Diversify your digital marketing approach

Diversifying your digital marketing approach is more than just a safety measure. People often conflate digital marketing with social media marketing when, in reality, social media is just one component of a healthy digital strategy. A full digital marketing effort should incorporate email marketing, long-form content and digital advertising into the mix. By branching out, you’re both giving yourself new routes in case of emergencies as well as new routes in general to reach customers who don’t cross over with any of your other approaches.

Facebook Marketing Strategy

The best Facebook marketing strategy you can think of right now, is probably a hybrid of all the ones listed above, and quite a few others too. One thing to realize about Facebook, is that it is truly unique in its character. It is all about education and community, and therefore has no shortage of users interested in learning more. Since they don't need to be told about how their product works, people are always eager to show off their expertise in social media in order to prove that their opinion is valuable to their audience.

Creating a business page is the primary step in promoting your business on Facebook. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with running a Facebook Business Page, there are plenty of additional ways that brands can find opportunities for engagement beyond posts and comments.

Facebook Business Manager: To take your Facebook Page to the next level, it’s helpful to set up Facebook Business Manager, too. Facebook calls it “a one-stop-shop to manage business tools, business assets and employee access to these assets.” How can you resist?!

In simpler terms, Business Manager is a tool that allows you to manage your organic and paid Facebook posts. It also allows you to work effectively with team members and outside contractors and agencies.

Facebook Groups

Groups are another great “extra credit” tool you can use to drive engagement. In a way, Groups are like the online equivalent of your favourite coffee shop or community centre. They are digital spaces for people to share information and ideas… and hopefully, a passion for your brand. With 1.4 billion people using Facebook Groups every month, it’s an audience too large to ignore.

You can also use Facebook Groups to showcase your expertise and provide added value to your fans, with bonus content or special deals that are just for “members.” This is a great way to build trust and ongoing loyalty.

Email marketing

1. Not Using a Recognizable Sender Name Subject lines get too much credit for driving open rates. Your sender name actually has a bigger impact on whether your subscribers open your emails. That makes sense for two reasons:

First, email marketing is a permission-based channel, so who’s sending an email to a recipient is critical. If your subscriber doesn’t recognize your name, it can lead to your emails being ignored or, worse, reported as spam. And second, email marketing is a relationship-based channel, so your sender name represents the value that your subscriber has gotten from your emails and from your brand previously.

2. Not Optimizing Your Preview Text Preview text is the text from inside your email that’s displayed in the inbox either to the right of your subject line in inboxes like Gmail or underneath your subject line in inboxes like the iPhone Mail app. Often, inboxes display twice as many characters of preview text as they do subject line text, so it’s a valuable opportunity to communicate more to your subscribers about what your emails is about before they open it.

Make sure you take full advantage of what text appears as preview text by using either visible or invisible preheader text. But more than that, run some A/B tests on your preview text, just like brands routinely do for their subject lines. And if you want to take it up a notch further, use multivariate testing to try different subject line and preview text combinations to see which one drives the most clicks for your email.

3. Including Too Much Copy A good rule for writing marketing copy is to write what you’d like to say, and then cut the number of words in half. A good rule of writing email marketing copy is to cut the word count in half again.

If you can’t avoid sending an email with a lot of copy, make sure that you break the copy up and make use of subheads and bullets where you can. That will make the copy much more approachable.

Chatbots

Embracing AI technology is another important aspect of digital marketing trends. AI technologies make chatbots more adaptive and fast, helping them answer customer queries or solve complaints in real-time.

Their 24 x 7 availability, ability to recall the customer’s query or purchase history instantly with prompt answers are factors customers appreciate.

Apart from customer service, chatbots are also playing a big role in marketing automation. For example, they can collect sales leads and send customized emails or messages to people. Now, all they need to do is sound a bit more human.

Video Marketing

While YouTube remains the biggest search engine after Google, its popularity over blogs and podcasts makes it more effective. So make sure that it is a part of your content marketing plan.

80% of marketers using videos have seen a considerable increase in sales. With YouTube, Tik Tok & Instagram Reels leading the space, it’s time to use promotional videos and storytelling to increase your brand awareness.