A Simple Beginner’s Guide to Help You Learn SEO

Marketing

Are you wondering how SEO works? There is a lot of information required to learn SEO. 

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of content optimization to help it be discovered on the search engine’s organic search results.

The benefits of doing SEO are quite obvious. You can obtain free traffic to your website passively and continuously. This is also why a lot of people are looking to learn SEO.

Although it takes a long time to start ranking on the first page of search results (at least 3 months). It is worth it as a long term investment. Results have shown that the top 3 Google search results get 75% of all clicks and moving up just one position of the Google search results can increase your clickthrough rate by an average of 30.8%

There are 2 types of SEO:

  • On-page
  • Off-page

We will be diving into an overview of this to give you a basic understanding of how to do SEO and a guide on how to execute your SEO efforts. Since, in order to learn SEO, there are many details to know about and not everything can possibly be covered with one blog post.

How The Search Engines Works

Search engines are modern versions of a library but instead of storing books, they are storing web pages. To learn SEO, you must understand how the search engines work in finding a webpage to rank on its search results.

When you type a word into the search query, the search engine is able to look through all the pages within its index and show you all the relevant results. This process is called an algorithm.

In indexing a website and showing you the results, the search engine uses various factors to bring up a webpage that is most relevant to the users. According to Brian Dean, an “SEO genius” as called by entrepreneur.com, their search engine currency uses over 200 known factors in their algorithm in ranking a webpage. 

Although you do not have to remember all of the 200+ factors, it is good to know what factors you can use on your website. Ideally, creating your own simple WordPress website and experimenting around will really help you learn SEO much faster and more effectively.

Some of the most important ranking factors  are as follow (these are not in any particular order):

  • Website dwell time
  • Website loading speed
  • Organic clickthrough rate
  • Mobile usability

Tip: Google has over 92% of the worldwide search engine market share which is why it pays to optimize for Google over other search engines such as Bing, or DuckDuckGo.

Keywords?

Keywords are usually a huge part of SEO. 

Although we are not looking for ‘keywords’ exactly but usually the search queries. SEO specialists will look for a combination of words that people would search for on certain topics. Keywords that they are concerned with are usually the combination of words that express a problem or question. This is for the sake of catering content to an audience which brings us to our next point.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO has to do a lot with ranking factors that are within a page. This includes both the technical side as well as the content side of webpages. To learn SEO, you need to understand the various factors that you can implement on a webpage that will help Google index it easier.

Technical SEO

  • Site speed – make sure your website loads quickly. One of the ways to do this is to make sure that your website image files are not too big.
  • Mobile-friendliness – Your website should have a responsive design that supports all devices.
  • Code quality – The coding of your website should be clean and clear for Google to understand the content of your website effectively. 
  • Security – Your website should be secure

SEO Content Optimization

  • Titles – The ‘meta-title’ and the heading of a content should have your chosen focus keyword as these are critical ranking signals that Google used in its algorithm
  • Content – The copy of your content should bring benefits to the readers and answers to question that is often searched for in the search query, usually it should be content that answers questions or solves a problem. Your content should also be filled with images, videos, and other engaging content because Google wants its users to have better interaction with its ranked websites.
  • Internal linking – Internal linking will help Google identify which content is the most important one on your site. Internal linking will also help Google discover all the pages on your site.
  • Outbound links – Google uses links that refer to another website in order to check the accuracy of the information and credibility of the author.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO includes the signals that are not related to factors on the webpages you are trying to rank. It usually relies on third-party websites that links back to your webpages. Thus, increasing your website authority in Google’s eyes.

Inbound Links

These are the most significant contributing factor in off-page SEO. Another word for this is backlink. Creating a reliable backlink profile for your website will help Google see your website as more authoritative.

Some ways you can build backlinks are through guest blogging, and reaching out to related website owners, as well as collaborations.

Conclusion

There is a lot of information required to fully learn SEO and implement it on your own. Some useful tools that can help this process flow easier are Ahrefs and Ubersuggest. To recap, there are a total of 2 types of SEO: on-page and off-page. The goal of any SEO strategy is to help webpages rank on page 1 of Google’s search results. The most important thing to keep in mind when you learn SEO is that Google’s search engine favors websites that will provide the best experience for its users. 

If you’re looking for someone to help you with digital marketing, we are the one for you! Contact us today for a free consultation on the best digital marketing strategies you can implement in your business.

How To Go About Creating an Email Marketing Strategy

Marketing

The most important element of an email marketing strategy is the relationship between you and your audience. Do they trust you? Do they know who you are? 

According to Statista, roughly 281 billion emails are sent every single day. This number is predicted to grow to 347 billion emails daily by 2023.

There is no doubt that email marketing is still playing a huge role as part of digital marketing strategies. This is why today we will be writing about how to create an email marketing strategy.

Even former President Obama was using email marketing which led to his success in the 2012 Presidential election.

An opt-in page for Obama’s email marketing strategy

So, to help you win more customers the way President Obama won the election, we will be looking at some email marketing strategies. Then, you will be able to find ones to incorporate into your business.

1. Personalization

Personalization tactics are key to increasing your customer experience. One of the best email strategy, or any digital marketing strategy these days, are the use of personalization. Research has found that an average of 71% of consumers express frustration when their shopping experience is not personalized.

One example is adding your recipient’s name in the email. For example, instead of “Dear valued customer,” use “Dear Steven,”. 

Another way to personalize your emails is by recommending your products to the customer based on their purchase history. This will help you cater products to your audience.

This kind of strategy can be implemented using email marketing tools such as MailChimp.

2. Subscriber Segmentation

Market segmentation is a huge part of all marketing planning. Subscriber segmentation is the same. The more you know your customer and the more you are able to cater to them, the better your chances of delivering better customer experiences by incorporating the right content to them. By segmenting different kinds of customers, you can deliver an email marketing strategy that will best suit them. Here are a few ways you can segment your audiences:

  • Industry – Let’s say you are a retailer and your target customer is a business that sells computer hardware. Your email campaigns will receive a much higher engagement rate if you send them emails recommending computer hardware compared to sending the same email to a business that sells books.
  • Company size – By segmenting with company size or annual revenue, you can market certain levels of B2B product or service depending on the business’ capacity. 
  • Sales cycle – Buyers who are in their earlier stages will likely be less receptive to an aggressive sales pitch or product demos. However, they will likely appreciate information on industry research. In contrast to buyers deeper in the cycle, they are likely to respond better to free trial offers or product webinars. 

3. Mobile-Friendly Emails

Emails opened on mobile devices account for 46% of all email opens and the number is growing. This is exactly why your emails should be mobile friendly as it will tremendously add value to customers in your email marketing strategy.

