Business Bullets - Marketing

Organisations of all types and sizes must continually adapt their marketing strategies to remain relevant and in front of their target audiences. Increasingly, this means recognising the online nature of customer relationships and deploying a strong Digital Marketing strategy.

Having a poor Digital Marketing strategy can mean missing out on potential customers online, which is a significant problem when you consider that the vast majority of people looking for a business begin their search online.

Follow these ten top tips to ensure your Digital Marketing strategy remains relevant and delivers results:

1. Make Your Homepage Visual

Web users have become increasingly impatient and studies have shown that they decide whether to stay on a site within the first 10 seconds of visiting.

Web users are no longer going to read through paragraph after paragraph of text. This means it is increasingly difficult for businesses to communicate their key messages and unique proposition.

To combat this, many websites are now using a combination of video and images to help them easily and powerfully communicate.

Visual communication is powerful as it allows much more to be communicated, and in a much shorter space of time. This is crucial when communication to impatient web users visiting your website for the first time.

This isn't surprising when you consider 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. Added to this, research by Forrester Research, showed that 1 minute of video is worth a staggering 1 million words (click here for more information).

Having a visual centric homepage allows websites to decrease bounce rates, increase search rankings and boost online conversions.

Examples of websites using visual centric homepage:

Apple:

Dropbox:

Union Square:

2. Make It Mobile Friendly

The last few years have seen significant increases in the number of people accessing websites on smartphones and tablets. This trend is set to continue and businesses can no longer ignore this shift from PCs and laptops to mobile devices.

Mobile visitors are even more important when you consider the fact that 9 out of 10 smartphone searches end in action.

Every business will have to have a mobile responsive website to ensure they don't miss out on sales from increasingly significant mobile visitors.

3. Focus On Content

Traditional marketing, such as TV adverts and magazines ads, is becoming less and less effective as consumers switch off from this type of interruptive communication.

Marketers must now give buyers what they want – information that answers their questions and needs.

The best way to do that in 2014 is through high quality content. Content that engages and satisfies what a buyer is looking for will be listened to and will be much more effective.

Content is also becoming an important SEO factor, with sites that publish high quality content that satisfies a searcher's intent. Social shares and engagement is also an increasingly important SEO factor, which is most effectively generated through high quality and engaging content.

4. Harness The Power Of Online Video

Video is one of the most powerful marketing tools available to a modern marketer. If you are not deploying online video, then chances are, you have fallen behind your competition.

We have already discussed how video can be used on your homepage to communicate and engage much more effectively, but online video can also be shared across a wide number of online platforms that your audience visit, including social media sites.

Using video across a number of platforms allows businesses to have an engaging, easy to consume, and consistent first touch point with potential customers.

This allows them to understand your business much more clearly, and are therefore far more likely to convert.

5. Multi Channel

Gone are the days were it is a sensible marketing strategy to rely on a single channel for customer acquisition. In an online world, businesses need to be where their potential customers are. Often, this will be on a number of different channels, meaning there are a number of touch points a business needs to focus on engaging their audience.

Marketers must learn to be savvy about where and how they reach their target audience. Start by trying to understand who your target audience is and websites these people spend their time on.

Please check Part 2 of this article for 5 more Killer Tips to get the Digital Marketing Strategy to drive your business forward.