Top tips to boost your business with digital marketing
Cafes, restaurants, and retail stores are amongst a few businesses that are able to reopen after the global lockdown at the beginning of the year. The coronavirus pandemic and the enforced lockdown that came with it has led to an economic crash, meaning we now face the challenge of encouraging consumers to begin spending again.
However, there are a few digital marketing tactics that small businesses can utilise to boost business over the next few months. We have come up with a few ideas to get you started, take a look!
Keep your message consistent and your content engaging by auditing your social media channels
As most of us know, social media is an extremely important area in the digital marketing landscape with billions of monthly active users across channels including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.Most users are actively using social media to connect with friends and family, read news updates, and share their interests with followers. However, for businesses, social media is a fantastic tool that allows you to directly connect with your brand’s fans and followers, digitally showcase your products and services, and reach a wider audience that, otherwise, may not have known about you.Having success on social media means creating content that encourages your audience to engage – whether that be paid or organic content. However, with billions of accounts active every day, complicated algorithms to understand, and perhaps a lack of in-house time to devote to it; it can be hard to stay on top of the ever-evolving nature of these channels, nevermind maintaining consistent engagement rates. If this is something you can relate to for your own company, auditing your social media channels is a great way to analyse your current output and ways that it can be improved!Though there are guides on how to audit your accounts online, at After Digital, our social media experts regularly run audits for our clients to ensure that they are adhering to best-practice on each of the social media channels that they post on. Our audits include in-depth analysis of each channel (or specific channels should that be requested), actionable insights on how to maximise results on each channel, audience analysis and expert insight into how to harness paid activity, and examples of how your revised content should look. By providing full reports on their existing accounts and how their content can be better, our team of social media experts can help shape a better, more engaging social media strategy for our clients.
Invest time into creating great video content
Digital users are consuming more video content than ever before, with 86% of them actually watching video content daily! Whether on social media, email newsletters, or on your website; video content is an extremely popular form of multimedia. In fact, Cisco projects that global internet traffic from videos will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2021 – if you’re not already investing in video content, you should be.Video is a marketing tool that not only provides information in an easily digestible format, but in an entertaining way too. Video landing pages on websites are capable of increasing conversion rates by over 80%, the mere mention of the word ‘video’ in your email subject line can increase open rates by 19%, and viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video Its popularity only grows each year and video has become an essential part of digital marketing activity. From B2B businesses using it to bring infographic content to life to B2C businesses using it to advertise a new addition to their product range, video is versatile and an asset to your marketing strategy.However, in-house videographers and editors aren’t always a common resource and if you aren’t already utilising video content regularly, it can be difficult to know how best to harness it. Whether it’s creating short, animated case studies or sifting through your existing video library to create something new and special, there are a multitude of video formats that can help increase your sales and brand awareness.
Here are a few ideas that After Digital could help you with:
Demo Videos:These formats of video are created to showcase how your products work and educate your audience on how to best use your product. These are extremely popular when brands use social media influencers to demonstrate products.
Brand Videos:Brand videos are typically used to elevate brand advertising campaigns that showcase the company’s mission and vision. We can create brand videos to help increase your brand awareness.
Expert Interviews:Capturing interviews with industry thought leaders and internal experts can help build trust amongst your audience who have never purchased from your before. We can reach out to influencers and manage relations to ensure we receive the best content for your organisation.
Case Studies and testimonials:Appeased customers are some of your best advocates, so, receiving testimonials in video format can be one of the best formats to encourage other customers who visit your website or social media channels to purchase!
Live video: In the past few months social media ‘live’ video formats through Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn have soared by 330%. Influencers and businesses have been using Live to stay connected with their customers during the lockdown period, while consumers use live video to stay informed and engage with the account. With the option to post comments and film Q&A’s, this form of video content is extremely interactive and gives viewers a behind the scenes peek of your organisation.
Use PR and reach out to influencers
We know that social media is a fantastic way to focus your advertising on a particular segment of your ideal audience. Therefore, working with influencers, who have already built up a loyal and dedicated niche following, is an excellent way to reach your audience through social media.Influencer marketing and PR is a form of collaboration of equal value between two brands with the aim of achieving brand awareness and online engagement. Influencer marketing has led to some of the most successful campaigns online as products are presented to an ideal and impressionable target audience. A great example of this being done well would be watch brand Daniel Wellington. Using a social media strategy, focused on the millennial demographic, Daniel Wellington harnessed influencer marketing to raise the profile of their brand – focusing on several micro-influencers, as opposed to mega-influencers, in order to get better results. Their influencer-focused strategy has allowed them to reach audiences around the world, something that would have been harder to accomplish with traditional marketing, and resulted in them receiving the most influencer mentions out of any brand on Instagram in 2018. Though they launched in 2011, by 2018, they had gotten to US$250m in sales and were named as one of the fastest growing companies that year – it’s clear to see the power of this avenue of marketing.In fact, according to Hootsuite, a quarter of Facebook users have purchased a product through Instagram recommendations and 61% of consumers are likely to trust recommendations from a friend, family member, or influencer on social platforms – compared to only 38% who said they are likely to trust recommendations from a brand.Though it’s a great tool to harness, staying on top of PR and influencer comms can be time-consuming.After Digital can work with you to create influencer and PR strategies to enhance your brand and product awareness, while also working closely on influencer relations. During our time working with Illuminated Mirrors, we undertook distinct social content and influencer marketing campaigns. We approached TV show ‘Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model’ and worked with them for over two seasons in order to attain promotional merchandise and collateral to form the foundations of a creative new Facebook competition. This campaign strengthened Illuminated Mirrors’ exposure across social media and drive referral traffic to the site.As well as working with Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model, we also secured coverage in other leading publications and TV shows, including, Restoration Man and The Daily Record. During these campaigns we gained a 91% increase in Facebook fans and 73% increase in Twitter followers.
Hosting live events? Make sure you cover them on social media
Though live events will be on the backburner for a while in light of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s possible that there will be a boom of them in 2021 with so many being postponed. 87% of event marketers said they have canceled events as a result of COVID-19 and 66% have postponed – but, this won’t last forever. Live events will return and, if your business is going to be hosting one, it’s important to make a splash...Live events are important to businesses, it gives face-to-face time between them and potential customers – a personal connection can be harder to achieve through email or down a phone. 85% of company leadership (Senior Managers, Executives, and Board Members) believe in-person events are critical to their company’s success. So, it’s important that the event itself gets the airtime it needs to generate as much interest as possible – before, during, and after it has happened.Whether it’s an award ceremony, a conference, or an open day; marketing your event ahead of time is one thing but live coverage on the day is another. Live coverage of events elevates the experience of attendees and increases brand awareness online. However, with your in-house team likely being run-ragged on the day with various tasks, keeping a consistent presence on the day is, understandably, really challenging.Our team is able to take that pressure out of the equation – leaving you to focus on hosting and running the event on the day. Over the years, we have worked with live events such as the CCA Conference and TEDx, running live coverage of the event – from live tweeting and streaming to managing multiple platforms throughout the day. We are able to take on your tone of voice and brand personality, ensuring a seamless transition from your team to ours (and back again), and maintain a steady digital presence throughout your event; keeping engagement up, interaction with your attendees consistent, and awareness of your event high.
If you are interested in transforming your digital marketing strategy using some of these concepts, and want our help in doing so, please let us know by getting in touch.