Digital Marketing Tips To Stay Ahead Of The Competition
Digital marketing tips to stay ahead of your competition comprise of all the tactics and techniques that a business entity can employ to ensure that they are at the top of the kinds of consumers for any purchasing decision. Digital marketing is an extremely interesting and dynamic field.
The multitudinous advantages of digital marketing campaigns ensure high returns on investments. Especially, for small and medium business houses. Businesses have realized the immense potential of digital marketing as a successful business strategy. As a result, competition has increased to a great extent. Having an online presence is mandatory for business now. But it is more important to have a very favorable online reputation.
Digitization, technological advancement, and mobile devices have given a great boost to the number of online users. Brands are always looking to get noticed in this vast web world. Therefore, you as a brand have to be the thought leader in your niche. The authority that you would command over your particular niche market will be the number one reason for online users to turn to you for their purchasing decisions.
Becoming an authority in your field is no mean feat. With so many brands constantly evolving and making use of digital techniques, you need to have a proper marketing plan in place. The key is to create awareness of your brand. For instance, your consumers are thinking of making a purchasing decision.
Formulate a strategy that would instantly remind your consumers about your products and services immediately. That is how you stay ahead of your peers and become a leader in your specific field of business.
Here Are 10 Digital Marketing Tips On How To Stay Ahead Of The Competition In This Supremely Competitive World Of Marketing.
#1)Digital Marketing tips – Consistency
Your brand is your identity among your leads and conversions. Your core message is what separates you from the competition. To build that sense of trust you need to have a clear, concise, succinct brand message in place. Your tone of voice is of the utmost importance.
It depends on your target audience. For example, if your brand is that of a baby product you have to choose to endearing, and informative. Similarly, if you are promoting a range of apparel for women your tone should always be elegant, and graceful.
Knowing your customer well helps to craft the message as well as the tone of your brand message. Your logo, your images, your overall design of the website, and advertising should always enable the consumer to instantly recognize your brand. It is that recognition that you should focus on.
One other important aspect is every digital marketing campaign for your brand should be to meet the standards of your consumer to the optimum level.
#2)Digital Marketing tips – Extensive Research of your market
This is the very first thing that you need to focus on at any and every stage of your business. Determining your target group is the most crucial element to successful digital marketing. Your consumers are the fulcrum of your digital marketing initiative.
Therefore, you have to acquire important details about them to produce more targeted focused content. Your potential consumers are all present there in the digital space.
Social Media has snowballed into one of the most important channels, if not the most important channels brands. They showcase the features of their brands on these channels extensively. People share so much about their preferences choices, the things they like, and the things they dislike on social media.
Once you start scouting social media channels for target consumers you can glean a variety of information on them. With digital marketing expanding and become a major part of the entire marketing process, several very efficient market research tools have emerged. They assist in creating more useful content to target your main focus group of customers.
You can estimate the different determining aspects of your target group like age, education, income, demography. Also. tastes dislike even by closely observing the engagement of the online users with your brand on social media channels.
The same goes for discussion forums. The language, the way they communicate is a strong indicator of how they want you to market your products and services.
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SOME OF THE VERY USEFUL TOOLS OF MARKET RESEARCH ARE
Google Keyword Tools – These tools like Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Google trends, Open web analytics, etc. These give us an idea of the volume of searches, and what the online user is looking for. Then there are different tools to measure statistics like Statista, Google Analytics, Moody’s Analytics, Google Alerts, Feedly.
Since most or almost all your target group resides on one or the other social media channel, you have social media tools for consumer insights like Social Mention, Facebook Analytics, Make My Persona, etc.
Market research is a multistep process. Along with observing and gleaning information through consumer behavior, you also need to carry out surveys and polls from time to time to understand the impact of your brand marketing. Some online survey tools are Survey Monkey, Zoho Survey, PickFu, Qualtrics Research Core, etc.
Once you understand the pulse of your target audience, you automatically gain a considerable edge over your competitors. You can disseminate information that will provide value to your consumers.
That will, in turn, increase customer loyalty. Make use of the various tools that are available to gain adequate information on your target group. Make efforts to target new customers while successfully retaining the existing ones.
#3)Digital Marketing tips – Social Media Promotion
A big part of extensive social media research involves understanding which media channel is likely to get you the most returns. For a start-up, it’s quite expensive to market aggressively on all social media channels. Even big enterprises allocate different budgets for different social media channels. You will always find more leads in one or more social media considering the nature of your business.
For example for a digital marketing agency the best channel to promote heavily might be Facebook and LinkedIn since they are the hub for employment opportunities and business pages
A cosmetic brand targeted at the youth might find more leads on Instagram and Pinterest than on any other social media channel. Chalk out a sensible plan based on the density of your leads on different media channels. Then, organize your marketing campaign aligning with the characteristics of the main social media channel that you intend to focus on.
Social media also enables you to track your competition in a far more precise manner. You can visit their pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and observe how they carry on their digital campaigns. Social media is the most viable channel to get leads and convert them into customers.
They are also the most feasible way of getting returns without spending a vast amount of money. Armed with the information that you can glean about your competitors through these channels, you can make a more organized strategic approach to influence your potential customers.