Half of all promotional emails sent to customers are still desktop-oriented. Therefore, you will be further ahead from your competitors just by implementing responsive design in your email marketing strategy.

It had also been found that 55% of smartphone users make at least 1 purchase after receiving a mobile promotional email.

However, while simply sending emails alone can be effective, you can increase the effectiveness even more by optimizing your emails. Here are some ways you can optimize your emails for better conversions as part of your email marketing strategy:

  • Implementing responsive email design – most email service providers already provide you with the solution as part of their features.
  • Keep subject line and pre-headers short and simple – Subject lines can make or break your email open rate. Don’t let your emails go to waste by implementing an attractive subject line. You can look at ones in your own email box for some examples of a good subject line.
  • Include a Call-To-Action (CTA) – Make sure that CTAs in your emails are noticeable whether they are viewing the emails on desktops, mobiles, or tablet devices. Make your CTA big and bold.

Tip: 41% of marketers say that email is the most effective method in sending offers to mobile consumers during holiday shopping seasons.

4. Automate Email Campaigns

Email marketing automation should be set up when possible.

These are trigger-based emails that are automatically sent out to users who signed up after showing certain user behaviors. One of the most common trigger emails are ‘welcome’ emails, ‘thank you’ emails and ‘transactional’ emails.

According to Campaign Monitor, automated emails generate up to 320% more revenue compared to non-automated ones.

The reason why automated emails perform so well in an email marketing strategy is because of the context. It is the middle ground between transactional emails and direct marketing emails.

For example, let’s say you visit an eCommerce store. You’ve added some items to the cart but started to grow some doubts and decided not to complete the purchase.

With email marketing automation, you will receive an email for the product you were shopping for just an hour later. Your interest in the item will likely grow because of it. Imagine if there were a link back to your shopping cart and a free shipping code or a 10% discount code for the order? You’re likely to go back to complete the purchase.

This is why trigger emails are so powerful. Setting it up does not have to be expensive or complex either. You can simply start with any one of the auto-responders out there today.

Conclusion

Having an email marketing strategy will provide you with a better way to connect with customers and grow your ROI. Keep in mind that if all your emails are about selling your product, it is less likely to sell unless your audience trusts you enough to deliberately sign up and be on your mailing list for the sake of receiving promotions.

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How To Start Affiliate Marketing For Beginners | 2020 Guide

Marketing

Passive income. Most people who strive for passive income initially achieve it using affiliate marketing. You may be wondering about how to start affiliate marketing on your own or as a side income for your business. 

The idea of affiliate marketing is to promote other people’s products. It is usually with the help of affiliate marketing programs or networks. You typically earn a percentage of those products sold through your marketing as part of revenue sharing. 

As defined by Shopify, “Affiliate marketing is an online sales tactic that lets a product owner increase sales by allowing others targeting the same audience—“affiliates”—to earn a commission by recommending the product to others. At the same time, it makes it possible for affiliates to earn money on product sales without creating products of their own.”

There are 4 different parties involved in the process of affiliate marketing: the product creator (or the merchant), the affiliate network, the marketer, and the customer. It allows for both product creators and product marketers to receive a share of revenues in accord with their contribution.

The Merchant

The Merchant, also known as the product creator, or the brand. These people are the ones who create the product for selling and can range from big corporations to small businesses. As long as they have a product to sell, they are the merchant.

The Affiliate

Similar to the Merchant, this party can be big as well as small companies. They can earn from a few hundreds of dollars to thousands or millions a month.

They are the ones who do the marketing to attract and, essentially recommending the products to potential customers. This marketing effort is all in hopes that the customers will end up buying the product through our link or using our code, usually for an extra discount. It can also be in the form of an entire site dedicated to certain products.

One of the most popular affiliate network sites is This is why I’m broke.

The Consumer

This is the customer, they are the ones who allow the affiliate system to run. Without customers, there will be no sales for the Merchant. Neither will the affiliate receive any commissions.

The affiliates are ones who market their products to the consumer however they see fit. Some examples are through social media, content marketing, or even digital billboards. 

The Network

Not many people consider the network as part of affiliate marketing. However, it is still an essential part of affiliate marketing programs. There is an intermediary between the affiliate and the merchant.

Affiliate networks such as Commission Junction or ClickBank will help the affiliate marketing process much easier by handling the payment and product delivery.

Depending on the product, the affiliates may be required to enter the affiliate network as some products may not be available elsewhere for affiliates to enter.

To summarize, you can become either a merchant or an affiliate marketer. 

If you were to become a merchant, you can have others promoting your product. This promotion is in exchange for giving others a commission for their sales.

If you were to become an affiliate marketer, you can choose one or more products to promote. Then, you can market them to consumers to make money.

For today, we will be discussing how to become an affiliate marketer.

For Merchants: How To Start Affiliate Marketing

If you want to be a merchant, you will have to create affiliate marketing programs. You will be selling your product with the help of affiliates. This can be done in 4 steps. Keep in mind that these are not easy, but many people have already achieved it.

  1. Come Up with a Product Idea
  2. Validate Your Product Idea
  3. Create Your Product
  4. Become Part of an Affiliate Network

Step One: Come Up with a Product Idea

This step is most likely the easiest among all the other ones. Your idea does not have to be completely original. Rather, innovate from something that already exists. 

Think of how to make a product you are already using better. This should be within the field of your own interest. However, do not get too attached to your idea. Stay flexible to make sure that you can adapt to what consumers want out of your product.

Reading reviews of those products are extremely helpful in coming up with those ideas.

Always ask yourself, will people pay for this idea?

This leads us to the next step…

Step Two: Validate Your Product Idea

This step is essential to making sure you can actually obtain sales. It will help you save time, money and effort. 

Now, to really make sure that people would be willing to buy your product, simply ask them. 

Be specific and make sure that you are asking if they want to buy your product because, most of the time, people will likely say that they like something just for the sake of being nice. While it is perfectly alright to be nice, we need a surefire answer in order to make sure that your product idea is good enough that people will see the value in buying it.

You can ask your friends or strangers on various social media. Make sure that you are asking people who are related to the product!

For example, if you are interested in selling a step-by-step guide to starting a small business, you can ask people who have commented or tweeted about a blog related to entrepreneurial ventures. Send out plenty to make sure you have enough people in your for the rest of this step.

If most people replied that they would not buy this product idea, take into account their feedback. What other comments did they make? Is there a way for you to improve upon this idea? Either develop your current ideas or pick a new one and repeat the steps above.

After a good number of people have replied with a yes, the next step is to answer those replies. Provide a link for them to buy, and that once a certain number of people buy it (let’s say 5 ), you will create it.

