A crowded online landscape, economic crises, pandemics, and other unforeseen circumstances continue to challenge the relevance of marketing practises.
According to McKinsey & Company, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital marketing technologies. The tech that would have taken companies 3-7 years to consider and implement happened in months.
That means that nearly every other company in your industry has a digital footprint and they are all targeting the same customers like yourself.
Contents
How will your business stand out?
Business success isn’t pegged to the adoption of digital technologies only.
You also need to consider factors like customer feedback, user experiences, and efficient processes and develop solutions to support them.
Here are innovative digital marketing strategies that may help you gain that extra edge.
1. Automate Your Processes
We all get 24 hours in a day, how do you want to spend your time?
Manually going through processes or engaging in higher-level issues such as customer engagement, prospecting, and making deals happen?
It’s not just less tedious, but also results in gains for your business.
Automating your processes involves using innovative technologies to streamline and automate processes. It eliminates manual efforts and allows you to measure tasks to improve operational efficiency.
With laborious tasks out of the way, you can focus on growing the business.
For the B2B marketers, the benefits of automating processes include:
- Improved sales and marketing alignment. Decentralized information, incomplete disclosures, and refusal to partner are woes that plague sales and marketing teams. Marketing automation tools facilitate up-to-date reporting, better customer or lead data collection, and set up workflows.
- Better lead generation. Marketing tools offer a better understanding of online visitor behavior so you can target them more effectively.
- Better lead scoring. Automation tools help rank leads as Marketing Qualified Lead or a Sales Qualified Lead. Having your leads properly categorized ensures they are sent to the right team for nurturing or closing, respectively.
- Ensures new leads are followed up automatically. You can automatically trigger follow-ups whenever prospects take actions like downloading content or subscribing to your newsletter, etc.
- Helps you know what’s working. Marketing tools can measure and analyze how effective your marketing efforts are so you can know what works and what needs tweaking.
2. Optimize For Voice Search
Did you know that up to 27 percent of the world’s population use voice search on their mobile devices?
With voice assistants getting smarter by the day and people preferring to speak rather than type queries, voice search optimization is necessary.
Internet users use their voices to look up products/services, vendors closest to them, and answers to pressing problems.
If you’re not maximizing this strategy, you’re missing your share of online marketing potential.
What can you do?
- Target Google rich answers. To improve search experiences, Google displays answers at the top of search results that don’t require click-through to the website. Target common questions and provide brief and to-the-point answers.
- Mobile-friendliness is a must. Since many searches happen through mobile devices, Google only serves up results from sites that meet its criteria for mobile-friendliness.
- Create a FAQs page. Put together common questions around your products/services and industry as well as the answers. It will help capture search traffic.
- Optimize Bing searches as well. While many people turn to Google for voice searches, Bing also attracts a sizable number of users that you shouldn’t ignore.
3. Create Podcasts
Are you looking for digital content that can hold your audience’s attention from start to finish and have them come back regularly for more?
Create podcasts.
Podcasts are part of the content marketing strategy, useful for boosting brand awareness, showcasing thought leadership, and getting your solutions out there. Think top of the funnel content.
Some of the more popular podcasting types include interview-style, Q&A, roundtable, and monologue podcasts.
You can feature industry experts and influencers to expand your reach and build credibility.
Why should you care about podcasts?
Because according to a LinkedIn study, 44 percent of senior-level executives (we’re talking owners, VPs, c-suite, and departmental heads) listen to podcasts.
Just the people you want to target with your solutions, right?
And here’s the best part, podcasts aren’t a one-off piece that is consumed and discarded. You can leverage it in different formats in the weeks and months that follow.
Here’s how:
- Create powerful soundbites for sharing on Youtube and other social platforms
- Turn educational podcasts into online courses
- Transcribe podcasts and convert them into search engine optimized blog pieces
4. Make Cold Calls
Over the years, salespeople have dreaded the cold calling strategy. While it’s kind of sad, it’s actually good news for you.
You see cold calling has evolved into buying into a strategy that gives.
It’s about professionals seeking to help customers achieve their business goals through the solutions they offer.
So their pitch isn’t about “what can I get?” rather, “here’s what I can offer you?”
By adopting this mindset, teams turned this strategy into a relationship-forming, trust-building tactic.
You can achieve this too by:
- Identifying your prospects: Think about the relevance of your products and which businesses may profit from using them. Look up these businesses.
- Know your products: Have an in-depth understanding of how your solutions work and be ready to share information and stats. Touch base with your marketing team to stay abreast of new content around your team and industry trends.
- Create a script that has a beginning, middle, and ending. A strong opener to pull in the listener, enough interesting information to keep them engaged and lead to your goal.
- Use the right tone. You’ll want to match your prospect’s tone. If they are enthusiastic, be the same. If they appear serious, put on your serious voice. You also want to sound confident, in control of the conversation, and not bored.
5. Employ Conversion Marketing Tactics
Conversion marketing tactics are the strategies you use to increase conversions.
From encouraging visitors to buy, signup for services, or urging those who have abandoned carts to return, the goal is to turn visitors into customers.
Here are tactics that may help you convert more customers:
- Improve website usability. Improve site navigation, responsiveness, create relevant names for your products/services, and optimize keywords to ensure users can find your solutions
- Keep audiences engaged. Run re-engagement emails to refresh relationships with dormant users. Segment audiences to improve relevancy and, run targeted ads
- Build a credible brand. Leverage social proof (good feedback) and create high-quality content, and share it on your website plus social channels that your audience use.
- Automate processes. As mentioned earlier, automating processes improves efficiency and saves time. Incorporate chatbots to assist users 24/7, set up email sequences, and use SMS marketing to keep customers updated.
