4 Tips to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing is a crucial part of an overall marketing strategy, but its importance has increased during the latest world crisis. Namely, due to the coronavirus pandemic, lockdowns, and social distancing, a great portion of our everyday lives now happens almost entirely online.

Online learning, working remotely, and online shopping are a couple of examples of this new normal.

It’s clear that these new circumstances call for improving your digital marketing strategy in order to strengthen your online presence.

Now you have even better chances of reaching your target audience and offering them your products or services. Here are some tips that will help you elevate your digital marketing game.

1. Take Advantage of Google Shopping

In order to help businesses recover from the impact of the current pandemic and allow them to re-connect with their customers online, the Google Shopping tab now features predominantly free listings.

Related: Check out our guide to Google Shopping's free listings

This option is available regardless of whether a merchant advertises on Google or not.

What’s best about this is that everybody wins – retailers get to list their products for free and gain tremendous exposure, advertisers can additionally boost their campaigns with free listings, while shoppers will easily find what they’re looking for as products from different stores will be easily discoverable.

In a nutshell, Google Shopping ads are displayed when someone searches for a particular product on Google.

In order to make sure that your product gets a proper listing, there are five key elements that you have to provide:

• product image
• product name
• product price
• seller’s name
• product promotions or reviews.

For businesses who opt for paid Google Shopping Ads, it’s worth mentioning that Google takes care of the majority of management – you create a shopping feed that matches their requirements, while Google automatically creates ads and aligns your products with relevant searches.

It’s a good idea to run Merchant Promotions as this option will make your Ads more appealing and encourage your potential customers to pull out their credit cards.

2. Optimize Your Blogging Efforts for Search Engines

Relevant, well-researched content can be the main fuel for your website.

It will attract the right kind of audience, educate them, and showcase your subject-matter expertise. As a result, they will trust you when it comes to purchasing products or services that you offer.

But how do you achieve all this?

First of all, the content you create needs to reflect your audience’s interests and pain points. You have to write about the issues and problems your potential website visitors face and talk about helpful and convenient solutions.

This means that you should identify what your potential customers are searching for on the internet and write posts that will offer the answers to the questions from their queries.

For example, if you’re selling running shoes, your target audience most probably wants to find something that might match the following queries:

• how to pick the best running shoes,
• what are the best running shoes for flat feet?

By using a keyword explorer tool, you can find out what the most popular keywords are, and create content that revolves around offering your audience the answers they need. And, this will give you a chance to integrate your products or services within it.

In other words, you’ll target not just any audience with your content but the one interested in what you have to offer.

Besides finding the most popular keywords and writing high-quality content, it’s also essential to tweak other search engine optimization elements such as meta titles, meta descriptions, images, or alt tags. These are the basics of SEO, but getting them right can help you improve your Google rankings and put your content in front of the right people.

Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes or related questions are low-hanging fruit.

Although it’s safe to say that Google search algorithms work in mysterious ways as the search engine giant is usually tight-lipped when it comes to their latest updates, you can still boost your SEO by optimizing your search results with PAA boxes.

3. Revamp Your Social Media Marketing

Approximately 4.5 billion people around the world used social media platforms at the start of 2020.

That’s more than 50% of the global population, and you can’t properly promote your business unless you amplify your social media efforts. But, posting pictures and sharing your blog posts occasionally won’t do the trick.

What you should do is create an effective social media strategy and share engaging content with your audience. Building a loyal following should be your first step, and that’s a time-consuming and challenging task. That’s why you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin – focus on one or two most relevant channels for your industry and do it properly.

If you’re running a B2B business, a logical choice is LinkedIn. For e-commerce, fashion, or sports stores, Instagram and Facebook are a must.

Apart from leveraging its great potential for product promotion and granular targeting, use Facebook and Instagram for creating additional sales opportunities by setting up a Facebook Page shop (pictured below) and Instagram Shopping. This practically means that you’ll allow your potential customers to shop directly from your social media channels.

Facebook already had a Marketplace feature, but a new update now allows you to build a fully-fledged Facebook Shop. In an age when some of the world’s biggest retailers, such as Zara and H&M, are considering closing their regular physical stores in the wake of the pandemic that has been hurting their sales, this can be a way out.

Creating a Facebook Shop is free – upload your catalog, pick featured products, customize your store, and that’s it. A small fee will be charged for every purchase, but the social media company will mainly profit from advertising.

Similarly, Instagram Shop will allow people to browse different products from Instagram Explore and make a purchase from the main navigation tab.

Facebook also plans on joining forces with leading e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce and Shopify to additionally improve the shopping experience and offer business control over managing their online stores.

4. Leverage Podcasting and Webinars

It’s obvious that content still reigns big time, but it comes in many shapes and formats.

Podcasts and webinars are among the most popular ones, as they’re educational and engaging while allowing you to build your following and brand.

However, while creating your own podcast can be somewhat of an issue for all those who lack industry connections or adequate equipment, there’s another, much easier, way to benefit from this format – getting on somebody else’s podcast.

Popular industry figures with a huge following are always looking for an opportunity to bring new people to their shows, and this can be excellent for promoting your business and establishing yourself as an authority in your niche.

The same goes for webinars, which is why it’s a good idea to join forces with other entrepreneurs and do webinars on different topics relevant to your audience.

The trick is to share value and experience and help the people who sign up to learn something new that will allow them to improve their lives.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to popular podcasters or webinar hosts, and invite them to do something together – if you have what it takes, they will gladly accept your proposal.

Your digital marketing strategy is an evolving process, and it should be adjusted and tweaked all the time to include the latest trends and shifts in the overall marketing landscape. Use your analytics to identify what works and what should be improved, but most importantly, feel the pulse of your audience and always be where they are.

Michael has been working in marketing for almost a decade and has worked with a huge range of clients, which has made him knowledgeable on many different subjects. He has recently rediscovered a passion for writing and hopes to make it a daily habit. You can read more of Michael's work at Qeedle.