The reason for this is to confirm that people actually want your product idea enough to spend their money on it. 

Once enough people have bought your idea, it is time to start making the product.

Step Three: Create Your Product

Depending on your product idea, this step will vary. One of the best ways to create any product is to first learn how to do it.

Let’s say you will be selling an online course, there are plenty of resources online that can teach you how to do it. So learning these are a great starting point for you. 

Digital products are probably the easier ones to create without too much financial investment needed. 

Step Four: Become Part of an Affiliate Network

If you are selling a digital product, tools like Digital Product Delivery or Gumroad can be very easily set up as these platforms will already take care of the commission process and other payments.

Next, search for and reach out to other merchants who have a decent following within your products’ niche to promote it. This can easily be done with some simple social media and google search.

Depending on how niche your product is, the easier it will be to pitch to other merchants.You will want to contact them by simply introducing yourself, your product, and asking them to partner together for a shared revenue.

Side note: For digital products, affiliate commissions are usually 50% or even higher. This is because there is no cost of replication. Everyone wins from the revenue share, therefore, there is no need to be greedy on this.

Start from trying to get at least one partner first, you can work out the commissions and details later. Just make sure you get started.

Another route to start affiliate marketing for beginners is to become an affiliate marketer yourself.

For Affiliate Marketers: How To Start Affiliate Marketing

It is much easier to start out by building enough traffic on your marketing channels first before actually selling. 

Below, we will be describing the 4 total steps you can use to start out with affiliate marketing. Keep in mind that this is just one way you can go about affiliate marketing and there are other ways as well. Here are the 4 steps:

  1. Pick a niche and review products
  2. Building an email list
  3. Live Webinars
  4. Pay Per Click Advertising

Step One: Pick a niche and review products

Think of the product you are already using in your day-to-day life. Is there one you are particularly interested in? 

This could be a book, a kitchen gadget, or hair styling tools. 

You can look around for the exact product or something similar in affiliate marketing networks. 

One of the places with a wide variety of products is Amazon Associates.

Make sure that your product recommendations are genuine and authentic, that way people will not be thinking that you are just trying to make some quick money off of your audience.

When writing blog reviews, you can use affiliate links. Affiliate links are the links to the products you are recommending. They usually follow a regular URL with “/ref…” at the end.

However, as you can see, relying on other people would require a large amount of traffic to actually make a good amount of money. This leads us to step two.

Step Two: Building an email list

Email marketing is still one of the best channels these days. It is also a great way to start affiliate marketing for beginners. Here are 3 ways you can do this on your website.

Header Bar

A tool we recommend is Hello Bar.

This will put up a call to action at the very top of your website. Offering an incentive such as an ebook that includes your product reviews or sending your audience to an email of the product review video will help as part of your marketing strategy.

Exit Intent Pop-up 

Hello Bar can also be used for this.

An exit intent pop-up will show up on the screen when visitors show signs of leaving your website such as moving the mouse towards the “X” button. You can use it as a way to offer some kind of resource your audience will be interested in as an exchange for their email.

Sidebar Widget

When it comes to sidebars, affiliate marketers must make sure that the ones on their website are not overly cluttered. Having only one call to action is enough. This should also provide some kind of value to your audience in exchange for their emails.

Some tips in affiliate marketing for beginners are to send your audience an update once a week. It is important to not make all of your emails about sales. Only when you create a new product-reviewing post.

Step Three: Live Webinars

This step can be done once you have gathered a few contacts.

These are much more engaging content that is very helpful in higher ticket items. Your audience are likely to prefer watching a live presentation much more than reading a blog review.

LeadPages is a popular tool that you can use to create a simple landing page for your audience to sign up for your webinar. Don’t forget to promote it on your social media to inform your followers one  week ahead of the event!

These can be hosted on Google Hangouts for free or on Zoom as well.

Use this opportunity to talk all about your product as well as answering your audiences’ questions about it. 

If you can get your merchant to provide you with a deal or bundle especially for your audience, it will serve as a great incentive for people to buy.

Step Four: Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Once your affiliate marketing starts to take off, it is time to move up to paid advertising.

Although this can be a bit of a learning curve, your affiliate marketing business can scale much more with this step. You can use PPC to:

  • Grow your email list
  • Grow your sales
  • Get more people to sign up for your webinars

When more people sign up for your email list, you will be able to market to them again. This will grow your chances of sales because they have shown interest in your content and are more likely to trust your recommendations.

An efficient and time-saving method of email marketing is to set up your own autoresponder that markets to your email list in an email sequence. There are various tools to help you with this, one we recommend is MailChimp.

Conclusion

To sum up how to start affiliate marketing, there are two paths that you can choose. As a merchant or as an affiliate. Although becoming an affiliate is somewhat of an easier path compared to merchants. The two routes are equally worthwhile. It all depends on your preference as well as your current knowledge.  

As this guide is about affiliate marketing for beginners, we hope this step-by-step process has been helpful! Now go out there and make it happen.

If you own a business or are currently looking for ways to increase your sales, let Marketing Guru help you. Get a free consultation for your digital marketing strategy today! Contact us here.

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Build a Successful Business by Advertising with Google

Marketing

SEO and content marketing are 2 effective channels for promoting your business in the online marketing world. The only downside to them is that they take months upon months for your efforts to come into fruition. To grow your business faster, you can try advertising with Google Ads. This will bring you much faster returns. It will also help to kickstart your business no matter which stage you are in.

This form of paid advertising is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. While there are various PPC advertising, we will be focusing mainly on advertising with Google Ads. This is due to its widespread use among digital marketers.

Why Google Ads?

Advertising with Google Ads, specifically, ones that are used to target audiences in the form of keywords. This means that when you search for something on Google’s search engine, your search results will show you the ads that your keyword suggests. As a result, keyword research is an extremely important part of Google Ads. 

The text below will show the fundamental parts of Pay-Per-Click advertisements and give you a foundation on how to conduct keyword research.

Before kickstarting your PPC project…

There are 3 key components required to set it up.

  • Ads — From afar, ads are the smallest individual component in Pay-Per-Click projects. What you put into these individual ads is exactly what your audience will see.
  • Ad Groups — These are a group of ads. To make things simpler on the backend, it is recommended to create 1 ad group per product. Under these ad groups, you can test different ads to find the best performing one.
  • Campaigns — A campaign contains ad groups. It can contain many PPC projects, for example, a campaign could be run for the Christmas holidays

To summarize, a campaign can have several ad groups, and each of those ad groups can have several individual ads.

For a high-performing Google PPC ad with high clickthrough rates, they must have quality ad copy or texts. However, to find the best-performing ones require testing multiple ad copies.

