Promoting Your Business in the Digital Age

There is much more to promoting your business than creating regular posts on social media. Your enterprise, no matter the size, can certainly benefit from a well-curated selection of promotional endeavors. This, after all, could help maximize the exposure of your brand at a time when all other businesses are vying for customers’ attention. Here are other digital marketing strategies that you should consider today:

1.) Invest in Paid Search Ads

One of the most straightforward ways to drive customers to your business is to purchase ad space within the more popular search engines. In the Philippines, Google is, by far, the most popular search engine, followed by Bing and Yahoo.

These search engines all offer paid search ads that will put your business at the top of a search results page (SERP) for a given keyword. For businesses in hotly contested online markets, investing in Google Ads is almost mandatory if they want visibility. These ads are normally paid for on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, which means your business won’t have to pay anything to the search engine unless a user clicks on the link.

Without getting into too many details, the practice of PPC advertising can be more complex than it seems. To benefit from a PPC campaign, your website has to be able to convert visitors to customers. To do that, the site design and content have to be engaging. This brings us to the next important strategy.

2.) Develop Cohesive Branded Content

While a professional site design can hook visitors in, engaging content is what will keep them coming back. In the context of brand marketing, the type of engagement your content will elicit depends on the look, feel, and tone as much as the actual message. As with offline content, online content for
businesses can be deliberately designed to appeal to specific market demographics.

It should be understood that “content” is more than just articles and product descriptions. It also includes all text, audio, and visual assets on your site as well as on traditional and social media. All of these have to work with each other to support your brand.

All content that’s intended to promote your business should, therefore, have a similar look and feel. For example, images should have broadly similar styles and color palettes and the text should follow a specific style guide for uniformity. Additionally, the styles should be deliberately chosen to help the
business meet its goals.

If you have resources, you could also expand the role of your branded content to drive a content marketing campaign. Content marketing is an especially great way to cultivate leads and engage customers who may not yet be ready to buy. The great thing about content marketing is that it’s also quite flexible, with your content assets easily leveraged as part of email and social media promotions.

3.) Try Targeted Email Marketing Campaigns

Generally speaking, targeted email marketing campaigns are not an ideal method for reaching out to new customers, as unsolicited emails from unrecognized sources can be seen by customers as intrusive.

That said, this type of promotion is great for re-engaging customers and other people who consent to giving you their email addresses. When done right, email marketing can make a huge impact on existing customers and heavily influence their decision to make another purchase. The key is to craft your emails in a way so that the recipients look forward to them.

To do this, you can offer coupons, exclusive content, and other updates your customers find interesting. You can also use email automation tools to time your emails so that they don’t happen too frequently, allowing your brand to maintain its presence in your customers’ minds without wearing out its welcome.

4.) Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Having a Facebook page or Instagram profile isn’t enough. If you’re serious about promoting your business, it’s important to have a website. While social media profiles do give you a variety of ecommerce options, they are extremely limited in what they can offer in terms of search engine visibility.

Having a business website makes it much easier to find your business on Google and other major search engines. To increase your visibility further, you’ll want to optimize your website. A properly optimized website will not only be easier to find online but it will also have a good chance of appearing at the top of the organic (unpaid) results on a SERP.

Because many prospective buyers will only choose businesses that appear on the top of the SERPs, professional search engine optimization (SEO) services are now seen as a necessity in highly competitive online markets. When combined with good content and offline marketing strategies, SEO can serve as a potent force multiplier for your promotional campaigns.

5.) Learn How to Interpret Data

One of the most important benefits of digital marketing platforms is their ability to provide highly accurate data on customer habits. This data could be used to create more cost-efficient marketing campaigns and develop better products and services.

However, this data is only useful if you understand how to interpret it. Interpreting data effectively involves following your industry’s best practices as well as exercising imagination, empathy, and creativity. You will also need to understand how to use the analytics features of the marketing tools you
have available to you.

By leveraging data effectively, you can quickly adapt your promotions so that they cost less, have a wider reach, and convert more customers. Promote Your Brand Smarter Here in the Philippines, SMEs have wholeheartedly embraced social media as a core part of their digital marketing strategy. While this is a good thing, there are many practical limits to relying on social media.
Embracing a holistic digital marketing approach that employs paid ads, email marketing, SEO, data analytics, and branded content may seem a lot to take in. However, doing these well can ensure that you have a farther reach, more loyal customers, and a lower cost for every sale.

By investing resources into these other areas, your SME can easily match the marketing reach of bigger competitors who are still focused solely on traditional or social media marketing.