

Micro influencers are like their more popular social influencer brethren but are more likely to have between 1,000 to 10,000 followers and are considered thought leaders in their niche, be it fitness, fashion or cooking.

They have more time to communicate with their self-built communities which results in a higher number of engagements on their social medias posts as their followers trust the micro-influencer to provide an honest opinion regarding a certain service or product.

If you have considered influencer marketing in the past but couldn’t warrant the budget, consider a micro-influencer who can be as much as 10x cheaper than a similar celebrity endorsement. The contact details of such influencers are much easier to find than your big shot celebrities: most of the time you'll be able to find their email using a handy email address finder extension on their website (if they have one) or even on their professional social profile. Contacting micro influencers is easy and the payoff is great, so give it a try!

Digital marketing strategies are constantly evolving and what works now, might not be effective in the future, so it’s important to keep an eye on what your competitors do on social media and the trend of activity online.

Maybe in the future, videos will be a thing of the past and everyone will be using augmented reality apps! We can’t be sure what the future holds and while getting ahead isn’t easy, being creative is fun, so get your team together, consider the above “outside the box” ideas and work to put together an effective digital marketing strategy that gets your brand some attention.

Featured image : iabc.bc.ca