Setting up a PPC project will always require starting at the campaign level downwards. The start of this process will require you to fill out your bid strategy and ad budget. You will also learn about the variety of advertising networks you can choose on the Google Ads platform to best suit your marketing goals.

Fundamentals of Advertising with Google

When starting out on this platform, it is best to put your budget on the lower side as it can take some time to learn to create and optimize your ads. Once you feel more comfortable with the platform, then you can increase your budget.

There are 4 basic aspects to most paid ads which are:

  • Headline — This should match the title of the content that your ad links to. (Your headlines cannot exceed 25 characters)
  • Description — This part should give your audience a reason to click on your ad. Always add a call to action here.
  • URL — Your audience will be taken to the URL you have set for your ad.
  • Network-specific aspects — A unique element of different networks, for example, likes and shares.

The performance of your paid ads is also largely dependent on 2 factors its relevance to the audience and the curiosity it evokes. 

Targeting the Right Audience with Keyword Research

Targeting is just as important as having an attractive ad copy. To attract your ideal customers, you must know what they are looking for when they go online. A concept that will help make your keyword research process move faster is imagining yourself as your customers. 

Ask yourself this: If they want your products or services, what will they search for?

You can also create customer personas. These will help to direct and guide your decisions in marketing and keyword research. This is to help you be sure that you are targeting the right people in your business.

For targeting keywords, there are 3 main types that you can choose with some variations. An example of these are as shown below:

For the exact match type of keyword, you will get the highest amount of conversion rate in comparison to the other types because it targets people who are looking for the exact words.  

Phrase match is a keyword type that enables your ad to show up when someone searches for either an exact match of the phrase or a close variation of it with extra unrelated words before or after the keywords.

Broad match is a keyword type that targets all kinds of searches that has a specific word in it.

Broad and phrase matches may not be so good if your keyword could show up for “coffee mug holders” when you sell only coffee mugs, however, this does not mean you should miss out on some potentially great keywords to target for.

Optimizing Your Google Ad

Aside from all the elements that we have explained, there are many ways for advertising with Google Ads to work as efficiently as possible. There are 4 main factors for this:

  • Landing Page Quality: If you run ads to your website but your website is not fully ready to support your visitors, your ad budget will be wasted.
  • Keyword Relevance: Targeting the wrong keyword will not only make your visitor leave your website immediately, but it will also lower your ranking among competitors.
  • Quality Score: The Ad Quality Score is based on Google’s algorithms of your ad relevance and quality as determined by customers.
  • Creative: A great creative will help attract customer attention. This can be in the form of an enticing ad copy and/or graphic design depending on your chosen medium of Google ad type.

Now that you know all the requirements for advertising with Google Ads, you can start running the PPC in your business. 

However, if you want to save time and cost by hiring some professional help, you can contact Marketing Guru for a free consultation today.

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Social Media Marketing Strategy: How To Execute It and Win Customers

MarketingSocial Media Marketing

Using social media marketing strategy in your business will undoubtedly help with your brand as a whole. Today, not only can it be used to increase brand awareness or drive more traffic to your website, but also as a social listening tool where you can observe the things your customers are saying about your brand as well as a way to engage with your audience.

Here are the 5 key elements of a social media marketing strategy:

  1. Strategy
  2. Planning and Publishing
  3. Listening and Engagement
  4. Analytics and Reporting
  5. Advertising

Once you have read through all 5 of these key tools, you will be able to fully apply and leverage social media in your business.

1. Crafting a Social Media Marketing Strategy

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ⎼⎼Sun Tzu

Before diving right into the action, it is important to plan out the bigger picture to help guide your marketing. 

What’s your goal? 

How will using social media help you achieve your objectives? You can increase your brand awareness, drive traffic and sales, drive engagement, create a community, and have it as your customer support channel.

Which social media platforms should you focus on? 

There are so many channels that you can leverage for your brand. Some major ones are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok. When starting out on social media, it is best to pick out just a few channels.

What type of content should you share? 

Think of who your audiences are. What would they want out of your content? Do they prefer images, videos, or link posts? Create a marketing persona to help you answer the previous questions. Keep in mind that your type of content does not have to stay fixed because the market constantly changes in our digital era. You can experiment with your posts and be flexible with your strategy when some posts perform better than others.

2. Planning and Publishing AKA Getting Ready and Taking Action

Being consistent when posting your content is extremely important. There are many pages and profiles on social media that has never been updated in months or years. By posting consistently, your audience will see that your business is still active.

Publishing consistently will require a content calendar to help you know exactly what will be published. You should plan and create these posts ahead of time and schedule them using tools to save time. Some tools you can use are Buffer and Hootsuite, for example. 

Some tips: Once you create evergreen content, repurpose them in different formats and post it a few times on different channels over the next few months. This could be in the form of a new caption, a new graphic, or a link to the post.

3. Listening and Engagement: Interacting With Your Audience

Once your social media following starts to grow, more people will be discussing about your brand online. There will be more direct and indirect interactions with your business.

What you should do at this stage is to observe the comments about your brand. This can be from direct feedback or brand mentions. You can use social listening tools to help you learn about people who have mentioned about your brand online and learn of their opinions, whether they are positive or negative.

From here, you can adapt your business to answer customer needs. For example, you can use those feedbacks as content ideas, or to learn about the business’ weaknesses to improve certain aspects of your brand.

Some more tips: Don’t forget to interact with your customers who commented on your posts! Not only will this help them feel appreciated with this interaction, but it will also encourage more engagement from more of your audiences.

4. Analytics and Reporting

Unlike traditional marketing, most forms of online marketing are quantifiable.

With the help of analytics tools, you will be able to learn how well your social media marketing is performing. 

In social media platforms, basic tools for analytics are usually provided. However, to obtain more in-depth data or to be able to compare data across all your social media platforms, external tools should be used to help with this such as Sprout Social, Buffer, and Hoot Suite.

5. Paid Advertising

After building some social proof from growing your followers or if you have the funds, it is important to consider using paid advertisements in your strategy. 

The power of social media advertisements is in its ability to create very specific target audiences based on many different kinds of demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.

At first, you may think that the advertisement pages may be intimidating to look at. However, these social media platforms encourage us to use these tools because it is where they profit from which is exactly why there are various tutorials as well as tips while using the advertisement features to make it easier to get used to. 

Once you learn the different features it has, you will be able to advertise and optimize your ad campaigns and budget as you need. Of course, analytics play a huge role in online advertising so be sure to take a look at your key metrics such as clickthrough rate (CTR), cost per 1000 impressions (CPM), bounce rate, and more.