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The exposure on social media channels is unrivaled. The fact remains that no other digital marketing channel can give you that kind of reach.
Make sure that you put your social media efforts(social research, social listening, social media content and posts, social scheduling) as one of your topmost priorities to stay ahead of the competition.
#4)Digital Marketing tips – Competition research
As important as it is to have an extensive understanding of your target audience and your leads, it is equally important to have a thorough knowledge of your competition. This will definitely help you to stay ahead of your competitors.
The digital marketing space is a challenging domain. You can only leverage its benefits if you have the adequate acumen to correctly discern the patterns, trends, and behavior of the different components that influence your digital marketing efforts.
It is more about improving your efforts, being more proactive, and eliminating your flaws than trying to outdo your competition. Once you maximize your efforts by honest marketing strategies, you will automatically turn into a thought leader in your specific field.
There are several advantages to studying your competition. First, it allows you to further understand the expectations that a consumer has from a product.
It is important to know what benefits your competition can give to the consumers for them to staunchly stay with that brand. You can better comprehend your own shortcomings by studying what works for your competitors.
Also, insight into their business strategy helps to improve your own brand differentiator that is, the quality that separates your brand from the rest. Competitors have their own stories of failures and challenges too.
Case studies on their challenges will help you better cope with your deficiencies. Analysis of their challenges will ensure that you work on your marketing deficiency to eliminate risks.
Information on your competitors can be found on LinkedIn, TripAdvisor. Social media channels also give you vast insight into your competition. The interactions and engagement rate on your competitors’ page is an indicator of how well they cater to the preferences of their clients.
#5) Digital Marketing tips – Content for Brand Building
How to stay ahead of your competition using content? As digital marketing, new and experienced are aware, content is the most vital aspect of any digital marketing initiative. As digital marketers, we have to be incisive and have foresight. Your short-term goals can only yield you so much profit.
Your content is the core element that draws prospective clients to your product. Creating inspiring content is not an easy feat. A great content strategy can keep you ahead of your competitors by a huge margin. But mediocre content that fails to inspire and educate might just do the opposite.
Also, a lot of companies spend too much time promoting the content rather than actually paying attention to the quality of what you are creating.
To stay ahead of your competition, ideate content that will position your product to your target consumers easily.
When your consumers have clarity regarding your product, the steps of garnering leads and then turning them to consumers become a lot more convenient.
Content should impart information without persuasion to buy the product or service. When you are transparent in disseminating information, you invariably gain the trust of your potential consumers.
Some key points to consider while implementing digital marketing tips
You should put more emphasis on creating high-quality content to meet the expectations of your potential and existing customers.
According to Hubspot’s 2018 study, 74% of marketers emphasized the use of inbound marketing than outbound techniques. This goes on to show how influential good content is for any business.
The more focused and appealing the content the more likely you are to stay ahead of your peers. As you provide meaningful solutions to your consumers’ problems they begin to rely on your information.
Some examples of effective content are blogs, infographics, videos, webinars,
Blogging helps to build credibility and trust, makes for a better customer experience, generates traffic, and demands more inspiring content, etc. Infographics help retain information better. The same applies in the case of videos.
The short attention span of your clients does not leave a lot of room to write big pieces to put forth your points. The strategy should be to create a thorough, detailed content copy and then break it down into snackable parts for easy readability for your clients. That way they imbibe all the information without feeling bored.
Be sure of what you want to go convey, have a confident tone and you can very well be ahead of your competition.
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#6)Digital Marketing tips – Video Strategy
Though this is a part of content strategy yet it deserves a special mention in this topic for its sheer Importance in the planning of an effective marketing campaign. Video and pictures are the most popular forms of content for marketing purposes.
Videos help in better cognizance of your brand, your logo which is an image of what your brand represents has high recall value. Videos are extremely impactful. When you come across a video that sends a strong message you recall it even months or years after watching the video.
That is where the strength of video and pictorial marketing lies. It is also a great digital marketing trend for the years to come.
The little boy and his puppy the pug are forever etched in the memory of viewers. In fact, the telecom giant, Vodafone’s recall value is in the picture of the pug and the boy with the tagline “Wherever you go, our network follows!” This is a prime example of how pictures and videos can impress viewers for a long time.
The popularity of How-to and Tutorial Videos
How-to videos are a very popular form of video marketing. Whether it is a technology that needs practical understanding or a home decor brand showing how to to set your living room for maximizing space and light, how-to videos get a whole lot of views.
That helps in nurturing leads and turning them into customers who believe in the quality of your brand. Tutorials are also hot trends in Digital Marketing for the value they provide.
An attractive thumbnail depicting the intrinsic tone of your video and brand, a pop-up video for leads on a landing page is a great way to get ahead of your competition and become an authority in your field. A simple yet very effective tip if you have a person in a video make sure they are communicative with a friendly demeanor and clean speech.
#7)Digital Marketing tips – Email Strategy
Email Marketing has time and again proved how efficient it is when it comes to remaining prominent in the minds of consumers. Emails have innumerable advantages over other mediums of communication. It is one of the best digital marketing tips that one can offer for your business.
