online marketing overview

Someone rightly highlighted the importance of digital marketing with these words, “Brands which fail to establish an emotional connect with the millennials will be outshone sooner or later by the ones that do.”

And it is not the big brands that are making digital marketing count. It is the smarter creed of startups and small-scale enterprises that have successfully cracked the code of digital marketing.

What can you as a business learn from them? Well, here are some of the key metrics that I’ve figured out. Take a look at them, and how you can succeed at the game of digital marketing -

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Content marketing

In words of marketing prodigy Seth Godin - content marketing is the only marketing left.

Take a look at the trends for the past few years. You will get to see that brands that have invested in creating top quality content have managed to create powerful presence in the market.

One of the examples of effective content marketing comes in the form of Leadpages, a company that deals in designing customisable, landing page templates, and also provides testing services. Thanks to their powerful content marketing efforts, Leadpages were able to get their customer lifetime value to customer acquisition ratios quite high.

In words of the company’s CEO Clay Collins, “A content team of four people could outperform an 80+ person sales team at most companies.”

Here’s what they focused upon as part of their content marketing strategy -

• Popularising their blog by creating beautiful, useful and compelling content
• Spreading marketing resources such as e-books, case studies, infographics and courses
• Conducting weekly webinars to build a community for spreading their content

And the results? Leadpages has become a multi-million dollar company, and one of the fastest growing companies in the US.

Video marketing

If we talk about the trends, video marketing ranks right up there in the present scenario. YouTube and live video streams have become the next big thing in marketing.

As per statistics, companies that leveraged video marketing to good effect were able to grow 49 percent faster than the companies that did not.

Just like content, you can leverage different types of videos in marketing. Starting from engaging and funny videos to creating tutorials - there’s a lot that you can do as part of your video marketing endeavors. And, thanks to the rise of live video streaming, it has now become easy to keep your community engaged and hooked by sharing live story videos and what not.

Lowes Home Improvement is one of the most prominent names when it comes to pocket-friendly, and successful video marketing.

Social media marketing

‘We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.” - Erik Qualman

Social media keeps us connected to the world. Over the past few years, it has become a lot more than just something that people use as a pastime. In fact, studies show that social media plays a massive role in user’s buying choice, with customers being 71percent more likely to purchase a product based on social media referral.

As they say in the marketing world, ‘social today is not just a tick in the box, it’s bread and butter for a brand’s survival.’

The best example of cost-effective social media marketing campaign that worked really well - Know Your Lemons - Worldwide Breast Cancer! In this unique campaign, the organisation encouraged women to stay safe against breast cancer by checking their breasts regularly and looking for early physical warning signs. Using a standalone member’s page on Facebook, they were able to raise their fundraising target by 317 percent using just a smile ‘donate’ call to action.

As you can see, you don’t have to break your bank in order to succeed at social media marketing.

Search engine marketing

The good old SEO - you would have heard about it for sure. It is a mix of different practices that are used to get on top of results in search engines. How could a list of cost-effective marketing strategies be complete without SEO.

It is the oldest form of digital marketing, and still ranks right on top when you talk about getting results. With the right SEO tactics you can eventually gain limitless traffic to your website. And, it won’t cost you a dime. There are plenty of tutorials and online courses available that can help you master the art of SEO.

In fact, you can hire professional services for the same that will cost you much lesser as compared to any of the other services.

Remarketing

Lastly, we are going to focus on one area that’s fairly less discussed i.e. remarketing. Targeting users who have already visited your website, remarketing lets you tempt potential buyers who had left your website for some reason or the other.

It works based on cookies - the trail that users leave while visiting your website. With the help of these cookies, you can easily target social media accounts of users, or any other websites they visit, to display your ads and increase the chances of them getting converted.

Though it falls under paid marketing, the ROI is pretty good. Hence, you can expect to get a lot more than you are investing; making it an easy, quick way to boost your business sales with online marketing.