The Bottom Line

So what can a social media marketing strategy do for you? According to Sprout Social, 53% of consumers have said that they are likely to purchase from brands that are transparent on social media, and brand transparency is heightened by a company’s presence of social media. This finding provides an opportunity for businesses to create more personal interactions with their customers and grow their revenue.

It is important to note that any social media marketing strategy can take time and expertise to execute, especially when using paid advertisements which may sometimes be a hit or miss. If you are looking to add a social media marketing strategy to your business or want to level up your SMM game, Marketing Guru can help you save both time and energy with our service. We also give free consultations for your digital marketing plan! Contact us here.

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Quick and Easy Guide to Picking a Digital Marketing Channel For Your Business

Marketing

Picking a marketing channel to run with as part of your digital marketing strategy is not the easiest task without some foundational knowledge on the topic. Here’s the quickest way to learn all the basics of different digital marketing channels. The text below will be giving you a short overview on this topic. Covering all the information you need from what each of the platforms does, how to use them, and how it will benefit you.

Marketing Channel: Social Media Marketing

The most well-known online marketing channel. You can engage your customers much more personally here as most users go on social media as part of their daily routines to stay connected with the world. 

However, each social media platform does not have the same audiences and this is where you can play around with your choices depending on your ideal customers.

Facebook

This platform has been around for a long time. The main audiences on this platform are usually millennials or older as younger generations tend to migrate to newer platforms. 

Either way, this marketing channel alone is powerful enough to use for most businesses because of its paid ads feature which allows detailed targeting of who you want your advertisements to appear in front of by selecting their age range, gender, job industry, and interests.

As long as you know who to target and how to optimize your ad campaigns, Facebook Ads is like a machine that keeps giving.

Instagram

Instagram is currently owned by Facebook. The native content of this platform is mostly visual-heavy in both image and video formats.

What matters here when promoting your Instagram profile are authentic interactions with people in the same industry and your ideal customers. Always be sure to add popular hashtags to your posts, especially when building your account.

Twitter

Twitter is a “loud” platform that allows you to post multiple short-texts posts in one day without annoying your audience.

Things go viral and die out very fast and trending topics are always changing. 

Twitter profiles are also great for interacting with your audience. To get more engagement, post your text post with images, gifs, or even better video content.

Retweeting reviews or relevant posts are also helpful in adding more variety to your content. Aside from this, retweeting reviews can help increase your social proof and authority as well.

TikTok

This platform had only recently been created yet Gen Zs have already made it went viral. Tiktok has a very interesting algorithm that makes it so that fills the users’ “For You” page with content that is similar to ones they have already liked. 

The native content format is short-form videos where users can directly edit videos on the application before posting. This allows the younger generations to fully explore their creativity which is the essence of this platform.

As TikTok is still relatively untapped and post engagement rates here are much higher compared to any other social media platform (one random video can easily accumulate a thousand views), businesses can create short-form videos to promote their brands and more. Keep in mind, however, that the users on this platform are younger audiences and businesses catering to more mature audiences may not perform as well here.

Pinterest

Another highly visual social media platform, however, the majority of Pinterest’s audience are females. They usually go on Pinterest to find inspiration for their hobbies or artistic works. This platform allows users to save pins from all over the internet and form them into albums. You can easily get followers liking and “pinning” your posts or “pins” as the algorithm in this platform supports the engagement of new posts. 

Therefore, if your business caters to female audiences and visual assets can be produced, consider using this platform as part of your marketing strategy to build new followings and to drive traffic to your website.

LinkedIn

A professional social media platform, LinkedIn is great for B2B business. Not only do most decision-makers use this platform, but it is also an opportunity to showcase your company’s internal happenings to stay relevant and increase brand awareness. You’ll be able to build your brand and attract the right candidates for your job openings as well. Content on LinkedIn is similar to the ones on Facebook, you can share text posts, website links, videos, and images.

LinkedIn ads are also an option. You can boost your post for engagement, send a large number of direct messages to people you target, and more. Therefore, if your business is a B2B type, consider using this platform.

LINE

This channel is particularly popular in Thailand. However, its usage is growing in other countries all around the globe. There are options to advertise using the LINE Ads Platform. However, advertising with this requires contacting partnered marketing agencies. Marketing Guru is one of them! Aside from this, there are also free Official Accounts for businesses to create. This allows companies to text and advertise to customers who follow them via messaging apps to create more personal interactions.

Read more about LINE Ads Features here!

Marketing Channel: Google Adwords

Everyone uses Google on a daily basis. This is a powerful paid platform to advertise with. The audiences on this marketing channel are usually searching with intent. This means that they know what they are looking for.

There are a few methods to advertise with Google Ads. You can use these strategically depending on the marketing objectives you want for your business. The different types of ad campaigns you can create are:

  • Search Network (text ads)
  • Display Network (banner ads)
  • Shopping Network (product displays)
  • Video (Youtube ads)
  • App (App installs and promotions)

Marketing Channel: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a way to earn commissions from selling other products. This can be done through product recommendation videos on Youtube, for example. You will have to contact the company you want to be an affiliate to obtain a link or a code. This is where your sales will be tracked and you can earn a percentage off of them. This channel is great to use as an additional income source for your business.

Marketing Channel: Email Marketing

Email marketing is still effective! Once a customer opts-in to your email list, you can create content that is educational or relevant in your industry. Make sure, however, that you are answering to what they will find interesting. The most important part of a good commercial email is the subject title and the first sentence.

Marketing Channel: Search Engine Optimization

We can have a great website but without anything to attract visitors to your website, that website is practically useless. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great way to help your website be discoverable on search engines such as Google. However, the process of building your SEO well enough to rank on page one of Google can take a minimum of 3-6 months.

Marketing Channel: Content Marketing

Content is the key to all forms of digital marketing. This online marketing channel will help build brand awareness, convert customers, and build customer loyalty. Your content should be relevant to your audience and the content, whatever form it is or where you post them, will help to promote your business and who you are. 

In terms of content, there are 3 main types: evergreen, topical, and ephemeral.

  • Topical content provides relevant and targeted information.
  • Evergreen content are ones that can still be relevant to your audience months or years from the time it is posted.
  • Ephemeral content are ones that are short-lived. Like Instagram stories, for example, these last only 24 hours but they are used by many businesses to stay relevant and encourage brand recognition.

The best way to build following and engagement with this is to focus on producing content based on quality over quantity. 

Marketing Channel: Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing, while it can be costly, will help you reach the type of audience who are your ideal customers. The most important factor in choosing an influencer is the type of audience that follows them and their engagement rate. Having a high engagement rate will not only give a show that their followers are real, but it also increases the likeliness of producing sales.

In this field, we separate the influencers by the number of followers they have. 