It helps to better connect with your consumers, being able to personalize your email copy to fit the needs of your customers. It helps to strike up a rapport with your consumer with interactive and friendly ways of communicating important information.
According to QuickSprout email subscribers are 3x more likely to share the content on different social media channels. It has also been seen that customers purchase more when they interact with companies via emails. Emails enable far better customer service.
You can experiment with your email format and subject line to see which feels better and more focused. Communicating specialized incentives like promotional discounts, offers, exclusive deals, offers that are only for select customers to help in promoting your product.
Staying ahead of your competition is very much possible by optimizing your email marketing efforts. Paying close attention to cart abandonment, and quick response to grievances are some great means to build goodwill for your brand.
Many a time you will find that an e-commerce giant like Amazon sends you survey and feedback messages if you don’t open their mails for a certain period of time.
This is a great way to make that connection. You will feel that you are an important part of their business. They care about your response to their emails. Another great way is to promote but not go overboard with persuasion tactics.
Send relevant information like deals, and cashback offers but doesn’t spam their inbox. That will make them switch brands and you will lose customers.
#8)Digital Marketing tips – SEO + SEM
SEO is the prime way that helps to drive traffic to your website organically. Your quality of content and the optimized use of SEO best practices enables you to get the desired ranking on Search engines.
Some of the elements that SEO looks into for proper ranking are page optimization, website optimization. Some more are natural backlinks, optimization of the website for different devices, videos, in-depth content, higher reviews, etc. The mainstay of SEO is keywords and their successful use in your content copy. SEO helps in consolidating your position in the digital world. It is purely based on the efficacy of your content.
Therefore users know that sites that display on the first page of a SERP have to be quality-driven. Understand the basics of SEO and analyze traffic and user communication. Ensure that you get the best out of SEO practices.
PPC
Coming to PPC, this method gets you instant visibility and reach. Your site will appear on the top of the page and you will have a considerable CTR. What you need is a wise blend of both these elements of search engine marketing SEO and PPC to stay ahead of your competition.
Analyze your market, calculate your budget and invest an amount of money on paid clicks that will yield sales. Do not go all out on PPC. Rather, concentrate on creating appealing content copy and then get people to visit your site through PPC ads. Leads will only turn to conversions if your content is useful.
PPC won’t help you with that. Some popular PPC ads are dealing delineating your credentials, your unique selling point(USP), promote yourself, display good ratings to draw users in.
You have to be the priority of users when they think of a product or service in your niche. Make sure you give due attention to the sales funnel and use a good mix of SEO and PPC to get the maximum exposure.
You will see sometimes the same site is ranked twice on the SERP. For example, one has an ad written at the left of it and the other without it.
That is a great example of being able to leverage the benefits of both these elements in the most optimum way possible.
#9)Digital Marketing tips – UI/UX Optimization
This is the most crucial factor for your brand reputation and cognizance. Every method of staying at the top of a user’s mind mentioned above will fall into place ONLY if you provide them with a great UX online.
You know about your target audience. Put all that information into implementing a strategy that will enhance the experience of your consumers on your site.
Moreover, there are some evergreen tips for better user engagement like succinct yet powerful content, white space for better viewing, having a good CTA on the landing page, page speed Optimisation, backlinks throughout your copy.
They help to bolster your claims of data and statistics, consistent theme, and clear headline subheading distribution among others.
Your main goal is to be at the helm, the authority in your business domain. Mobile devices play a huge role in it. For an optimized user experience, you have to make sure that your website design is device responsive.
Otherwise, see to it that you have your website and it’s all pages mobile responsive and with a clear user interface to easily maneuver the site.
All these factors go into enhancing the user experience. As a result, they vastly improve your chances of staying ahead of your competition to a huge extent.
#10)Digital Marketing tips – Collaborating with influencers
You can no longer brush aside the impact of social media influencers for your marketing initiatives. They have become an integral part of your social media advertising efforts. They help to gain huge exposure for your brand.
For leveraging the benefits of social media influencers the foremost work is to identify the influencers perfect to pitch your brand to their followers.
Make sure the influencer you collaborate with on social channels is credible enough to entrust your brand’s image. According to statistics, 84% of marketers say Influencer Marketing is effective. 30% of consumers are more likely to buy products recommended by a non-celebrity blogger(Collective Bias Study).
People who are from your industry have better credibility when promoting your product or service. Therefore, scout the community of like-minded people, pitch your product to an influencer of choice and then make a deal.
For example, a blogger on different diet suggestions has a higher chance of being able to promote your healthy brand of tea than a superstar. Online users have become more wise and more alert. Make sure you are absolutely transparent with your product qualities both with the influencer and your target group. These digital marketing tips are invaluable.
Conclusion
The above are some digital marketing tips with which you can successfully become a leader in your niche. To stay ahead of your competition, will require you to implement all digital marketing strategies at your disposal in the best way possible. Also, keep an eye out for innovations and developments that your competitors incorporate in their strategies.
You can learn a lot from them. At the end of the day, it is your vision of excelling in your specific business field that will make you a thought leader in the digital domain.