There are a few main ways of using influencer marketing in your business. First, you can create a list of all the influencers you think will fit into your brand. Calculate their engagement rate with tools such as Influencer Marketing Hub’s Instagram Influencer Earnings Calculator. From here you can filter who you want for your brand.

Marketing Channel: Native Advertising

This marketing channel is similar to paid ads but instead of appearing as an ad, the content looks native to where it appears. This could be in the form of a recommended content on a website or on social media feeds. The core of native advertising is to have the advertisement appear non-disruptive and does not directly push its product or service to the audience. As a result, the form of marketing has the potential to work even better than regular advertisements.

If you are interested in implementing digital marketing into your business or adding more channels to grow your revenue, let MarketingGuru help you save time and effort from experimenting on all of these channels to figure out what works best. Get our expert’s free consultations on your digital marketing today!

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Improve Your Online Marketing with Google Micro-Moments

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Google has defined the micro-moments as the key moments in a customer journey. They are ones that consumers use to interact with a brand, specifically, in the form of mobile searches.

These key moments are ones where consumers make certain decisions and reach for their devices to find answers or assistance. This is why it is something all digital marketers must always keep in mind when forming marketing strategies.

The key micro-moments are

  • I-want-to-know moments
  • I-want-to-go moments
  • I-want-to-do moments
  • I-want-to-buy moments

How can they improve your customer experience?

There is always someone, somewhere searching on Google. In fact, Google gets an estimate of 3.8 million searches per MINUTE!

Therefore, learning how these micro-moments impact your customer’s journey will help with your business. Specifically, in learning how to increase your brand awareness, boost your customer experience as well as creating the right marketing strategies for your business.

According to PWC, 73% of all people agree that customer experience is a critical
factor in their purchasing decisions and 43% of all consumers are willing to spend a premium for greater convenience.

That’s why this is one of the most exciting opportunities to invest in 2020!

I-want-to-know moments

At this stage, your brand should be giving relevant informative content to your potential customers. Google has discovered that up to 69% of consumers are more likely to buy from companies that gave them the relevant answers they are searching for. Not only does it increase brand awareness, but this touchpoint can also help in growing your customer base.

The most common searches in I-want-to-know moments are for general topics (“What’s on the news today?”), food and groceries (“What are healthy dinner choices?”), and shopping-related searches (“What’s the shipping policy?”).

I-want-to-go moments

Location-based searches are critical for this micro-moment. This is where physical shops can bring in more customers. Research has found that up to 76% of consumers are likely to visit the store they have found when searching online that same day.

Therefore, any local shops looking to increase their customer reach should pay attention to this micro-moment to plan and market accordingly.

For example, local SEO can be used. Make sure your local shop has signed up on the Google My Business site to show up on Google’s search ranking page when customers searches for “near me” businesses.

I-want-to-do moments

91% of smartphone users look to their devices for ideas while completing a task. To elaborate, most consumers search for “how-to” information or examples to help them follow through with some type of activity. This is where the I-want-to-do moments comes in as a touchpoint between your brand and your customer.

Brands can leverage this micro-moment to create a lasting impression on the consumers. Keep in mind that up to 48% of smartphone users are more likely to buy from a company that provides instructional video content which is why this micro-moment is a great way to position your brand as an authority in your industry and help create trust between your customer and your company.

I-want-to-buy moments

Customers in I-want-to-buy micro-moments are ones who are ready to buy from a business. These are great for raising brand awareness and increasing conversions as Google has reported that up to 51% of consumers discover a new brand or product when conducting searches on their smartphones. This moment provides brands with great opportunities to sell their products and close their deals.

The most common types of searches in these micro-moments are usually shopping-related (“smartphone comparisons”), food and grocery-related (“best place to buy imported fruits”), and restaurants and bars (“pizza delivery near me”).

More than one type of micro-moments can be used simultaneously. For example, when a consumer searches for “coffee near me”, it is likely that the potential customers are in both I-want-to-go and I-want-to-buy stages.

How To Apply The 4 Micro-Moments?

Now that you know of the Google micro-moments. How do you apply this to your business?

The first thing you should do is to know your customer. No business can survive for long without truly understanding the everchanging needs of their customers and answering to that.

One of the most important tasks for any business to do is to develop customer personas and come up with the type of questions they will have for your brand’s products or services. With this, you will be able to imagine your customers as real people rather than just profit numbers. Always approach your business from a value-first approach. The easiest way to do this is to put your customers first and strive to deliver the best for them.

After developing customer personas, map out your customer journey, or even better yet, go through that customer journey yourself. By experiencing it yourself, you will be able to empathize with your customer and search for the best ways to deliver even more value for them.

From here, observe the potential touchpoints customers may have with your brand and think of the types of information your customers will likely search for. Each business is unique and what works for other businesses may not work for you. Therefore, it is extremely important to base your business decisions on real data.

There are plenty of tools you can use for market research and to explore certain topics and trends. Google Trends, for example, helps in learning more about the popularity of certain topics and industries which is useful in predicting the market direction.

Maximize the touchpoint opportunities and create relevant content according to those moments that will help in increasing your opportunity to grow closer with your customers.

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5 Digital Marketing Myths You Most Likely Haven’t Heard Of

Marketing

Digital marketing myths come from misunderstandings. These are rather common when it comes to complicated topics such as online marketing. Make sure to keep a heads up for all things regarding this industry. Any news can be either an opportunity or a risk.

 In the following text, we will be describing some common myths that most people assume about digital marketing. 

1. “Digital Marketing is Everything”

Digital marketing has definitely become the marketing area of choice for most businesses. Brands these days are much too diverse to assume that traditional marketing does not work for them.

Digital marketing is a form of acquiring customers is getting harder every day to tap into. This is due to how much competition there is. Some traditional marketing channels that are still widely used today. For example, billboard advertisements, networking, giving away free product samples, and, of course, cold calling.

Most corporate brands use both traditional and digital marketing to execute a truly omnichannel marketing strategy. With this method, their marketing flawlessly fits into their customers’ lifestyles.

These strategies work amazingly for bigger brands. However, only 8% of all businesses with an omnichannel strategy believe that they have mastered it.

Digital marketing can be highly interactive for your ideal audience. Nevertheless, traditional marketing can also work just as effectively when done right.

2. “Paid Ads Alone is Enough” 

Customers that you are advertising to are real people, not just data.

Another digital marketing myth is that many people think that paid ads alone will work for their business. Paid ads are definitely one of the best tools to use in promoting your business. This is because you can bring people from Google’s search page into your website. However, if your website does not have a responsive design, you will simply be throwing your money down the drain. 

Hence, it is extremely important to keep in mind that a business requires much more than just paid ads in an effective digital marketing strategy. 

A study has shown that website visitors can take just 50 milliseconds to judge if your website is worth staying on. Therefore, any digital marketer and business owner must know more than just this channel.

For example, website optimization and an attractive ad are all essential parts of successfully converting leads.

3. “Online Negative Reviews Will Affect My Business”

It is true that negative reviews can chase potential customers away. People are eager to vent about negative experiences on a product or service, especially with the advantage of online anonymity.

However, that is not a reason to fear them. There are plenty of solutions that will help you turn negative reviews around to something that can help your brand. 

Of course, we all would love to have an entire list of feedback filled with positive reviews. We know that positive reviews mean that you have made your customers happy through your products or services.

But it is never possible to satisfy everyone. 

On the other hand, negative reviews can also help your business. It is one way for you to really listen to your customers and learn how to improve your business.

Research has suggested that complaining customers are more likely to revisit a business compared to unhappy silent businesses.

Another way to turn this problem into a brand-building strategy is to have a great customer support service in place. If the complaint is handled well, you may be able to clear out your problem. Complainers are likely to come back to leave a positive review or even delete their own negative reviews. Therefore, there is no need to fear those negative reviews as long as you know you can handle them well.

4. “I Can Get Instant Results” 

This myth is not entirely a myth. 

It is true that paid ads can definitely bring you relatively fast results. It is only when you have the right target audience and products, however. But it is unlikely for it to be any close to ‘instant results’. 

While some businesses may be able to get results within a few hours, it is not always the case. Think about it from the customer’s perspective. If you saw one advertisement for an interesting product, you probably wouldn’t buy it. Not unless you really felt like you needed it enough to make the impulse purchase. 

If you were to see the same interesting brand over the span of a few days, then you might be interested in what they are trying to communicate. In this case, customers are then more likely to convert.

There are also plenty of other digital marketing channels that require time and expertise. SEO, for example, usually takes 2-6 months for your website to start ranking page one on search engines.

Hence, instant results may not always apply to every business and, as with all things, sacrifice comes before success.

5. “Email Marketing is Spam” 

Despite most people’s inbox being a mess of a junkyard for emails, good email marketing is still reported by small business owners as the second most effective strategy in building their brand awareness.

Email marketing does not always have to be spammy. There is a difference between effective prospecting emails and spammy ones. 

To avoid sending your emails into the abyss, make sure that you know who you are writing to. Also, add an attractive subject line. Your customers will judge your email within the first few milliseconds of reading those subject lines. 

One method to train yourself to write great email subject lines is to look at your own email inbox. Observe the ones you’ve opened or ones that attract you. 

What made them worthy of your click?

Observe this and apply it to your own email subject lines when writing.

Another important factor to ensure your emails won’t be spammy is to create valuable and relevant content in those emails. These could be personalized, educational, or offer-related.

Conclusion

Now that those myths are busted, I believe you now have a better understanding of what digital marketing is. It is not easy to market any brands online. Every business requires its own customized combination of channels and content strategies. Constant tweaking of your social media and websites will also help to keep your online profile modern.

If you are ready to grow your business with digital marketing, but you are not sure where to start. Let Marketing Guru help you and get your free consultation today!

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How Does Digital Marketing Strategy Benefit Your Business?

Marketing

There is no doubt that businesses in this day and age should adopt at least some form of technology in their business. From social media marketing to CRM, the rapid growth in tech innovations have grown to provide so many benefits to every part of our everyday lifestyles as well as our businesses.

It is obvious that certain businesses have much more of a presence on the internet. This kind of authority presence is what most brands strive for. Why is this the case? It is due to how they incorporate a digital marketing strategy into their business. We will dive into this topic below:

  • How your business can benefit from a digital marketing strategy
  • Things to be wary of when planning and executing your strategy

The Benefits

When it comes to digital marketing, the most important part is to decide on your marketing strategy. Your digital marketing strategy should depend on where your ideal customers are. Aside from this, experimentation can also be used to help decide which channels would work the best for you.

Keep in mind that all businesses are different. One channel may work well for one business in the same industry while another may find success in other channels. Either way, investing in some sort of digital marketing strategy will undoubtedly help in growing your business. It is a surefire way to increase your brand awareness and grow your business due to the following reasons:

Small Investments and High ROI

It is well-known that marketing is one of the most costly aspects of running any business. Digital marketing can open up opportunities with its relatively lower cost of marketing compared to traditional marketing. However, without the right expertise, you may end up spending more on paid ads. Therefore, investing and implementing the right digital marketing strategy into your business is critical in gaining a profitable ROI.

It is important to note that without the right knowledge in digital marketing, both time and money can be wasted. There are various digital marketing tools such as Facebook advertisements. These may cost you to spend more trying to figure out how it works.

Learn About Real People

Social media is not just powerful in the way it connects people together. They are also powerful in how they are able to understand what your customers are interested in. Take a look at Facebook Audience Insights, for example.

Say, you have an eCommerce website selling women’s clothes in San Francisco. You want to learn more about who your customers are and what they are interested in. Facebook Audience Insights can help you learn about all of this from just searching based on the users’ interests. Some of the related interests would be “online shopping” and “women’s clothes”. Aside from this, you also have the ability to target specific locations to help narrow down your audience.

digital marketing strategy tool - Facebook Audience Insights
Image captured from Facebook Audience Insights

As you can see in the image here, the tool shows exactly the age range of your potential customers and how many of them are within a specific location, in this case, it is New York, USA.

The majority of potential customers interested in women’s fashion and online shopping are in the age range 25 to 34 years old. The total number of these audiences are 2.5 million to 3 million people.

Retarget Your Customers

Have you ever gone on a website, and find that the same website’s advertisement keeps following you around? In the world of digital marketing, this is called retargeting ads and it is a great addition to all digital marketing strategies.

You may have heard of the term “Facebook Pixel”. It is a tool that helps you advertise yourself to the people who visited your website. However, Facebook only allows you to keep this data up until 180 days.

This tool is massively useful from a marketing perspective. Just think of how often you actually buy a product the first time you see an ad? Retargeting can be used strategically to help your customers learn more about you and remember your product or service when they need them.

Things To Be Wary Of

Digital marketing can bring a lot of benefits to your business but one wrong move can really hurt. Without the right knowledge and application, your business can be significantly affected. Here are some main things you should be careful of:

Targeting The Wrong Audience

When advertising, you don’t want to randomly target everyone. That’s a quick and easy way to going broke. Your product/service needs to be put in front of the right audience. If not, it is unlikely that will be able to make any sales.

If you have been running advertisements for a few days and there’s been no purchases or conversions for your ads, make sure that you are not targeting too broad of an audience. Try adding a variety of different audiences and see how your ads perform. Eventually, you can cut out advertisements that have little to no conversions and invest more into ones with conversions.

Low Ad Quality

All paid advertisement platforms care a lot about the experience of their users. Without these users, their platform could not exist which is why advertisement quality is extremely important. These platforms have built-in algorithms that decide which advertisements to show their users depending on how much the advertiser pays and how good the quality of the ad is.

If your advertisement is not up to standard, it is likely that the platform will prefer showing your competitor’s ads instead. Audiences also have the option to report your advertisements which can affect your advertisement quality score.

Remember: Your competitors are just a click away.

Bad PR

News on the internet spreads like wildfire.

If some sort of negative or controversial news were to be released about your business, that could potentially be the end of your career. Therefore, always keep track of what is being said about your brand online.

It is important to use social listening tools to not only learn about what your customers feel towards your brand but also to keep your brand image in check. Some of the tools for this are BuzzSumo and HootSuite.

Conclusion

So, we have learned why businesses should use digital marketing strategy and some factors to avoid. With this in mind, it is extremely important for companies to execute their digital marketing strategy properly. Having experts in this field help you out will tremendously save time and money.

Aside from this, paid advertisement costs are also gradually increasing due to corporate entities tapping into this channel. This is the reason why the time to invest in digital marketing should be now, rather than later.

If you are interested in implementing it into your business or upgrading your digital marketing strategies contact Marketing Guru today for a free consultation!

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Level Up Your Business With Digital Marketing Strategies

Marketing

From SEO to Facebook ads, the marketing industry has evolved tremendously in the past few decades. Digital marketing is an important branch of marketing. This channel requires you to develop digital marketing strategies to strategically promote your business. This branch was developed due to the internet phenomenon and has since become an essential part of all modern businesses.

Digital marketing is defined as the act of promotion and selling of products and/or services through the use of digital marketing strategies. Some of the most popular ones include social media marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.

By 2023, the total digital marketing spend is predicted to reach $146 billion; a growth of about 9% compound annual growth rate.

While there are many digital marketing strategies out there, it is important to keep in mind that not all strategies will perform effectively across all types of businesses. This is where the real challenge of online marketing comes in. To execute the most effective digital marketing strategy possible, one must have the right skills and expertise, not to mention the time and effort required to create all the right content.

The Mechanics

How digital marketing works is by putting your business in front of customers online. However, your business must use the right digital marketing strategies to make your efforts worthwhile. For example, you can keep your existing customers aware of you by creating consistent and engaging content.

There are many different ways to put your business in front of your customers, here are a few common ones:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Google Pay Per Click Ads (PPC)
  • Facebook Ads
  • Email Marketing

The History

Back at the start of this field, digital marketing was extremely different to what it is today because there were much simpler algorithms that were not entirely user-friendly. Marketers at the time were uncertain and hesitant about this method of promoting businesses. The digital age began way back in the mid-90s and this was when the term digital marketing was first used.

Let’s dive even deeper into the history of marketing. It is helpful to first learn of the terms Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0.

What is Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0?

  • Web 1.0 refers to the beginning of the internet where websites were in simple formats with very minimal user interaction. Users were able to consume information on a website. However, it was more of a one-way communication from websites to audiences.

  • Web 2.0 is the next part of this evolution. This began in 2006 when the internet became much more widespread. Website designs also became much more interactive and user-centered due to the creation of social media. As a result, sharing and collaborating between people online was encouraged which completely turned the table on what marketing means.

  • Web 3.0 is the internet we know of in 2020. This era is one where websites are given the ability to learn about its users. It is also able to give new data such as personalized suggestions.

The evolution of the web shows the progression of its intelligence and affects how digital marketing is applied. From simply showing information to an exchange of information to today’s personalized website experiences.

In Web 1.0, businesses were promoted online by paying simple-looking websites. However, the problem with this was that these advertisements may not have been able to target their ideal customers directly.

Web 2.0 helps businesses reach their customers directly and conduct business online. Social media marketing and paid advertisements rapidly grew. These marketing channels became a huge success and the turning point of both the internet and the marketing industry.

As for Web 3.0, machines now have the ability to create much more complex actions. Customer preferences have been helping businesses put their products in front of the right people, at the right time. Many are still looking forward to what Web 4.0 or even 5.0 would bring. Its impact will likely transform internet users’ interactions as well as the digital marketing industry completely.

Picking The Right Channels For Your Digital Marketing Strategies

There are many different channels you can use to get your customers to see your products. However, not all of them are the perfect fit. The best way to find out which to use is to learn of what each channel has to offer. Start by picking the ones that your ideal customers will see. Then, experiment with these channels for some time, and adapt to what works for you and your business.

Learning From Case Studies

Shopify

Shopify homepage
Source: Shopify’s website

Let’s take a look at Shopify. It is an e-commerce platform that helps businesses create their own websites without having to learn how to code. Since their main customers are entrepreneurs, their content is created to help people build successful businesses using their service.

They were able to grow their revenue by 90% in just 365 days.

This was largely through an intensive content marketing plan that involves a combination of blogging, video marketing, and podcasts. With an in-depth knowledge of who their customers are, Shopify answered these needs by providing quality content as part of their digital marketing strategies. If you visit one of their blog articles, you will see the various kinds of content that they have. They cater to all kinds of people with content about e-commerce to digital marketing.

Daniel Wellington

Daniel Wellington homepage
Source: Daniel Wellington’s website

This popular trendy Swedish watch brand is one that truly understood the power of influencer marketing. They were able to grow to sell a million watches a year. This was largely from them sending their products for free to Instagram’s micro-influencers. How did this help grow their sales? In exchange for sending their products, the business asks the influencers to post a photo of them with the watch.

Each influencer that they send their products to were able to put their own creative spin on their posts. This creative spin gave the brand a source of influencer-generated content which ultimately became the brand’s source of success.

Tai Lopez

Tai Lopez homepage
Source: Tai Lopez’s website

Tai Lopez is a personal branding business that sells online courses. These have helped hundreds of thousands of people grow their wealth. His digital marketing strategies were a mix of social media and paid advertisements, especially on Youtube.

One of his videos called “Here in My Garage” became a viral success. This video shows him in front of his Lamborghini. He was talking about self-improvement and encouraging his viewers to visit his site. This video became a meme due to how often people would see his advertisements before watching their content on Youtube. It brought about many more promotions for him through social sharing. As a result, Tai Lopez is now one of the most well-known names among the business-related online courses.

We have now seen the different ways that digital marketing can help businesses. If you are interested in implementing it into your business or upgrading your digital marketing strategies contact Marketing Guru today for a free consultation!

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